Customers

Most customers aren't eager to look under the hood to examine the processes underlying their experiences, suggested Don Schuerman, CTO of Pegasystems. "The contemporary customer doesn't really care about CRM. They care about the experience they have, and in most cases they know little or nothing abo...

CRM innovations in recent years have had a significant impact on campaigns and nonprofit organizations, according to CFB Strategies President Trace Anderson. "Traditionally in the campaign world, it was an old-school mentality of just collecting checks," he said. "Even when I started working in poli...

If you want to succeed at engaging customers, or anyone else for that matter, it helps to have a model of what success looks like. This idea isn't new. Elite athletes train themselves to see a perfect race in their mind's eye, or to imagine the arc of a ball to its flawless conclusion. Scientists mo...

After surviving well over a year as a cord-cutter, I recently returned to the cable fold -- and after less than a month, I'm having major regrets. The problem isn't with the service or even with the pricing. The problem is with the lies. I wasn't entirely happy with my cord-cutting solution, but I w...

Dealing with customers in context can equate with personalization, as many define it. Also, it can refer to enabling customers to jump out of a largely automated customer-facing process to deal with a company representative. Additionally, it can mean getting down in the weeds of some hyper-specific ...

It's important to recognize that "CRM is growing up," said Xactly CEO Christopher Cabrera. "It's becoming more useful to the CRM user, who is predominantly the sales rep or whoever is managing the customer relationship. The sales performance management, or SPM, space is on a collision course with CR...

LinkedIn this week announced three updates to Sales Navigator. One is deeper integration with Salesforce CRM data, allowing leads and accounts to be imported into Sales Navigator automatically. More than 20 LinkedIn customers already are using this feature. The second is direct integration of Sales ...

CRM often is described as a discipline and a technology that will transform the entire business. Sales and marketing can get on the same page, support will have visibility into what sales and marketing are doing, and every interaction can be captured and used to create a complete and comprehensive v...

Lots of CRM vendors talk about personalization, but their idea of how to do it leaves much to be desired. They address personalization very late, using a just-in-time approach to accessing customer data to support a sales or service encounter in the moment. This certainly is important, and it achiev...

The most important trends in CRM right now are "the rise of the millennials, the rise of the promoter economy, and the rise of the conscious consumer," said Matt Price, Zendesk's SVP of emerging businesses. "The 'R' in CRM is relationship, and all of these things impact how we develop relationships ...

Salesforce on Monday announced it had completed its $2.8 billion acquisition of e-commerce cloud software platform Demandware. The deal "gives Salesforce the e-commerce piece to compete against Oracle, which already has e-commerce capabilities, as well as SAP," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president...

This summer has started out to be anything but a somnolent day at the beach. The Brexit vote for the UK to leave the EU is enough to disturb your slumber, and that's not the only thing on the plate. To be frank, it appears we are at one of those major historical transition points that might happen a...

As I see it, there are four basic capabilities, or attributes, needed to build better customer loyalty. I learned about them from two McKinsey researchers. Those attributes, according to David C. Edelman and Marc Singer -- and I agree -- are the following: automation, proactive personalization, cont...

Salesforce VP Lynne Zaledonis drives product marketing and sales enablement for Sales Cloud. In order to succeed in the age of the customer, companies need to understand that the new cloud, mobile and social world we find ourselves in "has produced trillions of pieces of customer data, and it's tota...