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I was talking to a friend of mine whose company had a rough first quarter. As is often the case, both sales and marketing came under scrutiny; several salespeople were let go, and marketing is now under a microscope. In trying to perform a post-mortem on the problems, we struck upon the issue of sal...

Sugar CRM took its annual customer and partner show on the road this week and brought what had been a Bay Area extravaganza to the Big Apple -- the better to attract a sizable population of customers and partners from Europe and other points beyond North America. It seems to have worked, because eve...

Airline travel experiences were relatively satisfactory for passengers in 2012, based on a number of metrics -- except for the most telling one of all: customer complaints. Those rose sharply, according to the Airline Quality Rankings Report, which examined 14 of the largest U.S. airlines and their ...

Marketing is taking CRM by storm. While we've all been fixated on social media, many companies -- both vendors and end customers -- have been acting more broadly by acquiring and extending marketing solutions. At the recent Microsoft Convergence 2013 held in New Orleans in March, the company put a l...

Salesforce.com has upgraded Salesforce Chatter with a new feature that collects and aggregates unstructured data -- or perhaps better put, social intelligence -- onto one page for easy reference. The feature is called Chatter Topics and Expertise, and it lets users find information and related resou...

Back in the old days -- like around 2003 -- the rate of what was termed "CRM failure" was unacceptably high. You often heard it bandied about that 70 percent of implementations were failures. That was an estimate -- companies were not coming forward to confess their CRM disasters, so building a scie...

SugarCRM and Colosa are getting set to debut a new Sugar module based on a visual tool that lets users design business process workflows inside SugarCRM. They'll be able to control the way tasks get routed; track how long it takes to complete; and control which screens get displayed and their order....

Marketing automation company Marketo filed paperwork with the SEC on Tuesday to launch an initial public offering valued at $75 million. The company has not yet proposed a stock price. It does say in the filing that it is considered an "emerging growth company," and it plans to list on Nasdaq under ...

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the MIT Center for Digital Business and the Sloan School of Management have written an interesting book for our times -- our economic times -- with an appealing metaphor that any technologist will appreciate. Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution...

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau announced last week that it has expanded the Consumer Complaint Database it launched last summer, increasing the number of complaints about credit card companies from 19,000 or so to 90,000. The added data comes from additional players such as mortgage companie...

CallCopy recently unveiled cc: Discover 5.1, an upgrade to its flagship workforce optimization suite. Many of the changes incorporated in this version were made at the behest of customers who provided feedback at the company's first annual User Conference last fall, said Patrick Hall, CMO of CallCop...

If you have been thinking lately that the chief marketing officer has been driving CRM purchases more than the IT department, you're right. "This is the era of the CMO," Larry Bowden, vice president of portals and Web experience at IBM, told CRM Buyer. The reason for that is simple: The amount of in...

It's hard to overstate the impact that the arrival of Software as a Service had on the CRM world. Spearheaded by Salesforce.com and picked up by almost every other vendor in the CRM space, SaaS made CRM available to virtually every business, and has paved the way for the continued health of the CRM ...

For years Microsoft has been telling us that they have great new products in the pipeline that were competitive, and an approach that was social and customer-centric. For the last couple years, however, we had to watch the slow maturation of that vision. First there was Windows 7, which was pretty g...

Consumers give hotels, airlines and car rental companies high marks in customer satisfaction for the mobile experience they provide, according to the "ForeSee Mobile Satisfaction Index: Travel Edition." Online travel agencies, however -- not so much. Specifically, of the measured travel categorie...