Trends

Salesforce announced the partial attainment of one of its long-range goals in its second-quarter earnings announcement last week: It eclipsed its goal of a $10 billion run rate. This will be followed by similar announcements over the next year -- first $10 billion year, etc. -- and why not? The comp...

The customer service robot market will be worth $88 million by 2022, according to Tractica. Annual shipments are expected to increase from 2,730 units in 2016 to nearly 4,800 in 2022. The robots will be both humanoid and non-humanoid. However, telepresence robots, chatbots, and stationary customer i...

Eighty-nine percent of survey respondents said they would recommend an app if a customer support agent proactively contacted them while they were experiencing problems. On the flip side, 47 percent of respondents said they would delete apps that did not provide good customer support.

B2B marketing automation has a long way to go, suggest the results of a recent survey of more than 350 marketing professionals. Act-On Software commissioned Econsultancy to conduct the research for its State of B2B Marketing report released last week. Only 51 percent of respondents said the CMO or...

As an industry, CRM continues to grow and shower benefits on its users. It's hard to imagine that some businesses still don't use some form of CRM, but the data presented in a new infographic from Algoworks suggests that businesses are still buying their first CRM solutions or changing vendors.

The omnichannel approach to customer contact has become a byword in customer service, but retailers need to do more to make it happen, based on a recent study. Researchers tested 57 metrics across desktop, mobile and in-store buying touchpoints to evaluate the end-to-end omnichannel experience at 30...

The further we go in the CRM adventure, the less our efforts seem to be about technology. That's because we're reaching a theoretical limit, or asymptote, on what technology can do in the vendor-customer relationship. Think of an asymptote as the ceiling that a graph never reaches. Increasingly, we'...

Staff engagement is a key component in a telco's ability to positively impact customers, based on new data from InMoment. The company recently conducted a survey of 11,000 North American customers of Internet, mobile and TV services and found that telecommunications companies' customers just plain h...

CPQ -- that is, configure, price, quote -- is one of the most transitional apps, because it spans front and back offices, and because its very existence has changed these functions. Another app in this category is sales compensation management. Both of their stories are about front-office processes ...

InsideView has announced a consulting service to help B2B marketers implement account-based marketing. Expert Service, the first in the firm's planned series of InsideView Expert Services, delivers target market analytics and helps customers build a view of their total addressable market using a dat...

There are three key moments when salespeople can maximize the value in a customer relationship instead of allowing it to leak out, according to Corporate Visions, which announced a new sales skills program on Thursday. Those three turning points occur during deal negotiations, when securing customer...

Sage's Tuesday announcement of its agreement to buy Intacct prompts a multilayered look at the evolution of the cloud ERP space. Both companies are partners with Salesforce and have products based on the Salesforce platform. Each is a member of the AppExchange, and both are situated in the broad clo...

It's hard to believe that the founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX could have such reactionary views about artificial intelligence. Elon Musk last weekend had some very un-Musk-like things to say about AI when he addressed the U.S. National Governors Association meeting in Providence, Rhode Island. "A...

Consumers have a shortlist of critical channels they expect to have access to, including the company's website, email, phone number, and a knowledgeable person to speak with.