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PNC Bank took an unusually open approach with its customers recently. It sent a letter apologizing for any inconvenience they might have experienced recently when the bank was battling denial of service attacks assumed to have been launched by the hacktivist group Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters...

Last summer, open source CRM provider Zurmo threw its hat into the CRM ring with a beta version of its particular take on the hot new gamification software category. The theory is simple: CRM, especially sales force automation, has notoriously poor user adoption figures. Why not use some of the fu...

CRM applications tend to embody a range of features, depending on the maker and the audience. Some applications are stripped-down products sporting a handful of features -- and only those features -- deemed necessary to the user. Other products have become de facto mini-ERP systems with their integr...

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...

Salesforce.com rolled out an integration between Sales Cloud and Work.com this week. The integration is currently available in pilot and will be made generally available to all Salesforce.com customers in the first half of 2013. To understand the value-add the integration offers, one first has to b...

A year or so ago, digital marketers were head over heels, breathlessly in love with QR codes. Bearing a close resemblance to Rorschach inkblot tests, QR codes quickly became ubiquitous on labels, posters, signs, magazine ads, billboards -- pretty much any ad space a consumer might conceivably want t...

CoreMotives, a Silverpop company, has launched a new integration that ties revenue-tracking capabilities embedded in its CRM system to the Ticketmaster sales application. The upshot is that teams that use Ticketmaster to market tickets can also easily track which campaigns actually led to a sale. In...

It is a truism that consumers' smartphones, armed with a slew of sophisticated apps, function as mini computers. That being the case, smartphones programmed with sales force marketing and productivity applications have almost become sophisticated enough to be compared to mainframe computing. They're...

Microsoft next month will roll out a service update for Microsoft Dynamics CRM that will have a new user interface, integration with Yammer, Skype and Office 2013, and cross-browser support. In general, the theme of tight integration with other Microsoft technologies runs through the release, said S...

The mobile experience has clearly changed consumers' expectations of the shopping experience, creating higher expectations. With in-stock notifications, a mobile shopper doesn't have to run around to various stores. Want to ask a question about a product? Many apps offer chat. "This could be in star...

Benbria has launched Blazeloop, a customer engagement platform that revolves around one pointed question aimed at the consumer: How did we do? The theory behind the Web-based app is that most customers do not take the trouble to complain about little things -- but it is those very little things that...

Based on recent statistics, one would think Houston is the mobile-commerce capital of the United States. Shortly before the Thanksgiving holiday, the Interactive Advertising Bureau released its list of mobile-savvy cities. Houston was ranked No. 1, followed by Seattle-Tacoma, San Francisco, Los Ange...

Avaya IP Office joined the BYOD revolution with the release of version 8.1 earlier this year. Now the company is gearing up for more changes, including a forthcoming release that will integrate video functionality into its feature set. It will continue to expand its functionality around mobility in ...

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...

In the beginning, there was Apple's iPad. For a long time, "tablet" meant the iPad and nothing but the iPad. Then competitors began to make an appearance in the tablet market. For CRM vendors, that state of affairs made developing mobile products and strategies much easier. Now, there are several ta...

Genesys is making a play for the middle market with the release of Genesys One. The last time the company targeted the middle market was more than 10 years ago, when it was owned by Alcatel. Since then, the middle market has changed significantly. Both customer needs and buying behavior have chang...

As companies rush to offer mobile CRM apps to their customers, they are in danger of repeating the same mistake made a generation ago with the launch of early online initiatives: not placing enough emphasis on security. We know how that worked out. Untold millions of customers were compromised finan...

Demandbase is extending beyond its Web analytics and sales roots with a new platform that allows B2B advertisers to target and personalize display ads for specific companies. Demandbase Company-Targeted Advertising, which has been incorporated by Eloqua within its own marketing automation applicatio...

Mobile CRM and its related technologies have intrigued developers and users alike for years. However, it wasn't until Facebook announced it would acquire Instagram for an eye-popping $1 billion that the money began to pour into this space. "That was the transaction that crystallized for us and a lot...

Nudge, a marketing application designed for the real estate space, has released an update that incorporates Instagram into its offerings. The integration expands the application's photo and visual bona fides, not surprisingly -- but also expands Nudge's potential audience, since its inclusion makes ...