Trends

The software industry fueled jobs and GDP growth in the United States in 2020, according to a report by Software.org: the BSA Foundation. The software industry supported more than 15.8 million jobs in 2020. While the largest concentrations of software jobs remain in traditional tech hubs, such as Wa...

I've been writing about the importance of platform as a tool and as a strategy for a while -- and not only with regard to Salesforce. I'd say most CRM vendors have a platform story; others like Oracle and Zoho come up as examples all the time. The difference with Salesforce is that it's looking bey...

This year's revised federal tax code plus new Covid-19 initiatives provide additional incentives for startup companies, as well as small and medium-sized businesses. If you received a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan, you may qualify to have that indebtedness forgiven; and other tax incentives...

Certainly, the pandemic has caused some upheavals in American business -- and it's true that the record of progress in economics is littered with creative destruction. But the absolutist prognostications about the future of digital commerce taking over the world made me think "here we go again." Tre...

Even the most customer-centric businesses can overestimate their performance or miss the broad trends in customer behavior. That is why NICE inContact conducts annual surveys that track the customer experience from the perspective of businesses and consumers. CRM Buyer discussed the recent findings...

With most workers continuing to work remotely, CRM has become an important tool for managing relationship risk. Financial firms have to deal with market and operational risk, consumer retailers have to focus on supply chain risk, and all companies have to keep an eye on economic risk. Relationship r...

As we slowly climb out of the Covid anis horribilis, advocates of the new normal (whatever that is) may wish to temper their prognostications about working from home or working from anywhere. While those are good ideas, and the new crop of CRM apps that support such hybrid work lives are genuinely c...

Personalization and automation, two of the hottest buzzwords in the lexicon of CRM practitioners, are all the rage for marketers these days. But only 14 percent of organizations are using artificial intelligence or machine language to automate their marketing campaigns. A survey by Rackspace Technol...

The arts have seen a shift in the last year away from in-person gatherings, but that doesn't mean that performances, showings, and other creative activities have stopped. Rather, they've been transformed, becoming increasingly virtual and digital. We spoke with experts in the arts, design, and marke...

Monitoring and maintaining your data is an ongoing, strategic process. By educating your CRM users -- and making their data entry process as easy as possible -- you can ensure that better-quality data will be entering the system. Here's how you can give your company a true advantage -- and empower e...

For brands that haven't yet tried social selling, 2021 is the time to start. Social commerce offers brands the ability to reach new audiences on platforms consumers already use and trust.

There is budding optimism about the future. COVID-19 cases and deaths are in decline, financial indicators are decent and trending up, and forecasters are predicting a booming economy. This involves a lot of buying and selling at both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer ends of the spe...

Catastrophic events, like a pandemic, coupled with hasty technological change such as many people forced to work from home immediately, have been a rich environment in the past for phishers, who use deception to infect machines with malware, steal credentials, and invade corporate networks. However...

Commerce analysts do not see consumers shedding their newfound buying options in the wake of a post-pandemic marketplace. Concerns for health safety, social distancing, and remote working will remain priorities for many shoppers. Merchants who demonstrate that they are able to quickly get products t...