Expert Advice

'Tis the Season. And it's better to give than to receive. And you'd better watch out. Besides being Christmas gibberish, those statements apply neatly to CRM. It's always the season to think about improving how your employees use CRM. It's better to give them tools that reward them for using them ...

There are two types of behavioral analytics. The first kind is "aggregate" analytics. This is what you can see when pulling reports from an Omniture or Webtrends. It shows you things like how many impressions, how many pages viewed on your website, which pages are most popular, or even the path a pr...

Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event is now 10 years old, and it's reached the stage where it draws a true sample of the Salesforce ecosystem. Of course, there are plenty of Salesforce personnel and vendors whose products work with Salesforce, but there is an increasing number of real customers. For me...

Companies spend a lot of money to drive traffic to their websites. Reactive live chat implementations, while highly beneficial, are similar to search engine optimization -- "the more impressions, the better." However, placing a live chat button on your website will not generate more traffic to your...

It's always fun to see the flood of articles this time of year about the holidays. "Is Your CRM Ready for Christmas?" the headlines knowingly ask. "Are You Facing a Christmas E-Commerce Customer Experience Crisis?" "The Holidays: Will You Survive? Will Your Family Survive?" OK, I stole that last one...

Social media have practical applications throughout the buyer cycle for corporate and retail customers. The first step in this direction is to get familiar with social media and then connect the channel with CRM processes. There may be challenges in seamlessly integrating the social media channel wi...

Social media is clearly becoming the next-gen customer engagement channel of choice for industry. The banking industry is likely to be the frontier in adopting next-gen technologies, including social-networking-enabled business processes. The banking industry has two important classifications based ...

TCO is a financial estimate that helps enterprise managers determine direct and indirect costs of a system. TCO goes beyond the initial purchase price or implementation cost to consider the full cost of an asset over its useful life. TCO and ROI are frequently confused and misused, but they actually...

For all the talk of social CRM, there's not so much talk of social CRM successes. Oh, sure -- there are scattered success stories, but there's not a wave of SCRM home runs being hit out there. As a result, there's been talk of SCRM having "jumped the shark" or "outlived its hype." In talking to user...

In life and in business, the old saying "you never get a second chance to make a first impression" fundamentally could apply to everything -- except when it comes to display advertising. Remarketing has disproved that old adage time and time again by affording just that: a second chance to reinforc...

Online consumers are more demanding than ever. They have little, if any, tolerance for website issues, poor site design or longer-than-necessary processes. For organizations with e-commerce channels, this leaves little margin for error. In fact, research indicates that when saddled with an unsatisfy...

Best-in-class sales organizations that leverage B2B teleprospecting stand out. How? They consistently achieve 90 percent of their sales team quota; they experience at least a 10 percent year-over-year increase in average revenue per sales rep; and they gain an average 7 percent year-over-year improv...

Social CRM is quickly transforming from a concept to a reality. However, because of the diverse nature of customers and the broad range of options they have among social media channels, the best practices for capitalizing on Social CRM vary from segment to segment. That means some industries may hav...

Businesses decide to invest in ERP systems for a number of reasons, but it all boils down to one main benefit: profits. ERP systems streamline data processes and eliminate waste to create the most efficient company possible, leaving more room to get things done and turn a healthy profit. There's no ...

We all like to say our businesses are "customer-centric." It's the de rigueur thing to say these days, and it's the only smart way to describe yourself to your customer audience. But how many companies really revolve around the customer? Not many, and for realistic reasons. For instance, your busine...