Customer Service

Every small vendor -- no matter the industry -- dreams of landing at least one big name Fortune 500 client. Such a client, of course, would lend it the necessary street cred -- not to mention revenue -- that all smaller companies need. It also might open the door to new product development and distr...

It's been four months since Google announced it would guarantee 99.9 percent system accessibility for users of its Google Apps Premier Edition -- a cloud-based productivity suite of business-oriented messaging and collaboration apps, including integration capabilities and support. At the time, it se...

By any measure, SaaS vendor RightNow Technologies closed the year on a high note, completing seven million-dollar-plus deals in the last quarter. In fact, CEO Greg Gianforte told CRM Buyer, "our sales teams delivered the highest total bookings in any quarter over the last two years. In the current e...

Growing up in a world immersed in digital technologies, members of Generation Y have the highest of expectations on how they want to interact with their banks online. Born at the dawn of the digital age in the early 1980s, the oldest among Generation Y have never known a world without personal compu...

Society's expectations for more personalized products and services have risen. As a result, vendors need to better understand their customers and prospects in order to remain competitive in the marketplace. One of the best ways for a company to do this is to spend time examining the interactions bet...

Genesys has always been a distinct entity within the Alcatel-Lucent line of divisions, products and services. On Jan. 1, though, it was folded into a larger group called the "Applications Software Group." Genesys' mission of offering contact center products and services geared toward enterprises and...

It's no secret that customers aren't buying much these days. The economic engines have locked and stalled, leaving businesses everywhere in freefall. While companies around the globe are jettisoning anything they can to slow the descent, none are ditching CRM. In fact, CRM may be the last remaining ...

Last week Salesforce.com introduced its new support concept dubbed "The Service Cloud." I have to say it makes a lot of sense both as a product direction and as a business decision. The announcement is in line with many of the business initiatives that the company has made over the last decade in t...

Salesforce.com has rolled out another cloud offering -- this time for the service space. Called "Service Cloud," the bundled applications, which include integrated social networking tools, are built on the Force.com platform. Service Cloud allows users to create an online community for up to 250 cus...

Avaya is rolling out two new industry-specific applications at the National Retail Federation's annual trade show on Monday. One, Avaya Video Assist, leverages the company's contact center expertise. The other, In-Store Connect, allows retailers to do away with siloed commnication systems such as i...

For many e-tailers, online chat is a closer. Packaged and offered up to site visitors as a service, it provides an opportunity to close a sale when an uncertain customer wavers. Retailers were early adopters of this technology precisely because of the distinct return on investment, Conversive CEO Ro...

Memo to telecom service providers: "We never thanked you, but you did a great job offering us consolidated billing. It is hard to remember now, as for the last few years you have been so aggressive in promoting bundled services, but five years ago, this was a major pain point. Three bills for ISP, c...

The Internet provides opportunities for businesses to interact with customers in new ways. As innovations in social media appear, enterprises slowly adopt those same trends to offer alternatives for making the sale online. Some companies are attracting potential new clients through live video stream...

Are cable "bundle" customers changing channels to wireless telecom services? A recent study by the CFI Group, which focuses on measuring customer satisfaction and CRM issues, indicates they are. That is, if they can. Some can't, either because the choice is unavailable, or they have signed the optio...

Cable company and customer satisfaction: The two terms are often considered antithetical. Through the years, these corporations have earned a reputation of being slow to respond to customer inquiries, inflexible and callous. Now as new competitors tread on their cash cow video services, will these p...