Articles by Christopher J. Bucholtz

I love CRM as a discipline, but I have no illusions about its ability to survive in the cruel world. The reality is that customer relationships are fragile things; they need the right environment to flourish and be profitable. There are a host of things that can scuttle these relationships, and most of them are entirely out of the control of the p...

Disasters -- be they man-made or natural, like Hurricane Sandy -- showcase the best in people. Neighbor helps neighbor like never before, people share what they have, and assistance comes from unexpected places. They also showcase people at their worst -- looters, scammers and other lowlifes emerge and heartlessly seek to profit from the victims....

This story was originally published on Aug. 3, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series If you mention a certain brand of lower-priced, assemble-it-yourself furniture ofScandinavian heritage, you stand a pretty good chance of getting a response thatdwells at some length on how hard it is to put it together. I've neve...

"It is a good thing to follow the first rule of holes: If you are in one, stop digging." It was only 1988 when this nugget of wisdom was first recorded, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs It's one of my favorites, because it has so many applications in the business world. Unfortunately, the glib so-and-so who first uttered this turn of ...

It used to be that your business could provide a basic level of service and yourcustomers would be perfectly happy. Some form of help, delivered at the speed ofthe business and within the parameters of your company's policies, was usuallyOK -- and if it wasn't, you could probably get away with it. I mean, who would hearabout it, right? Those days s...

As a technology journalist, I interact with public relations professionals regularly,to the point where some firms have asked me to speak internally about whatjournalists are looking for from the companies they cover Usually, these are straightforward discussions -- journalists want access and they wanthonesty. Like everyone else, they're more incl...

One of the tricky parts of developing a social CRM (SCRM) strategy is that it requires left brain and right brain thinking. The left brain, where more logical and procedural thinking takes place, is comparable to how "traditional" CRM operates, organizing and distributing data based on predetermined processes. The right brain, the center of creative thinking, is comparable to SCRM, discovering new relationships and communication models and engaging and conversing with customers...

About five years ago, CRM analyst and author Paul Greenberg set out to develop a definition for social CRM, or CRM 2.0, as some called it at the time. Through his impetus, some crowdsourcing, some crowd-editing and ultimately, I suspect, a degree of fatigue, he arrived at a definition. It was this: "Social CRM is a business strategy, supported by...

The CRM industry is used to getting a jolt every year from Dreamforce,Salesforce.com's annual mega-event. Each year, the number of attendees swells --this year, it's more than 70,000 -- and that makes CEO Marc Benioff's bacchanal theepicenter of the CRM industry for a week That give Salesforce a chance to make a serious splash. Some years, it succe...

CRM is not itself a technology -- it's a discipline enabled by a technology. Butthe ideas are so completely enmeshed with technology today that it's almostimpossible to talk CRM without lapsing into jargon That's led to the abduction, abuse and expropriation of technical terms, which oftenresults in confusion over what they actually mean. Just look...

This story was originally published on Jun. 7, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series There's a lot of opportunity for CRM vendors seeking to reach small businesses.While there are 15 million seats of CRM in action today, there are a lot more than15 million customer-facing workers out there, and the vast majority o...

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, wrote George Santayana, and if you've covered technology as long as I have, you know that the cycles of repetition become shorter with each passing year. When it comes to CRM, we're seeing it again in the form of social CRM: companies are making the same mistakes they made at the start of the CRM era...

If Winston Churchill had been a CRM pundit, he may have penned the immortal turn of phrase, "never in the course of human events have so many paid so much to have so few use an application." That would have made him a pretty awful CRM writer. But give fictional Winston a break -- it is difficult to summarize the ongoing struggle with user adoption...

Henry David Thoreau's quiet wisdom is best exemplified by sayings like, "in allthings, simplicity." That's a nice credo to live by -- but it may be a hard one to fullyembrace if you're trying to provide great customer service these days After all, if you work in service, you have customers coming at you through a widervariety of channels than ever ...

When people are under stress, many respond with remarkable grace, courageand decisiveness. Then there are those who, under great stress, becomeparalyzed, flail about, or lash out in unproductive and unprovoked ways The social era is showing us that while corporations are not people, they are run bypeople. And choosing wisely when elevating people t...

If you mention a certain brand of lower-priced, assemble-it-yourself furniture ofScandinavian heritage, you stand a pretty good chance of getting a response thatdwells at some length on how hard it is to put it together. I've never felt that way-- in reality, I actually like putting stuff together. Thus, I am often summoned byfriends when they're flummoxed by an item of furniture that boasts an umlaut in itsname...

When people ask me what I write about, I say "CRM," but I could just as easily say Iwrite about adoption. Adoption failure is the arch-enemy of CRM, the great CRMinvestment-waster, the adversary to those who want to organize, rationalize andeconomize their customer data and how it's handled We've known this for years, and yet as an industry we're s...

Travel always seems to elicit great customer service stories -- that is, great storiesfrom my perspective as a person who writes about CRM; not great as in "myexperience while traveling was wonderful, stress-free and restored my faith inhumanity." As fodder for columns, they're great. They're object lessons in how to sabotagecustomer relationships,...

This story was originally published on April 5, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. "The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made."

About a year ago, I heard a great story on National Public Radio's "Marketplace" that illustrated the concepts of sunk costs and opportunity costs using baseball players as a sample group. While fans marvel at the enormous contracts paid to star players,there are thousands of younger players who toil away in the minor leagues for verylow salaries;...