Strategy

The customer version of sustainability requires that we capture scads of data about customers -- and today that means in an ethical and non-snooping way so that we'll have something to feed the monster we call AI.

Today, we all need to be on platform-based CRM, and we need to become ninjas at platform-based application development and deployment. This especially goes for the newest tools on the platforms which include an array of analytics, machine learning, and voice assistants.

Attracting and engaging with a younger target audience is no longer optional; it is an essential marketing goal. The big question is: how to do it? Marketers and online retailers who have found useful answers to that question shared their insights with the E-Commerce Times.

As the New Year rolls in, consumers are strengthening their voices to tell brand marketers how they support can win more of their dollars. Their message is clear: make your purpose about more than corporate profit.

A new Forrester survey commissioned by Capgemini, Salesforce, and MuleSoft reveals companies face the same recurring customer experience (CX) struggles. They lack an integrated single source of truth for customer data and are strapped with subpar personalization capabilities.

Surround strategy is the antithesis of rip and replace. Rather than replacement, a business can move parts of its workload from some workhorse system, say ERP, to Zoho -- where things like pre-built reports and Zia, an AI-based digital assistant, can help business users interrogate data stored on th...

This is not good. A new report commissioned by Replicant tells a story of customers frustrated when service fails or is way too slow. That's not new -- and Replicant is not the only vendor to ring the alarm. For many years Oracle has reminded vendors that one bad service encounter is enough to make ...

There are three levels of abstraction that we can study to derive benefit, and this is abundantly clear in CRM. First there's the object, a material product or service that is the thing we trade money for. Then there's the experience, see where I'm going? Lastly there's the concept.

The term "social commerce" is the trend du jour for marketers, yet there's confusion in many circles about what that really means. Some people equate social commerce with capital-I "Influencer" marketing. Others think of social commerce as the process of marketers reaching consumers directly via soc...

A pair of recent studies highlight changing shopper attitudes as the pandemic continues its stranglehold on the supply chain for most industries. Two clear-cut consumer trends have surfaced: online shoppers want more self-service options and an overall more-efficient shopping experience.

Leaf Home built its call center operation to drive potential customers to a cheerful encounter with all the departments to which they connect. That pleasant working relationship starts with Leaf's call center staff. We spoke with the company's chief human resources officer, Sean Loboda, to discuss ...

A sales process is a set of protocols that an organization uses to conduct selling. One's process needs not be complex, many organizations settle on processes that have around seven steps. But a sales process that everyone in the organization adheres to is fundamental to that organization's success....

It isn't just the pandemic that's shifting society; other macro events add an important dimension and all of it influences the direction of CRM for the foreseeable future. But a key question looms: Are we still too close to these events to be able to make sensible predictions about how and where we...

With the recent completion of the Slack acquisition, Salesforce can look forward to improving the quality of the customer-facing business processes that it supports with more and better collaboration. However, the presence of Slack may now highlight the reality that while vendors operate at the spee...