Archive

Pascal Houillon, the CEO of Sage North America, has been at the job for a bit over a year. He took over the reins at last year's Sage Summit where he famously introduced a new branding exercise. Houillon's idea was to make Sage a more prominent brand by de-emphasizing the individual product names,...

Jeff Hasen, Hipcricket's CMO, recently had what he called his "10 millionth" bad customer experience with Comcast. It's galling enough to be treated poorly by a company when you buy just about all of its services, as Hasen does with Comcast. Worse, though, is when you are a mobile CRM expert, as Ha...

VerticalResponse recently launched its social platform with two new features: Coupons and Clipper. Coupons lets businesses generate custom coupons that can be published as a Facebook tab on their Facebook page or as a standalone Web page. Clipper is a browser button that lets users save interesting ...

In today's economy, there are many tools designed for sustaining small and mid-sized businesses. Web conferencing is a tool that an increasing number of companies find very useful. Over the last few years, Web conferencing and online meetings software have taken off as communication tools with sever...

Zoho has been speedily turning out applications to complement its core platform. Earlier this spring, for instance, it introduced Zoho CRM. Now, it is rolling out Zoho Marketing Campaigns to buttress the marketing functionality it introduced in the CRM app. "We had marketing and campaign features in...

Henry David Thoreau's quiet wisdom is best exemplified by sayings like, "in all things, simplicity." That's a nice credo to live by -- but it may be a hard one to fully embrace if you're trying to provide great customer service these days. After all, if you work in service, you have customers comin...

It's good to be busy, but I remember when August was a slow month, sort of like January, and for the same reasons. The holidays are out of the way, there's less to do -- other than eat the Christmas chocolates or the summer squash and tomatoes, and think about spring or going back to school. The A...

Salesforce.com is rolling out a limited pilot of yet another social media initiative -- Salesforce Communities. The offering combines its Chatter product, its Salesforce.com business processes, and an underlying social intelligence that makes it easy to show people the right information and give the...

There's a great chase scene in Minority Report when Tom Cruise, having been identified as a future murderer, is making his escape through a futuristic mall. He's trying to keep a low profile. Unfortunately, the advertising billboards start crying out to him, vying for his attention and blowing his c...

Awareness has enhanced its social marketing automation suite, Social Marketing Hub, with a new feature called "social scoring." The feature allows marketers and brands to identify, store and rank prospects across all the major social networks based on scoring criteria they define. It is a deliberate...

When people are under stress, many respond with remarkable grace, courage and decisiveness. Then there are those who, under great stress, become paralyzed, flail about, or lash out in unproductive and unprovoked ways. The social era is showing us that while corporations are not people, they are run ...

I'm just back from a week in the woods, trying to get my head around social media and CRM again. That means I'm in the middle of writing up a report on some research that uberanalyst Esteban Kolsky and I did over the last few months, and smack in the middle of CRM Idol judging. Everything's fine, a...

A marketing campaign by Southwest Airlines to mark the growth of its Facebook fan base to 3-million turned into an unmitigated PR nightmare last Friday. Southwest offered discounted flights that day to celebrate the social media milestone. Unfortunately, customers who tried to take advantage of the ...

A company's reputation is based on the customer's experience. Fixing or preventing problems is half of the service equation; communicating with customers is the other half. Customer service is as important, if not more important than the immediate resolution of the problem. An integral part of the c...

If you mention a certain brand of lower-priced, assemble-it-yourself furniture of Scandinavian heritage, you stand a pretty good chance of getting a response that dwells at some length on how hard it is to put it together. I've never felt that way -- in reality, I actually like putting stuff toge...