Uncategorized

NextPrinciples has launched Insight-To-Action, a social analytics and engagement product that integrates with a handful of CRM applications. The company is in talks with other vendors to expand the integration of the platform, said Ted Sapountzis, head of marketing and product management for NextPri...

Do your customers think of you as one of them? Do they think you truly understand their business challenges, their opportunities and what keeps them up at night? These are questions you should seriously consider, because in the extraordinarily demanding B2B sales climate of our post-recession world...

As a journalist covering technology, you get bombarded with material from PR people trying to get you to write about their clients. Although there are some stellar PR people, the majority of pitches I get are not targeted at what I write about, addressed to the wrong person, or make claims that are ...

I have been known to do things for money. I bet you have too, but doesn't it sound funny to put it that way? I just got off a phone briefing with Freshdesk, an Indian company with a subscription customer service and support system that it refers to as a "help desk." Freshdesk's got most of the bell...

Customers expect call centers to know everything about them -- their order history, what they've posted about the brand on Facebook, and how long they've bought from the company. Increasingly, companies are beginning to keep up with that expectation, and the more they do, the better customer service...

LiveOps this week debuted LiveOps Engage, a browser-based desktop agent app that centralizes myriad channels -- phone, email, live chat, SMS, Twitter and Facebook -- on one screen. The screen also displays the history of past interactions with the customer. "This release is bringing together all of ...

I had a call today from someone at a company that made a technology that helped inside sales people target the exact right prospects from a list of leads. She said she was using this technology to make the call, and assured me that this technology could make a big difference to the inside sales orga...

It's fairly common practice today for major brands to have a social media team at the ready to respond to customer complaints on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. The practice is so widespread that the Call Center Satisfaction Index report released last week by CFI Group found that ...

First there were smartphones. Then there were very small smartphones and, conversely, larger ones. And devices that folded in half. And smartphones that had sliding QWERTY keyboards. After that, of course, came the tablets. The new form factor story doesn't end there. The next big trend is expected...

It's a universal reality: Customers dislike waiting on hold. Now call-backs and virtual queuing are changing all that. "Our basic mission is to improve the call center experience," said Shai Berger, CEO and cofounder of Fonolo. "The heart of what we do is replacing hold time with a call-back." Call-...

CRMCulture is preparing to release its latest iteration of Productivity Pack for Pivotal CRM. On one hand, it might seem counterintuitive that Pivotal would need a productivity pack. "Pivotal is a great platform," said Steve Roch, CRMCulture's founder and president. "It is pure .Net on the front and...

"People buy your story." Hearing that said from the stage at DemandCon 2011 by Forrester's Jeff Ernst made my withered writer's heart grow two sizes (to paraphrase Dr. Seuss). Covering the technology industry has made me an unwilling witness to a range of crimes against language, ranging from tortur...

Ayasdi came out of stealth mode and told the world it had a new way to analyze big data, and I think the implications for CRM and social are very large indeed. The new way is called "topological data analysis" and hearing about it has the feel of hearing about relativity for the first time and lea...

Mobile CRM is usually not a company's first foray into CRM. Before going mobile, a company usually has a SaaS-based CRM application, at a bare minimum, as well as an online presence that has become increasingly interactive over the years -- and likely a social media presence as well. Mobile CRM has ...

Call centers are increasingly migrating away from on-premises systems to cloud-based systems, which can save money and give greater flexibility. Everything from customer data to telephony software is making its way to the cloud, revolutionizing the way call centers manage their operations. "It's all...