Best of ECT News

Renault is marketing a car called the Logan -- a starter vehicle that retails for about US$6,300. A safety conscious consumer may pause before getting in -- but he shouldn't, or at least not more so than he would with any other car. Renault is not cutting corners in its manufacturing process. Instea...

Earlier this month, Sage Software announced it had acquired one of its longtime partners, Corum, a Canada-based provider of CRM technology. It was a significant deal for the company, said Dave Batt, senior vice president and general manager of Global CRM, as the acquired technology matches one of th...

Two years ago or so, a handful of upstart companies entered the CRM market offering open source technologies designed specifically for this space. At the time, open source CRM was neither mature nor relevant enough to corporate deployment needs to make much of a dent in the CRM space. Fast forward t...

Enterprise is far from the days when it was enough simply to have a Web presence. More and more sophisticated consumers are shopping for services based not only on what a company offers, but what it offers online and how easy it is to negotiate. A recent study by Keynote Systems, which offers e-bus...

Microsoft announced in July it was stepping full force into the small- to mid-size business (SMB) market with a customer relationship management (CRM) product designed to fit into its Office software suite. At the time, analysts said Microsoft was wise to take a bottom-up approach to the CRM office ...

Since the end of the U.S. presidential campaign, the issue of outsourcing has ceased to be daily fodder for television news outlets. But it remains an issue that many American corporations struggle with on a daily basis. Aside from controversy surrounding the loss of American jobs, companies must d...

Even when companies outsource some functions, they often keep control over far more than their core competencies. Unless outsourcing will deliver a cost savings with equal or better service quality, they keep it in-house. "They say, 'We want a service level, a service assurance at a price, and if yo...

Think of this scenario: You're shopping for a new home and instead of guiding you into a single-digit fixed-rate mortgage, lenders try to persuade you that an adjustable mortgage indexed to your income makes more sense. Structuring mortgages like that makes no sense, and it's making less and less se...

American businesses are struggling with retaining experienced customer service agents as demands and contacts increase along with higher expectations in the customer-driven economy. At the same time, the marching orders to the contact centers are to keep costs down, reduce call time, increase satisf...

Many companies question if the dollars spent with research and advisory firms are delivering unbiased, accurate guidance. This is particularly true in the CRM industry, where analysts influence short lists, sales cycles, and media coverage extensively. Analysts, in short, can make or break a start-u...

It's that time again; the earnings calls for CRM, ERP, hardware and services vendors are being scheduled, rehearsed and delivered to shareholders, industry and financial analysts. What's common across the more than two dozen calls I've listened to that span CRM, ERP and SCM software, hardware and se...