Trends

Do customers suffer from a split personality? I say this not because of encounters with clearly rattled fellow shoppers during the holiday season. I say it because of the numbers that consistently come out when customers are surveyed -- and the other numbers that seem to be in the forefront of most ...

Peter C. Whybrow, M.D., is a neuropsychiatrist and director of the Semel Institute for Neuorscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, or at least he was when he published American Mania: When More Is Not Enough in 2005. In the book he quotes numerous economic thinkers and writers from the last 300 years,...

Mobility, intuitive cloud-based tools, iPads, iPhones, and social media have forever transformed the sales ecosystem. Across all industries and sectors, salespeople are no longer chained to a desk or landline, and managers and executives agree that integrated technology makes selling more efficient....

In our careers as consumers, we've all encountered employees from time to time who display a shocking lack of manners, aggressive ignorance of what their company sells, or a toxic attitude that suggests we're seen as an enemy rather than a customer. "How in the world did this person get this job?" w...

Welcome back to the discussion. At the top of my list is the idea of resiliency, which I consider a more practical form of sustainability for business. We are now encountering a wave of sustainability-oriented ideas in the popular culture. Forty miles per gallon is the new 30, someone said, and I ...

For many companies, the role of the PMO seems like an enigma. Sure, everyone knows that PMOs exist to streamline project operations so time and money aren't wasted, but what do they actually do? Failure to answer this question has led many companies to question the value of the PMO in the years afte...

"It takes two to tango." Ronald Reagan said this of the contentious relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union in the final stages of the Cold War. Unfortunately, this also applies to executives and project management offices. At times, it seems they are destined to face off against...

There was an interesting article in the January 2012 edition of Vanity Fair, a magazine I've come to enjoy though for many years regarded as another of those things my wife would like more than I would. But VF carries an interesting blend of current events and politics, as well as the glossy pictur...

The logistics industry is facing challenges in adopting a sustainable and profitable CRM strategy, and there is inertia when it comes to replacing or augmenting disparate CRM solutions adopted by different business units, like retail, as well as various channels, like phone, Web, email, etc. These ...

Social media is often held up as the wind sock to gauge how fast the winds of change are blowing. When Google+ gained 25 million users in just six weeks, it was used as evidence that people had become willing to shift the channels and methods they used to communicate at the drop of a hat in our new,...

The mainframe application forms the core of the system where the bulk of the order processing takes place. The traditional mainframe UI in, say, SCOBOL (Screen COBOL) is being augmented/replaced through the front-ending applications built in VB, ASP, .Net, etc. The front-end screens fetch the custo...

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote famously in his essay "Self-Reliance" that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." These days, many people drop the "foolish" out of the statement and thus completely pervert the saying's meaning, creating a justification to bash the idea of consistency. C...

Forrester Research has been heating up the marketplace lately with a string of interesting reports and forecasts that impact CRM and the front office generally. One that I saw, "Capitalizing on Live Video Chat" by Diane Clarkson talks about the bright future of using video rather than text chat in ...

The logistics industry faces several challenges with the tremendous growth observed in the last two decades. Global manufacturers in industries such as automotive, IT and consumer goods have outsourced supply chain activities such as distribution and warehousing to third parties. The industry has be...

Operational for just barely four months, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has received some 5,000 complaints about credit card companies. The bureau issued an interim report on the nature of the complaints, ranging from objectionable advertising and marketing practices, application processi...