Customer Data

SynerG, formed in 2005 to develop interactive business mashups, has released its first product -- a contact center application -- from beta. SynerG Contact Center targets a familiar pain point -- one that all agent desktop apps have tried in various ways to address: the difficulty of accessing and i...

Companies have long recognized the importance of customer data in the context of revenue growth and cost reduction. Today, more companies are also waking up to the value of customer data in the context of direct mail waste reduction, which is fast becoming not only an environmental imperative but al...

Retailers in Japan and South Korea have been using image capture technology for several years now, and with the growing base of smartphones, companies in the U.S. are rolling out a wide range of new mobile applications, including some that use interactive digital symbols captured in photos to provid...

To say the Federal Communications Commission isn't responsive enough to citizen complaints about telemarketers or TV programs likely would be an understatement of monumental proportions, if a new study from the U.S. Government Accountability Office is accurate. On Thursday, the GAO issued a report t...

PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and a host of others succumbed to the pull of its tractor beam. Could Salesforce.com be next on Oracle's list? Though this rumor has been around for several years as idle speculation, in the last several months it's taken on new life. The tenor of the gossip has change...

A new survey of European bank customers could prove useful to banks on this side of the pond. The Future of Communications in Retail Banking survey, conducted by Coleman Parkes and sponsored by Xerox, analyzed how retail banks communicate with their customers and presented an argument for more perso...

ATG is building out its personalization feature set with the $10 million acquisition of best-of-breed vendor CleverSet. It is the first acquisition the company has made since its $48.3 million eStara deal in 2006. CleverSet is an automated personalization engine delivered in Software as a Service mo...

Optimizing the value of customer data and respecting customers' privacy are two immutable and opposing forces that companies always try to balance -- usually unsuccessfully. Few for-profit firms have proven themselves able to avoid challenging the privacy boundary when captivated by the lure of data...

Oracle's steady march to integrate its string of multimillion-dollar acquisitions continues. Its latest meld is the PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 application with the Oracle Customer Hub, with Fusion middleware serving as the common platform. The end result is a CRM enterprise suite with master data m...

The holiday season may bring joy to consumers and retailers alike, but hand in hand with that joy comes the inevitable pain of post-holiday returns. Gift returns can be a hassle for consumers, but for retailers they pose a daunting logistical challenge, requiring speedy adjustments throughout the pi...

Thieves were able to breach the corporate databases of TJX Companies and steal millions of credit card numbers because the company retained too much information that was not properly secured, according to a report released Tuesday by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. TJX is the paren...

Companies are increasingly faced with the challenge of how to leverage the large amounts of data available in the contact center. The data is accumulated through customer management systems -- CRM, SFA, ERP and order fulfillment -- and interactions with the customer. Even though providing consistent...

Opposing tensions are much in evidence in the legal wrangle over individual privacy rights and security in the digital environment. The dizzying pace of technological innovation continues as individuals and organizations public and private struggle to come to grips with its implications and ramifica...

With its sex appeal, direct conduit to YouTube and ability to store videos and music -- advantages hardly conducive to productivity in a work environment -- it would not seem likely that many businesses would want to incorporate the iPhone into their operations. Then there is the not small matter o...

Poor data quality can impact an organization in a myriad of ways: Employees wasting time checking and rechecking their work, the unnecessary cost of redoing mundane tasks and dissatisfied customers screaming at the other end of the phone are just a few of the data quality challenges that customer-fa...