Trends

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, wrote George Santayana, and if you've covered technology as long as I have, you know that the cycles of repetition become shorter with each passing year. When it comes to CRM, we're seeing it again in the form of social CRM: companies ar...

My sources tell me that Salesforce.com will be handling its major Dreamforce announcements differently this year. Rather than letting us drink from a firehose at the event, they promise to tell us much of their news beforehand so that they can spend the keynotes, I assume, drilling down into more o...

Customer satisfaction with the credit card industry has stabilized after years of dramatic changes to the space, according to J.D. Power and Associates' 2012 U.S. Credit Card Satisfaction study. It found that for the third consecutive year, customers' satisfaction with their credits cards has increa...

If Winston Churchill had been a CRM pundit, he may have penned the immortal turn of phrase, "never in the course of human events have so many paid so much to have so few use an application." That would have made him a pretty awful CRM writer. But give fictional Winston a break -- it is difficult to...

In today's economy, there are many tools designed for sustaining small and mid-sized businesses. Web conferencing is a tool that an increasing number of companies find very useful. Over the last few years, Web conferencing and online meetings software have taken off as communication tools with sever...

It's good to be busy, but I remember when August was a slow month, sort of like January, and for the same reasons. The holidays are out of the way, there's less to do -- other than eat the Christmas chocolates or the summer squash and tomatoes, and think about spring or going back to school. The A...

There's a great chase scene in Minority Report when Tom Cruise, having been identified as a future murderer, is making his escape through a futuristic mall. He's trying to keep a low profile. Unfortunately, the advertising billboards start crying out to him, vying for his attention and blowing his c...

When people are under stress, many respond with remarkable grace, courage and decisiveness. Then there are those who, under great stress, become paralyzed, flail about, or lash out in unproductive and unprovoked ways. The social era is showing us that while corporations are not people, they are run ...

I'm just back from a week in the woods, trying to get my head around social media and CRM again. That means I'm in the middle of writing up a report on some research that uberanalyst Esteban Kolsky and I did over the last few months, and smack in the middle of CRM Idol judging. Everything's fine, a...

A company's reputation is based on the customer's experience. Fixing or preventing problems is half of the service equation; communicating with customers is the other half. Customer service is as important, if not more important than the immediate resolution of the problem. An integral part of the c...

If you mention a certain brand of lower-priced, assemble-it-yourself furniture of Scandinavian heritage, you stand a pretty good chance of getting a response that dwells at some length on how hard it is to put it together. I've never felt that way -- in reality, I actually like putting stuff toge...

I dropped a small stone in a large pool last week, and the ripples are still spreading. In a separate post I wrote that IT is over. I was very careful to say that IT is over as a disruptive innovation and as an economic engine, but few understood what I meant, so I thought this would be a good cha...

What's the world coming to? Microsoft lost money in the software business last quarter -- the first loss in a decades-long string of positive earnings from the world's biggest software company. Sheesh! Yes, there were extenuating circumstances, but the loss signals the breadth and depth of the impa...

When people ask me what I write about, I say "CRM," but I could just as easily say I write about adoption. Adoption failure is the arch-enemy of CRM, the great CRM investment-waster, the adversary to those who want to organize, rationalize and economize their customer data and how it's handled. W...

I have always been interested in the similarities between biology and economics and ultimately business. In the last few years we've adopted some of the parlance of biology when we talk about business, especially social business. Perhaps the best example is the analogy we freely make between a ven...