Uncategorized

VENDOR WATCH

Zoho Consolidates Marketing Functions

Zoho Marketing Plus is an attempt to bring things back into focus so that SMBs can do the same things in marketing that larger companies do with more labor. You might call this the second democratization of information.

Businesses across all industries are competing in the experience economy. The best way to stand out from the competition and retain customers is with optimal customer experiences, according to cloud technology firm Oracle. While this sounds simple, differentiation is a daunting task for many busines...

Online gambling is at an all-time high in accessibility and popularity. But many betting app developers are rolling the dice blindly without addressing users’ customer experience concerns.

One way retailers can minimize supply issues and strengthen supplier relationships is by automating accounts payable. AP provides a key interface with suppliers and is the lynchpin to getting those suppliers paid on time. Slow, tedious AP interactions will lead to difficulties with suppliers.

ANALYSIS

Digital Skills Front and Center

Research the Rand Corporation did for Salesforce paints a startling picture of how our industry -- actually our world -- is significantly underprepared for its digital future.

The simplest way to define the difference between customer success and what many companies call customer service is that customer success is about taking care of your customers by providing proactive guidance to help them achieve their desired business outcomes.

Braze recently released its second annual Customer Engagement Review that combined data from the Braze platform and the results from a global survey of more than 1,500 marketing decision-makers across 14 global markets. The study unveiled macro trends that evolved within customer engagement changes ...

INSIGHTS

Spreadsheet Mishigas

Recently McKinsey & Company did a deep dive on supply-chain planning -- which you might think is a long way from CRM -- but you might be surprised. The shocking finding to me, and the connection with CRM, is the statistic that 73 percent of respondents said that spreadsheets are their primary supply...

Knowing which software works better than other solutions can give business leaders a leg up on growing their company's efficiency and bottom line. To that end, venture capital firm Bowery Capital published in its annual Startup Sales Stack Report.

Automation will claim more than 11 million U.S. jobs over the next decade, according to a new report by Forrester. That's the bad news. The good news is that at the same time automation will create 9.63 million new jobs, for a net job loss for the period of 1.42 million jobs. The report noted that f...

INSIGHTS

The Sustainable Customer

The customer version of sustainability requires that we capture scads of data about customers -- and today that means in an ethical and non-snooping way so that we'll have something to feed the monster we call AI.

Contact centers have been challenged the past year, most notably from labor shortages that have forced the industry into changing how it operates, how it staffs, and how it improves customer satisfaction and experience. In response, many in the industry are turning to different methods that help aut...

INSIGHTS

Moving Up From SFA

It's time -- past time, really -- to reevaluate sales force automation and maybe consider a new path. That's not as dire as it sounds though. We did a study recently in which we asked over 500 experienced sellers about everything from lead quality to support in the form of resources and even their m...

One bad consumer experience can cause a customer to stop using a product, which is why the customer journey revolution is taking center stage at smart businesses. While customer experience analytics can rescue businesses struggling to effectively manage their customer journey, real-time insights are...

CRM Buyer Channels