Social CRM

CRM will be a top spending focus for enterprises this year and next, according to a Gartner report. What's more, CRM will be THE top spending focus -- edging past the behemoth category of enterprise resource planning -- based on a newly released survey of IT investment priorities for 2013 and 2014.

Could we have a moment of sustained loud noise for all of the companies that form the various ecosystems around major product lines? I mean it. The ecosystem -- and maybe not even social -- is the story of the last five years. While many of us have been running around like Chicken Little talking up ...

There is a long-standing debate in the email marketing community about timing -- that is, whether time of day makes a difference in open and click-through rates. In other words, will an email marketing message sent early Monday morning be more likely to be opened than one sent Wednesday around noon ...

The devil is in the details, the saying goes. When it comes to B2B selling, the dollars are also in the details. That's something I learned many years ago while writing about the reseller channel. Back in 2000, the Internet caused significant disruptions of traditional reseller relationships, becaus...

Salesforce came to New York this week for its annual winter meeting with customers. The company had two goals: test new ideas, and gather customer input. The event was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel for a relatively small group -- less than 1,000 -- rather than at the Jacob Javits Convention Cent...

We all know about the idea of total cost of ownership and the concept of return on investment. Both have their place in business evaluations of CRM. There's another measurement, however, that should be considered -- one I like to call "time to value." The T2V test is simple: From the time you begin ...

I liked what Sage did last week in agreeing to sell off some non-core assets to partners, and I am most interested in the decision to sell ACT! and SalesLogix. The move reduced Sage's bullpen of CRM solutions from three to one -- and that's the right number for this market. Buying and owning three C...

Surprisingly, many customer service organizations have yet to put their toes in the water when it comes to social media engagement. In fact, fewer than half of them actively respond to consumer complaints via Twitter and other social media channels. For companies that do actively engage in social me...

Intelliverse has rolled out a new cloud-based tool that monitors social media for brand mentions and responds when appropriate. IntelliBuzz is simple enough that a company with minimal IT resources in-house -- that is, a computer and an Internet connection -- can manage this outreach just using the ...

For the better part of six years, we pundits have been urging businesses to get social. Social CRM even has its own Gartner Magic Quadrant, and while the entries in that document are all over the map in terms of what they do, vendors serving aspects of SCRM are well established. Gartner itself said ...

NextPrinciples has launched Insight-To-Action, a social analytics and engagement product that integrates with a handful of CRM applications. The company is in talks with other vendors to expand the integration of the platform, said Ted Sapountzis, head of marketing and product management for NextPri...

As a journalist covering technology, you get bombarded with material from PR people trying to get you to write about their clients. Although there are some stellar PR people, the majority of pitches I get are not targeted at what I write about, addressed to the wrong person, or make claims that are ...

LiveOps this week debuted LiveOps Engage, a browser-based desktop agent app that centralizes myriad channels -- phone, email, live chat, SMS, Twitter and Facebook -- on one screen. The screen also displays the history of past interactions with the customer. "This release is bringing together all of ...

It's fairly common practice today for major brands to have a social media team at the ready to respond to customer complaints on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. The practice is so widespread that the Call Center Satisfaction Index report released last week by CFI Group found that ...

2013 is just two weeks old, but executives in the mobile CRM space have a clear idea of how they hope the rest of it will unfold. What they want, in a word, is more: more mobile CRM functionality; availability on more devices; more vendors supplying applications. More mobile CRM is indeed on the way...