Trends

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...

It's the catch-all department in many companies where top sales funnel activities like lead and demand generation are found, or lower sales funnel strategies including pre-sales support, pricing exceptions and team selling are found. It's team selling on enterprise-class ERP applications. It's als...

Most people can visualize the classic customer service environment: hundreds of agents sitting side-by-side in a large contact center, all working off the same script, working the same shifts and being monitored in the same manner. The mass media has reinforced this vision of customer service facili...

Contact centers will dramatically increase the adoption of Voice over Internet Protocol technology over the next few years, the Yankee Group projects. This long-awaited development will be driven in some part by related growth in the number of home agents. The VoIP adoption rate in North American co...

Global shipments of scanners that read wireless tags used to track products in business supply chains climbed 14 percent in this year's first quarter compared to the same period a year ago, according to figures released Wednesday by ABI Research, of Oyster Bay, N.Y. The research firm also revealed t...

Three technology companies have joined together to propel radio frequency identification applications forward. OATSystems, ADT Security Systems and Intel are paying for technology implementation to win grocery retailers over to RFID investment. Grocers suffer from slim profit margins. That means the...

Earlier this week, RightNow Technologies announced its acquisition of Salesnet, an on-demand vendor known for its highly specialized sales methodologies. It was a coup for the Bozeman, Mont.-based vendor, says founder and CEO Greg Gianforte, for a number of reasons -- not least because it lopped a y...

A PricewaterhouseCoopers' Management Barometer survey has identified CRM as one of the top drivers of change management initiatives among multinationals today. The typical company is currently using an average of five change strategies to achieve desired benefits, it said. Leadership training, at 77...

When the phone stops ringing, we all know what we need to do: Open up our overpriced CRM databases and start making calls. My CRM makes it very easy for me. It prioritizes calls based upon their probability of success. Now, it isn't rocket science, and I could really do the same thing with an Excel ...

IT consulting services will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.2 percent from 2006 through 2010, with slightly rising growth rates each year, forecasts a new study from IDC. Drivers behind this growth include the stabilization of prices, the entrance of new providers, and a changi...

In August 2005, specialty retailer Casual Male struck a bargain with its customers: If it didn't have a best-selling item in a particular size or color in stock, it would get it within five days. If it couldn't deliver, the customer would get the item for free. Nine months later, Casual Male is out ...

It's opening day in many Major League Baseball stadiums today, and in addition to wondering who's throwing out the first pitch, how much the beer will cost, and whether that rookie shortstop can hit the curveball, competitive and committed fans of this great sport are grappling with another burning ...

At first I did not know how to react to the news that AOL and Yahoo were going to be charging companies to guarantee delivery of e-mail. Was I supposed to feel good as a CRM person that a new avenue of message delivery was opening up, or was I supposed to man the barricades as a consumer to protest...

It is one of those technologies that has been predicted to explode in popularity, only to be relegated to moderate growth, and while there are still doubts, some indicate that mobile CRM may finally make its move in 2006. There are still some issues of securing mobile access to customer data, shippi...

The rising cost of fuel is prompting thousands of federal government workers to consider the benefits of teleworking -- either working from home or at an offsite location closer to home. A recently published study titled, "Fuel Smart Economy: It's No Gas," that examined the cost of the daily commute...