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One would almost think we have entered a stage of customer service nirvana: Two industry categories not ordinarily associated with high levels of customer service satisfaction -- airlines and fast food -- have garnered relatively good scores in a new American Customer Satisfaction Index report. The ...

BPM provider Pegasystems has taken its various sales-related applications and vertical offerings in the category and created a comprehensive sales force automation application it is calling "Pega Sales Force Automation." This offering follows a marketing application that Pega built in a similar fash...

By now, it has been drilled into most marketers' heads: Social media is all about conversation -- a two-way conversation. Oftentimes, the conversation entails responding to customers' comments, requests or complaints. From the customer's perspective, it almost certainly means offers of discounts and...

Microsoft is in discussions to acquire Yammer, a social media and communication platform for businesses, according to a report in Bloomberg, which cited two anonymous sources. Microsoft is prepared to acquire the company for a $1 billion purchase price, the report said, and the deal could be reached...

Customer satisfaction with the airline industry took a dip in J.D. Power and Associates' 2012 North America Airline Satisfaction study after two consecutive years of improvement. The drop was not a large one; overall, passenger satisfaction dropped to 681 index points on a 1,000-point scale. In 2011...

Banks have still not made important reforms or improvements in their checking account practices, according to an update Pew Charitable Trusts made to a report it released in April 2011, "Hidden Risks: The Case for Safe and Transparent Checking Accounts." The original report set out a discouraging li...

Ntractive, the developer of Elements CRM, a cloud-based CRM app for Macs only, has expanded its product line to include the iPad and iPhone. Ntractive is taking a different approach from other CRM vendors that have pushed their applications onto these devices, said CEO Justin Bartak. "We basically r...

Last month, open source CRM provider Zurmo released a beta version of a new app that staked out new ground in this mature software category: The app was built with gamification techniques and a game-oriented user interface in the hope of spurring user adoption. "It is a direction that is a bit contr...

The way people and companies decide what to buy is changing, becoming intractably intertwined with social recommendations, noted Sanjay Dholakia, SVP of Marketo's product marketing and corporate development. "This means that consumers and buyers have ability to educate themselves instead of going to...

Consumers face a number of hurdles if they want to switch banks -- which they increasingly do, as their banks continue to raise fees, raise minimum balances, and create entirely new charges. Some bank policies are, in fact, designed to make it challenging -- and expensive -- for customers to walk aw...

Salesforce.com is adding more functionality to its Chatter tool -- in this case, real-time communication capabilities. The two new features soon to be available are Chatter Messenger and Chatter Screensharing. Chatter Messenger is an instant messaging application to be used within the Chatter applic...

Silverpop has been on the vanguard of old-school digital marketing providers -- that is, email marketing firms -- embracing social media. The company has released a slew of products designed to integrate the two disciplines. Given that history, it is difficult to imagine a subsector or market consti...

The Sapphire Now conference kicked off Monday in Orlando, Fla., with 60,000 customers, partners and employees of SAP participating, either at the conference facility or watching it online. The first day of the event offered the usual lineup of celebrity speakers -- corporate and otherwise -- with To...

Zoho has enhanced its menu of offerings by incorporating social media into its customer support features. It has also added a Facebook social media integration point to its flagship application. The changes went live on Thursday, added automatically to the applications. These two developments -- the...

Imagine walking into a department store on a Wednesday morning and spotting a pair of shoes you feel that you must acquire, or life will have no meaning. You excitedly ask the sales rep if you can try on a pair in your size and she says, "Sure, why don't you come back on Friday?" That deflating expe...

SugarCRM has just debuted a controlled release of version 6.5 of its flagship open source CRM offering. In many ways, the release is an iterative change -- it does not represent the same major shift in functionality and user interface as version 6 did, when it was launched in 2010. In one key way,...

Salesforce.com has unveiled a new series of cloud computing initiatives for the government user base -- a highly lucrative niche for tech vendors, especially those that can present their products in a budget-friendly light. The new offerings, bundled under the name "Government Cloud," include a dedi...

Kana Software has introduced a new service experience platform that combines CRM functionality with BPM, knowledge management, analytics and social listening. The application is in fact the culmination of a few years' of effort by Kana to integrate these closely related feature sets, said Ajay Khann...

Sage is getting ready to enhance its mobile payments offerings. Next month, the company will roll out Sage Exchange.com, an interface for Sage Exchange, which it introduced two years ago. The rollout of Sage Exchange.com will considerably enhance what Sage Exchange offers customers, said Greg Hamm...

Cloud contact center provider inContact has released the first of what will be three major upgrades to its flagship product this year. New features in the release touch upon many areas, from agent scripting to a Web-connect module, new unified agent desktop tools and an expanded blended dialer. Most...