Social CRM

SAS is beefing up its SAS Social Media Analytics application with new features that give users a better handle on their social media effectiveness: improved tracking of past versus present performance, and benchmarks to assess competitors' performance. "A lot of this functionality seems as though it...

During the past few years, customer service organizations have faced increasing amounts of pressure to deliver better service over a broader range of channels including the Web, email and phone. Customers expect to get service at any time of the day or night and assume that customer service teams wi...

Recent announcements in the CRM space have been all about crossing bridges to streamline customer contact functions and making customer service representatives' lives easier and more productive. And all it's taking is a click of the mouse. LiveChat, a developer of real-time software and Web analytic...

At CRM Evolution, Brian Vellmure, founder of Initium Technology, gave a talk on the future of customer relationships. He peered well into the future, envisioning an era when the Internet anticipates customer needs and delivers advice automatically. That can only happen when companies develop suffici...

Maybe I'll take some heat for this, but I am trying to live by Don Tapscott's and Anthony Williams' ideas, especially concerning transparency. Let me digress already. Tapscott and Williams wrote a very good book called Wikinomics and followed it up with a better one, Macrowikinomics. As the titles...

InsideView will be announcing several upgrades to its SaaS social sales and intelligence application in the coming weeks. Some of the changes, including social profile features, have already gone live. The company has been turning them on over the past month, as soon as they were developed, said Ral...

By now, most people understand the power and the value of adding a social component to your CRM strategy. Perhaps you're not yet ready to go to full social CRM, but you no doubt recognize that there is a lot of value in engaging with customers in the ways they want to engage. As social media become ...

Whether you're a user or whether you purposely ducked the invitations to join, you've probably discovered that Google+ is all but inescapable as a topic of conversation. Responses run the gamut from rejection to an all-in embrace of Google's new social media platform; users are trying to figure ou...

We tend to think of social media as a property of CRM, and it is, but the story hardly stops there. Social media is changing the world beyond CRM too, and that's what makes it valuable. If being social were strictly about commerce, it might not be worth writing about. This week's Economist has a ...

Whenever I talk about CRM to people who aren't CRM experts, I find the discussion devolving into an examination of the real common denominator in all of this: the human aspects of doing business. The "R" of relationships resonates far more strongly with people than the "M" in management, and for goo...

Ever wonder what the opposite of CRM would be? I have. In my ruminations it's not as simple as matter and antimatter, up and down, left and right -- though few of us would consider antimatter very simple. If I gave you written directions to my house, you couldn't get home simply by turning the sh...

A year or so after it rolled out v.7.0, Sage CRM has updated its application with social media functionality, more interactivity, and tighter integration with email marketing, including a subscription-based service for managing email marketing campaigns. The latter, in particular, is of high value t...

Although businesses no longer control the conversation with their customers, that conversation has never been more important to pay attention to and to respond to in a coherent and, when possible, personalized way. It's critical to realize that these relationships are a key part of the customer expe...

CDC Software's Pivotal CRM Customer Service and Support has launched, with major changes to the application's integration with social media and email, and more configuration options. This module was developed for the Pivotal 6 platform, which was built on the .Net Framework. The biggest jump in func...

We get so wound up talking about the value of online communities for social CRM purposes -- for instance, in building loyalty, identifying potential leads, and improving the quality of service our businesses deliver -- that sometimes we forget that they're really scaled-up versions of actual communi...