Customer Service

Perfection is elusive, if not impossible to achieve. Businesses are made up of people, and people are imperfect. They make mistakes -- mistakes involving internal operations and mistakes that affect customers. How many have planned for those inevitable instances when people prove fallible? Not many....

I was recently discussing Watson -- the IBM super silicon brain that won Jeopardy! -- with a reporter writing an article. Around the same time, I was also looking into Google Glass, the wearable computer that enables people to record what they see and to see what they're recording through a teeny ti...

Mobile CRM is well entrenched in the sales and marketing spaces -- perhaps too entrenched in some cases. However, the third tier of traditional CRM -- service -- has barely been breached by mobile technologies. Some headway has been made, but for the most part it has been in fits and starts. Only a ...

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...

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...

New tools are available to help with service level management, but they require a new perspective on how IT infrastructure components should be managed. The key is to embrace a new ideal of managing every infrastructure component from the perspective of how it impacts end-user service levels. By inc...

Kana Software on Tuesday debuted its next generation of Kana Enterprise, a multichannel customer service application with functionality for both the agent-based desktop and self-service. Its features include case management; Web self-service; mobile chat; co-browsing; social listening, analytics and...

Airline travel experiences were relatively satisfactory for passengers in 2012, based on a number of metrics -- except for the most telling one of all: customer complaints. Those rose sharply, according to the Airline Quality Rankings Report, which examined 14 of the largest U.S. airlines and their ...

Salesforce.com has upgraded Salesforce Chatter with a new feature that collects and aggregates unstructured data -- or perhaps better put, social intelligence -- onto one page for easy reference. The feature is called Chatter Topics and Expertise, and it lets users find information and related resou...

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau announced last week that it has expanded the Consumer Complaint Database it launched last summer, increasing the number of complaints about credit card companies from 19,000 or so to 90,000. The added data comes from additional players such as mortgage companie...

CallCopy recently unveiled cc: Discover 5.1, an upgrade to its flagship workforce optimization suite. Many of the changes incorporated in this version were made at the behest of customers who provided feedback at the company's first annual User Conference last fall, said Patrick Hall, CMO of CallCop...

For years Microsoft has been telling us that they have great new products in the pipeline that were competitive, and an approach that was social and customer-centric. For the last couple years, however, we had to watch the slow maturation of that vision. First there was Windows 7, which was pretty g...

Social media and its close relative, social CRM, allow you to connect with customers in new and meaningful ways, on a greater scale and at a greater velocity than ever before. When it's done right, that is. When it's done wrong, like anything in this era of increasingly automated communication, you...

KXEN has launched Predictive Offers, a real-time next best action tool for customer service and call center agents, on Salesforce.com's AppExchange. The product's goal is to improve customer retention, boost upsell and cross-sell, and improve the overall customer experience by providing agents with ...