Social CRM

About ten years ago, I wrote a paper that predicted that analytics and social media would converge in CRM. I believed that for two reasons. First, I believed social media was inevitable, though I had no idea what form it would take. Facebook was not on my radar and had not officially launched, MySpa...

Kana Software on Tuesday debuted its next generation of Kana Enterprise, a multichannel customer service application with functionality for both the agent-based desktop and self-service. Its features include case management; Web self-service; mobile chat; co-browsing; social listening, analytics and...

Blackbaud, a CRM vendor that specializes in the nonprofit sector, has rolled out a new release offering additional social and mobile functionality. The end goal of the various upgrades -- which range from social scoring to the ability to run on a number of different tablets -- is to allow users to b...

As mobile marketing evolves, so do its risks. The Federal Trade Commission last month released its updated "Dot Com" guidelines. An update long in coming -- the first since the report was released in 2000 -- the guidelines take special note of mobile. In short, they state that the same rules that ap...

Salesforce.com has upgraded Salesforce Chatter with a new feature that collects and aggregates unstructured data -- or perhaps better put, social intelligence -- onto one page for easy reference. The feature is called Chatter Topics and Expertise, and it lets users find information and related resou...

Back in the old days -- like around 2003 -- the rate of what was termed "CRM failure" was unacceptably high. You often heard it bandied about that 70 percent of implementations were failures. That was an estimate -- companies were not coming forward to confess their CRM disasters, so building a scie...

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the MIT Center for Digital Business and the Sloan School of Management have written an interesting book for our times -- our economic times -- with an appealing metaphor that any technologist will appreciate. Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution...

For years Microsoft has been telling us that they have great new products in the pipeline that were competitive, and an approach that was social and customer-centric. For the last couple years, however, we had to watch the slow maturation of that vision. First there was Windows 7, which was pretty g...

Salesforce.com has rolled out the latest iteration of its Chatter app designed specifically for the mobile environment. When it debuted last year, the Chatter mobile app was focused largely on core collaboration, explained Michael Peachy, senior director of solutions marketing at Salesforce. Users c...

Social media and its close relative, social CRM, allow you to connect with customers in new and meaningful ways, on a greater scale and at a greater velocity than ever before. When it's done right, that is. When it's done wrong, like anything in this era of increasingly automated communication, you...

We have this idea of modern computing that is closely tied to social media, and rightly so. Social media is a kind of glue that ties us together in new and bigger configurations than our own human capabilities. However, it is also the unspoken issue in the Yahoo brouhaha about working from home -- t...

Microsoft opened Convergence 2013 Tuesday morning with a keynote address from Microsoft Business Solutions President Kirill Tatarinov -- and the debut of an upgraded CRM application. With 11,000 attendees, this is the largest Convergence Microsoft has held to date, said Seth Patton, senior directo...

IBM pushed deeper into the customer experience space with the launch on Thursday of its Customer Experience Lab. The lab brings together various elements of IBM's expertise, technology and staff to integrate mobile, social, cloud, Big Data and advanced analytics for its users. The end goal is to pro...

Does it matter what time of day a mobile ad is displayed? If a generation's worth of lessons learned from email marketing mean anything, the answer is... maybe. Truth is, there are coherent arguments to be made on both sides. However, as marketers intensify their aim at mobile devices, the balance i...

"Who is the customer?" It's a great question, one that my managers liked to ask when I was a young sales representative. Like all great questions, it got to the meat of the matter with an economy of words that were impressive as much for their brevity as for their meaning. The customer's identity is...