Social CRM

The CRM Idols have been announced. The goal of the contest was to identify the best corporate video developed by an up-and-coming CRM company. In the Americas, the winning firm is Get Satisfaction. In the EMEA region, it is BPMonline. The companies were chosen by popular vote of subject matter exper...

I like the saying, "Our attitude toward life determines life's attitude toward us." It's a nice quote, although it was uttered by John N. Mitchell, a convicted prevaricator who participated in the Watergate conspiracy and ended up in an Alabama prison as a result. Paraphrase it for business and it m...

Salesforce.com has a developed a new tool for companies to help them develop and publish Web pages and landing pages specifically for marketing campaigns. The tool, called "Siteforce," is built on the Force.com platform. It focuses specifically on new technologies that legacy content management syst...

Microsoft is rolling out a service update for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online for both the partner-hosted and on-premises deployments. The update includes its promised "Activity Feeds," as well as administrative enhancements and stepped-up disaster recovery practices. Microsoft has put Dynamics CRM on...

I am developing an appreciation of the Occupy Wall Street movement that surprises me. You know the news about it and how over the weekend the movement went global. You probably also know that the authorities are not dealing with it effectively. They've been content to watch and wait, hoping that ...

CRM is a business tool. Lke any business tool, its objective is tied to money -- either making more of it through increased sales, or saving it through greater efficiency. Perhaps because CRM is rooted in sales force automation and hard sales, the customer's path through CRM has mirrored the custome...

Last week's doings at HP exposed a lot that few of us ever think about. The basic story is that board member Meg Whitman replaced recently minted CEO Leo Apotheker. The company's stock price has been floundering for a long time, and many people on and off the board had little confidence in the job...

Customer interaction analytics specialist Nexidia has announced a new integration partnership with Teleopti, a provider of strategic workforce management solutions. The aim of the partnership is to enhance agent performance management by linking Nexidia's performance measuring applications with Tele...

One of the great conundrums about CRM is the disconnect between its stated intention and what it's usually really used for. Theoretically, CRM is supposed to help businesses build better and longer-lasting relationships with customers. In actuality, it's usually used to simply manage customer data a...

Shades of George W. Bush and Victoria's Secret all in one. We got fooled again last week by our own ineptitude and inability to learn from history when retailer Target's website crashed under the weight of a highly successful marketing campaign. The last time anything remotely similar happened was...

Social CRM has been contemplated and debated, defined and refined, cussed and discussed. These many years of excited conversation about what SCRM could do for businesses and what businesses need to do to make it a reality have created more questions than answers for many companies. That's created an...

At the biggest Salesforce.com event to date, Dreamforce '11, vendors had ample opportunities to strut their stuff. In fact, more than 46,000 people -- many of them very socially engaged -- registered this year. "In less than a decade, Dreamforce has become the largest conference in the enterprise so...

Shortly before Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference kicked off this year, with its accompanying slew of new offers and products, Microsoft Dynamics CRM played a little offense: The company rolled out a "Cloud CRM for Less" offer, which grants $150 in cash per user seat to any customer that switche...

Dreamforce's two-and-a-half hour keynote on Wednesday featured plenty of technology talk, and technology is neat -- don't get me wrong. The art and science of managing customer relationships would be lost without it. But one thing Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said early on really stuck in my head. He...

Salesforce.com kicked off its 9th Dreamforce conference with a slew of new features, services and products, as well as an offering that represents a surprising shift for the cloud-evangelizing company: the ability to store data on premises for security-conscious companies. Although lost somewhat ami...