Customers

Oracle Vice President Des Cahill is the company's head CX evangelist. An expert in B2B software and marketing, Cahill has spent most of his career in Silicon Valley, helping companies develop, refine and tell their stories. One of the main CRM challenges businesses face today is adjusting to the era...

I start a lot of client engagements with a simple question: Who's the customer? It's amazing the answers that I get. Some people are really quite good. They know the customer's demographic and business or personal needs, and they focus on those things. Others don't even grasp the difference between ...

SugarCRM cofounder Clint Oram is one of the original architects and developers of the Sugar application. He currently serves as the company's CTO. The biggest CRM challenge right now is that "technology is changing the way customers work with companies," Oram said. "I want the company that I do busi...

In an era when technology is changing the ways people conduct every aspect of their lives, it's not a surprise that business leaders have come to depend on it as the lever that will elevate their sales and marketing performance to the next level. Productivity has increased in all aspects of busine...

Software vendors and their business customers have tried many things to increase customer loyalty, but they have been disappointed more often than not. Rewards, delight, and daily deals were good ideas to help spur customer loyalty. Unfortunately, they weren't enough to move the loyalty needle in to...

After two years of declining customer satisfaction, the telecommunications sector has halted the slide, according to the ACSI Telecommunications Report 2016, released Wednesday. There was a 1.9 percent gain -- to 70.1 on a 100-point scale -- in satisfaction with pay TV services, Internet service pro...

If you love studying technology trends and imagining what they will do for your business, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that you have a vision of how things will be, while many of those you need to partner with to achieve that vision still are trying to master the reality of today. Congratulat...

GetHuman last week launched a service designed to help consumers with the tangle of customer service. For between $5 and $25, one of the eight-person company's five dedicated problem solvers, aided by bots, will call a customer service line on a client's behalf to sort things out. The idea for GetHu...

Oracle on Monday announced that it has agreed to acquire Opower for $532 million in cash. More than 100 global utilities, including PG&E, Exelon and National Grid, use Opower's customer engagement and energy efficiency cloud services, Oracle said. Opower's big data platform stores and analyzes m...

Sometimes, it takes something drastic to change a business' behavior. Standard procedures can remain in place long after they've become detrimental to the business, but sometimes it takes a tipping point to drive home the fact that failing to change is the surest way to fail. For example, the Ford P...

Respect is a vital ingredient in any mutually beneficial relationship, and that's never truer than in the case of business-to-business buyers and sellers. The most elementary way a seller shows a commitment to a healthy customer relationship is through an ongoing display of respect. That doesn't mea...

Fox News journalist John Stossel, who recently underwent an operation for lung cancer, on Wednesday wrote that although New York-Presbyterian Hospital's medical care is excellent, "the hospital's customer service stinks." Doctors "keep me waiting for hours, and no one bothers to call or email to say...

Fusion this week launched Contact360, an enterprise cloud contact center solution developed in collaboration with Technology for Business, the long-time partner it acquired earlier this month. "Fusion will be offering a clear migration path to the cloud for TFB's Fortune 500 enterprise and governmen...

Shopify on Wednesday announced that it has agreed to purchase Kit CRM, whose Kit chatbot automatically sends out marketing text messages for online stores. It also lets businesses run targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram, make recommendations based on store activities, post on social media and use...