Customer Service

In 1997, Keith Raffel founded UpShot Corporation, the first company to offer Web-based, hosted sales-force automation and CRM. UpShot launched its initial product two years later. By 2003 its products included UpShot for small and midsize businesses and UpShot XE for larger organizations. Today Raff...

At Blue Cross-Blue Shield of Rhode Island (BCBSRI), the numbers told the story: About 180 customer-service reps were using old "green screen" technology. With dumb terminals connected to a claims-processing system, trying to handle a total of 900,000 calls per year. Each call took about 10 minutes, ...

Hosted CRM vendor RightNow Technologies announced earlier this week that solutions and services provider 170 Systems has deployed RightNow Service to increase the quality, speed and resource efficiency of its technical support operations. Based in Bedford, Massachusetts, 170 Systems provides solutio...

As more consumers and businesses turn to the Internet not just for information, but as a way to run their daily errands, the need for more sophisticated customer service grows unabated. The old one-two punch of call-center representatives and an online Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page does not ...

It's an age-old slogan for companies: "We value your business." Thanks to customer relationship management (CRM) systems, many enterprises now can place a highly specific value on the worth of each customer's business. Like it or not, CRM systems allow companies to identify customer segments, or "ti...

CRM software revenues are expected to reach $30 billion in the next several years, according to research firm Cahners In-Stat. Even so, CRM implementation projects are often cited for high failure rates. To avoid losing customers, these projects need to succeed in more dimensions than just company m...

Shoshana Zuboff is a genius, but don't just take my word for it. Zuboff is a Harvard Business School professor who recently wrote a book called The Support Economy with her husband and collaborator, James Maxmin. What makes Zuboff a genius is that although I think the book is about CRM, there is onl...