Customer Data

When Cirruspath wanted to update its Cirrus Insight Gmail extension for Salesforce.com, it asked clients to draw it a picture. The result is what it calls a complete redesign that integrates lead tracking through Salesforce.com seamlessly into Gmail. First and foremost among the features in the new ...

If ever there was a case for conducting online customer surveys, Adam Lasky, global social media coordinator at Spreadshirt, has lived it. "A week after a customer makes a purchase on the Spreadshirt platform, we follow up with a customer review survey," Lasky said. That's how the company learned th...

The issue of mobile privacy has been simmering for years, and it's long been apparent that there will be some movement at the government level sooner or later. This week, sooner would probably be the better guess -- especially if the European Commission is included. In the last few days, more allega...

Some things in life are fleeting -- the lifespan on the mayfly, the appearance of a rainbow, the pure white of the first snow of winter. Some things in your CRM system are fleeting too -- namely, the quality of your data. Did you know that every year, somewhere between 25 percent and 40 percent of ...

This past May mobile app developers dodged a bullet when a California state court sided with Delta Airlines in a dispute over its mobile app. California's attorney general had sued Delta, alleging that the company violated the state's mobile privacy law, which requires a company to clearly state tha...

OK, the title's a cheap riff on the T.S. Elliot book of poems that inspired Cats -- but stay with me, this goes places. A big group of cats is called a "clowder." What if we could access a clowder of big data? Big Data has been taking up a big part of my conscious life lately, what with all the anal...

Mobile everything is the current computing zeitgeist and if that means turning an app or function that is perfectly suited for desktop use into a mobilized one, well, as the thinking goes at so many companies now, just do it. However, mobilizing an app -- even a front-office CRM app -- should not be...

I seem to be doing a lot of research and writing about Big Data this year. I am taking a lot of briefings from emerging analytics companies too, and I see it all as net good because the emphasis on data and analytics is really an emphasis on information, an economic indicator of sorts for me. The th...

The personality inventory known as the "Myers-Briggs Type Indicator" is premised on the idea that different people process information in different ways. Some people are verbal processors. Others are visual processors. Some people respond more strongly to images -- others to text. The most effective...

InsideView earlier this month debuted a new marketing offering housed on its InsideView CRM Intelligence Platform. "One of our working premises is that even with the massive amount of spending companies do on CRM automation, the products still do not fully address the needs of understanding the cust...

Bloomberg has been embroiled in scandal since news broke last week that its reporters were using the company's corporate terminals to monitor its customers' activities. The story began to unravel when news surfaced that Goldman Sachs had confronted Bloomberg over the possibility that reporters were ...

Although the acronym "CRM" has been around for a long time, most people have no idea what it means. That's kind of a shame, because they brush up against the effects of CRM every day in their interactions with the businesses that market to them and those they patronize. As a result, when I say I wri...

So you have your CRM application in place and humming, collecting information about customers and potential customers and organizing it -- but how are you using it? Most companies pour it back into sales, marketing and support to keep feeding those machines, which is the way you realize the value fr...

PowerObjects has released PowerMap, a new add-on for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. "It is a way to create a visualization of geolocation in the database," said PowerObjects CEO Dean Jones. Version 2, which is expected in a few weeks, will have stepped-up capabilities, and a more advanced version will foll...

Pegasystems has rolled out the newest iteration of its marketing application. New or enhanced features include improved ability to perform real time event-triggered actions and new B2B recommendation functionality. The key to understanding this app is its name, "Next-Best-Action," said Steve Kraus, ...