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A new Forrester survey commissioned by Capgemini, Salesforce, and MuleSoft reveals companies face the same recurring customer experience (CX) struggles. They lack an integrated single source of truth for customer data and are strapped with subpar personalization capabilities.

A proposed law barring high-tech companies from favoring their own products over those of their competitors -- a practice called self-preferencing -- would harm consumers, competition and innovation, according to a report released Monday by The Schumpeter Project on Competition Policy at the Informa...

For years, affiliate marketers, social media companies, online marketplace platforms, and search engines alike have enjoyed the seemingly ubiquitous tax-free landscape from their digital activities afforded to them by the United States' Internet Tax Freedom Act of 1998. However, that could all be ch...

Surround strategy is the antithesis of rip and replace. Rather than replacement, a business can move parts of its workload from some workhorse system, say ERP, to Zoho -- where things like pre-built reports and Zia, an AI-based digital assistant, can help business users interrogate data stored on th...

This is not good. A new report commissioned by Replicant tells a story of customers frustrated when service fails or is way too slow. That's not new -- and Replicant is not the only vendor to ring the alarm. For many years Oracle has reminded vendors that one bad service encounter is enough to make ...

When a complex need arises, customers expect to be connected to a well-prepared agent who can quickly resolve the situation. That fix must be applied in a way that leaves both the customer and agent feeling great about the outcome. Fortunately, the technologies now exist that allow contact centers t...

There are three levels of abstraction that we can study to derive benefit, and this is abundantly clear in CRM. First there's the object, a material product or service that is the thing we trade money for. Then there's the experience, see where I'm going? Lastly there's the concept.

"Amazon has always played a role in the ecosystem of replenishment for appliances," noted Patrice Samuels, a senior analyst with Parks Associates. "The fact that it's building its own appliance now with replenish capabilities is going to impact this market and give them a competitive edge."

Dreamforce saw Salesforce continuing to build out a product offering that in some ways defies description. For the CRM rank and file there were plenty of announcements and enhancements -- and for others some tantalizing views of what may be coming in future releases.

The term "social commerce" is the trend du jour for marketers, yet there's confusion in many circles about what that really means. Some people equate social commerce with capital-I "Influencer" marketing. Others think of social commerce as the process of marketers reaching consumers directly via soc...

Shadow code -- third-party scripts and libraries often added to web applications without security validation -- pose risks to websites and jeopardize compliance with privacy regulations, according to new research conducted by Osterman Research for PerimeterX. Third-party code leaves organizations vu...

Dreamforce happens this week, emanating from San Francisco and reaching out to the world via the global cloud computing network Salesforce helped to create. With that, this may be the last time to say with all sincerity that Salesforce is a CRM company. Truth be told, the transition has been ongoing...

If you follow a market long enough and if it's a successful marketplace, you notice that some of the companies in it go through a succession of moves; first in new products and then in finance. The confusion comes when a company like Oracle lives through multiple up and down cycles. When you look at...

Intuit on Monday announced an agreement to acquire Mailchimp, a global customer engagement and marketing platform for small and mid-market businesses, for $12 billion in cash and stock advances. The purchase could be the linchpin that thrusts the mostly financial software company into solving more f...