Articles by Christopher J. Bucholtz

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 of them are insmall businesses. That's a big opportunity for CRM vendors -- but what does it mean for potential CRMusers...

In a past life, I was a bosun's mate in the U.S. Navy. A bosun's mate's job is best described as "sailor stuff" -- running small boats, tying up and casting off in port, steering the ship, maintaining things, and lots and lots of painting Bosun's mates also stood lookout watches, and plenty of them. These watches involved simply monitoring the envi...

This story was originally published on Feb. 23, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. I have a lot of fun writing about CRM -- the ideas, the tools and how they're brought together as a coherent strategy. CRM is a foundation on which to build relationships, layer on additional sales and support tools, and create...

I remember being an impatient kid when something I really wanted was on its way.The first time I was aware of my parents mail-ordering something for me (I thinkit was a baseball jersey I especially coveted) I can recall bombarding them with achorus of the phrase, "when is it going to get here?" I realize now that hearing asix-year-old ask that que...

Customer service is a crucial part of the customer experience. That seems immediately obvious. And customer experience is the big buzzword right now, so companies are going bonkers revamping their customer service operations. Right? Would that it were so. Almost paradoxically, many businesses are still stuck in the mode of tweaking with utterly def...

There are three things certain in life. We all know the two cited by Benjamin Franklin, but there's a third certainty that we all face regularly and have to cope with constantly That's the certainty that we'll make mistakes. Everyone makes them; if it hasn't happened to your business, you haven't been in business long.

I just wrote a note to a friend of mine thanking him for his participation at a conference I recently helped organize. It was a thank you note, and he's a CRM industry influencer; I won't divulge names, because it's not important to my point, nor do I want to seen like too much of a suck-up In any event, I was grateful for his participation in the ...

CRM is not a small market. Nor is it a niche sequestered away in a corner of the larger CRM market. CRM is a US$13.045 billion industry in 2012, and it will grow to $16.694 billion in 2015, according to Gartner. No matter how you look at things, that's a lot of money With a projected growth of nearly 30 percent in three years, it would be easy to a...

"You can't get there from here." That's the classic gag about New Englanders giving road directions -- that somehow, the route that needs to be taken is so convoluted and confusing that there's no way to negotiate between two points on the surface of the Earth....

At last year's Dreamforce event, the word "koan" was used quite a bit, thanks to CEO Marc Benioff's Buddhist proclivities. The word means "a paradox that is to be meditated upon," typically used to train novice monks to abandon dependence on reason to achieve enlightenment. Most of the applications of "koan" at Dreamforce didn't apply to paradoxes...

"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made." This quote, often bandied about, is attributed to Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944), who was a French diplomat, dramatist and novelist. And, judging by his best-remembered quote, kind of a jerk....

This story was originally published on Jan. 26, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. The way the concept of CRM is defined during the sales process can sow the seeds of its ultimate failure. Because the decision makers are often sales managers rather than actual salespeople, the pitch is usually made that CRM m...

When I go to CRM conferences -- and I go to many -- one of the things I relish is the opportunity to speak to leaders about thinking surrounding social CRM (SCRM). That group is not limited to the pundits and authors most closely associated with SCRM; it also includes users at these events who have reached the decision to fully embrace it in their businesses...

The top 10 trends in CRM was the topic of the lead-off talk by analysts Gene Alvarez and Ed Thompson at Gartner's Customer 360 Summit last week. Most of the items were evergreens that are fixtures when such trend lists are drawn up, but there were two that caught my eye, if only because of their juxtaposition on the list First was the issue of "big...

In the UK, supermarket chain Tesco is being pounded right now in social media channels because it's refusing to honor an erroneous online advertisement offering new iPads for Pounds 50 (US$65). The offer went viral, and now the backlash is viral, too. How Tesco responds will tell the tale. I'd recommend a sincere apology, a few well-phrased jokes ...

A friend of mine bought a car that is, to be honest, a lot more than he really needs. It has all the bells and whistles, wrapped in a lovely paint job and a plush leather interior. Yet every time I ride in it, I discover something that he's overlooked. Yes, Randy -- this would be where you plug in your iPod. Did you know you had a second glove com...

In this era of social media, the Dunbar Number has been the subject of considerable debate. For those of you who don't run in evolutionary anthropology circles, the Dunbar Number is a concept created by Robin Dunbar, the director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. Dunbar's theory is that there are only so many meaningful relationships we can manage -- the approximate number is 150.

I have a lot of fun writing about CRM -- the ideas, the tools and how they're brought together as a coherent strategy. CRM is a foundation on which to build relationships, layer on additional sales and support tools, and create a customer-centric business But this foundation needs a foundation. After all, businesses thrived even before CRM technolo...

My childhood birthdays and Christmases had a few eternally repeated phrases associated with them: "Happy Birthday," "Merry Christmas," and "He'll grow into it." The latter one was always perplexing to me. The volume of oversized clothing I received as a kid from aunts, grandparents and family friends was astounding. It left me with two conclusions:...

Last week, I dropped off my Prius at the dealership for routine service, as I've done regularly since I bought the car in 2007. After getting the requisite paperwork handled, I ambled over to the shuttle stop for a ride home "Where you headed?" barked the driver, never raising his head from his newspaper. I recognized him -- he'd driven me back and...