Social CRM

Microsoft has taken the wraps off of its forthcoming service update to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which will be released in Q2 2012. The service update will build on Microsoft's rollouts last year in such areas as social CRM and mobile. "We are on the path to deliver a significant new set of capabiliti...

Salesforce.com unveiled a new customer service help desk tool this week. Desk.com works with customer requests delivered over a social network. It is the byproduct of Salesforce.com's acquisition of Assistly last year. However, it is no mere product integration, said Alex Bard, former Assistly CEO a...

The way the concept of CRM is defined during the sales process can sow the seeds of its ultimate failure. Because the decision makers are often sales managers rather than actual salespeople, the pitch is usually made that CRM makes it easier for the managers to manage their sales staff. Which is tru...

CSC and Infovisionix announced a new agreement at Retail's BIG Show 2012 in New York City. Under the agreement, Infovisionix's suite of retail reporting and analysis tools will be incorporated in CSC's Retail Enterprise Intelligence offering. The new capabilities will help retailers understand and i...

I'm ensconced at the Swan and Dolphin Hotels at Walt Disney World in Orlando this week for IBM's concurrent Lotusphere/IBM Connect shows, and all the announcements here paint the picture of a company and a partner ecosystem that is going all-in on collaboration. Big Blue's fuddy-duddy reputation is ...

Peter C. Whybrow, M.D., is a neuropsychiatrist and director of the Semel Institute for Neuorscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, or at least he was when he published American Mania: When More Is Not Enough in 2005. In the book he quotes numerous economic thinkers and writers from the last 300 years,...

The CRM landscape is shifting gears -- and it looks as though 2012 will be the year that will see investments in technologies to cash in on a veritable explosion of social media, mobile and integration opportunities. The winners in 2012 will be those that can figure out new ways to distinguish thems...

Mobility, intuitive cloud-based tools, iPads, iPhones, and social media have forever transformed the sales ecosystem. Across all industries and sectors, salespeople are no longer chained to a desk or landline, and managers and executives agree that integrated technology makes selling more efficient....

In our careers as consumers, we've all encountered employees from time to time who display a shocking lack of manners, aggressive ignorance of what their company sells, or a toxic attitude that suggests we're seen as an enemy rather than a customer. "How in the world did this person get this job?" w...

Welcome back to the discussion. At the top of my list is the idea of resiliency, which I consider a more practical form of sustainability for business. We are now encountering a wave of sustainability-oriented ideas in the popular culture. Forty miles per gallon is the new 30, someone said, and I ...

There was an interesting article in the January 2012 edition of Vanity Fair, a magazine I've come to enjoy though for many years regarded as another of those things my wife would like more than I would. But VF carries an interesting blend of current events and politics, as well as the glossy pictur...

Zoho has rolled out a major update to its CRM app, completely redesigning the user interface and adding new social and productivity features. It is a massive overhaul, Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna told CRM Buyer -- one the company plans to extend to other applications throughout its business suite o...

Social media is often held up as the wind sock to gauge how fast the winds of change are blowing. When Google+ gained 25 million users in just six weeks, it was used as evidence that people had become willing to shift the channels and methods they used to communicate at the drop of a hat in our new,...

Radian6 Social Marketing Cloud has been released -- it's the first Radian6 product to come to market after the company's acquisition by Salesforce.com earlier this year. It is also the first product in which Salesforce.com's functionality has been tightly embedded in the Radian6 feature set, althoug...

I was sitting in the "blogpound" at Cloudforce New York, the seating area where Salesforce.com considerately places press, analysts and bloggers along with tables, power and WiFi, when it dawned on me: Despite all the articles, blogs and books dedicated to the social media phenomenon in CRM, we may...