Trends

In November, as the crowds of caffeinated holiday shoppers began to swell, Starbucks baristas received a corporate edict: slow down. Going forward, they were to make only one drink at a time, no matter how many customers were waiting in line. According to sources, Starbucks customers were complainin...

This week, I interviewed a small business owner who told me a very interesting story. He'd done some planning before implementing his CRM solution, and his new technology took rapid care of the problems he anticipated. After that, however, he started finding new problems -- which he then found solut...

Consumers today don't want to interact just with other consumers. Increasingly, they expect to interact and communicate directly with brands and companies themselves. Over the past few years, companies have come to see these communities as a valuable asset, nurturing them as part of a brand's offeri...

The past year seemed like one of marking time in CRM. The trends are all well spelled out: Social CRM will become a critical tool, service has grown in importance as customer acquisition has become more difficult, and the value of mobile CRM is becoming painfully apparent. So why aren't we acting on...

Self-service is a concept that has been evolving. In decades past, self-service meant providing a detailed manual. The downside, of course, was that a printed manual could not be updated dynamically and was costly to distribute. In the late 1990s, with the advent of the Web and content management, s...

This Christmas, I was sitting around with the in-laws after the presents were opened, when my father-in-law asked me a question that has probably been nagging him for a long time. "What is it that you do?" he said. Well, I'm a writer, first off, but what is it that I write about? CRM. Explaining wha...

Recessions are always a good time to rebuild your competitive infrastructure, and the slow growth/recession of the last couple of years has been no exception. On the stock market, the technology sector seems to be doing quite well. After bottoming in the middle of the summer, the software companie...

'Tis the Season. And it's better to give than to receive. And you'd better watch out. Besides being Christmas gibberish, those statements apply neatly to CRM. It's always the season to think about improving how your employees use CRM. It's better to give them tools that reward them for using them ...

"Call rewrite!" That's what they said in the olden days on movie sets when the script needed doctoring. It's also what the technology industry metaphorically does about every 10 years. We rewrite much of what we've been relying on for information processing because the accumulation of new technologi...

There are two types of behavioral analytics. The first kind is "aggregate" analytics. This is what you can see when pulling reports from an Omniture or Webtrends. It shows you things like how many impressions, how many pages viewed on your website, which pages are most popular, or even the path a pr...

It's amazing to me how we overuse words. Bothering to notice is an occupational hazard of the writing life, I suppose. For instance, consider the word "unique," which means one of a kind. If you add "very" or any other modifier to it, you get mush. Today's word might be "amazing." There is entir...

Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event is now 10 years old, and it's reached the stage where it draws a true sample of the Salesforce ecosystem. Of course, there are plenty of Salesforce personnel and vendors whose products work with Salesforce, but there is an increasing number of real customers. For me...

Companies spend a lot of money to drive traffic to their websites. Reactive live chat implementations, while highly beneficial, are similar to search engine optimization -- "the more impressions, the better." However, placing a live chat button on your website will not generate more traffic to your...

It's always fun to see the flood of articles this time of year about the holidays. "Is Your CRM Ready for Christmas?" the headlines knowingly ask. "Are You Facing a Christmas E-Commerce Customer Experience Crisis?" "The Holidays: Will You Survive? Will Your Family Survive?" OK, I stole that last one...

Social media have practical applications throughout the buyer cycle for corporate and retail customers. The first step in this direction is to get familiar with social media and then connect the channel with CRM processes. There may be challenges in seamlessly integrating the social media channel wi...