Customer Service

Fast, easy and accurate -- ask any consumer to describe good customer service and that is the likely response you'll receive. Traditionally, people have reached out to call centers, confident that a well-trained customer service representative would have the knowledge to fill in the blanks. But movi...

Oracle has scooped up RightNow Technologies for a reported $1.5 billion. The acquisition price is a hefty 20 percent premium over RightNow's closing price last week. The acquisition fills a missing gap in Oracle's cloud-based CRM functionality. The deal also provides an excellent exit strategy for ...

As customers become more digital, social and mobile, SMBs have significant opportunity to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through a differentiated customer experience, just like their enterprise competitors. However, those who are unwilling to invest in solutions that embrace the needs of ...

Thousands of people may visit your website every day, but only a fraction of them make it into your CRM system. What about those visitors who don't get captured by CRM? How do you count and relate to the vast universe of prospects you know nothing about, but who obviously have some reason to be in...

Shades of George W. Bush and Victoria's Secret all in one. We got fooled again last week by our own ineptitude and inability to learn from history when retailer Target's website crashed under the weight of a highly successful marketing campaign. The last time anything remotely similar happened was...

Of the nearly 6 million people who consider home their primary place of work, 2.8 million -- slightly more than 2 percent of the population -- are employed by someone else, not "self-employed," according to the U.S. Census Bureau. When accounting for those working at least one day from home, the Te...

NanoRep, the developer of a help-desk application that employs a self-learning knowledge base, has just taken its fledging product global. An automatic language conversion feature now translates information into 34 languages, explained nanoRep CEO Doron Herzich. "The system can learn which language ...

Recent announcements in the CRM space have been all about crossing bridges to streamline customer contact functions and making customer service representatives' lives easier and more productive. And all it's taking is a click of the mouse. LiveChat, a developer of real-time software and Web analytic...

Assistly, a SaaS customer service company, started out with the goal of helping its user base incorporate communications from all channels into the customer service hub. That means messages sent via social media, including tweets and Facebook posts, and even replies to routine transactional emails s...

At CRM Evolution, Brian Vellmure, founder of Initium Technology, gave a talk on the future of customer relationships. He peered well into the future, envisioning an era when the Internet anticipates customer needs and delivers advice automatically. That can only happen when companies develop suffici...