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Blackbaud has enhanced its CRM app for nonprofits with completely redesigned prospect and research capabilities. It is the company's second major release this year, said Tiffany Crumpton, senior marketing manager for CRM solutions. However, neither release -- the previous 2.93 or this newest iterati...

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, wrote George Santayana, and if you've covered technology as long as I have, you know that the cycles of repetition become shorter with each passing year. When it comes to CRM, we're seeing it again in the form of social CRM: companies ar...

My sources tell me that Salesforce.com will be handling its major Dreamforce announcements differently this year. Rather than letting us drink from a firehose at the event, they promise to tell us much of their news beforehand so that they can spend the keynotes, I assume, drilling down into more o...

Buried in a recent J.D. Power and Associates 2012 U.S. Credit Card Satisfaction study -- which showed consumers' satisfaction with credit cards was at a six-year high -- was this very telling factoid: Only 7 percent of credit card customers use their mobile phones to complete transactions, up from 4...

Kana Software is pushing into the mid-market space with a new offering called "Kana Express." It is a multi-channel Web customer service application divided into four modules, all of which can be deployed separately or used as a whole suite. Scaled-down versions of more robust customer service appl...

Customer satisfaction with the credit card industry has stabilized after years of dramatic changes to the space, according to J.D. Power and Associates' 2012 U.S. Credit Card Satisfaction study. It found that for the third consecutive year, customers' satisfaction with their credits cards has increa...

If Winston Churchill had been a CRM pundit, he may have penned the immortal turn of phrase, "never in the course of human events have so many paid so much to have so few use an application." That would have made him a pretty awful CRM writer. But give fictional Winston a break -- it is difficult to...

Pascal Houillon, the CEO of Sage North America, has been at the job for a bit over a year. He took over the reins at last year's Sage Summit where he famously introduced a new branding exercise. Houillon's idea was to make Sage a more prominent brand by de-emphasizing the individual product names,...

Jeff Hasen, Hipcricket's CMO, recently had what he called his "10 millionth" bad customer experience with Comcast. It's galling enough to be treated poorly by a company when you buy just about all of its services, as Hasen does with Comcast. Worse, though, is when you are a mobile CRM expert, as Ha...

VerticalResponse recently launched its social platform with two new features: Coupons and Clipper. Coupons lets businesses generate custom coupons that can be published as a Facebook tab on their Facebook page or as a standalone Web page. Clipper is a browser button that lets users save interesting ...

In today's economy, there are many tools designed for sustaining small and mid-sized businesses. Web conferencing is a tool that an increasing number of companies find very useful. Over the last few years, Web conferencing and online meetings software have taken off as communication tools with sever...

Zoho has been speedily turning out applications to complement its core platform. Earlier this spring, for instance, it introduced Zoho CRM. Now, it is rolling out Zoho Marketing Campaigns to buttress the marketing functionality it introduced in the CRM app. "We had marketing and campaign features in...

Henry David Thoreau's quiet wisdom is best exemplified by sayings like, "in all things, simplicity." That's a nice credo to live by -- but it may be a hard one to fully embrace if you're trying to provide great customer service these days. After all, if you work in service, you have customers comin...

It's good to be busy, but I remember when August was a slow month, sort of like January, and for the same reasons. The holidays are out of the way, there's less to do -- other than eat the Christmas chocolates or the summer squash and tomatoes, and think about spring or going back to school. The A...

Salesforce.com is rolling out a limited pilot of yet another social media initiative -- Salesforce Communities. The offering combines its Chatter product, its Salesforce.com business processes, and an underlying social intelligence that makes it easy to show people the right information and give the...