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Avaya has added new products and enhanced existing ones in its Customer Experience Interaction Management portfolio. The overarching goal of the changes was to allow users to reach out to customers via any channel the customers chose -- for example, mobile application, social media or phone. Such ac...

About a year ago, I heard a great story on NPR's "Marketplace" that illustrated the concepts of sunk costs and opportunity costs using baseball players as a sample group. While fans marvel at the enormous contracts paid to star players, there are thousands of younger players who toil away in the mi...

I spent most of last week in Boston at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, where I was honored to be the sales and marketing track chairman. Next year it will be called "E2 Social" and will bookend the other conference that has been held in Santa Clara, which will become known as "E2 Innovate." There's...

Microsoft has agreed to pay an eyebrow-raising $1.2 billion in cash for the startup Yammer, presumably in the expectation that it will gain a much needed boost in social media expertise. Yammer will remain a standalone service for its 5-million-plus customer base, and Microsoft will also pair it wit...

Several months ago Constant Contact became aware that much of its customer base was intrigued by the daily deal model. However, it also noticed that once those companies actually tried out the model, their enthusiasm for it diminished considerably. "Daily deals just don't work for a lot of companies...

One would almost think we have entered a stage of customer service nirvana: Two industry categories not ordinarily associated with high levels of customer service satisfaction -- airlines and fast food -- have garnered relatively good scores in a new American Customer Satisfaction Index report. The ...

Last week I lamented how the legacy software establishment was focusing on the easy-to-sell parts of cloud computing without really providing the essence of cloud. Since then, I have been inspired by a couple of recent articles that point in a different though not opposite direction. "Oracle Is Sta...

By now, it has been drilled into most marketers' heads: Social media is all about conversation -- a two-way conversation. Oftentimes, the conversation entails responding to customers' comments, requests or complaints. From the customer's perspective, it almost certainly means offers of discounts and...

Microsoft is in discussions to acquire Yammer, a social media and communication platform for businesses, according to a report in Bloomberg, which cited two anonymous sources. Microsoft is prepared to acquire the company for a $1 billion purchase price, the report said, and the deal could be reached...

Customer satisfaction with the airline industry took a dip in J.D. Power and Associates' 2012 North America Airline Satisfaction study after two consecutive years of improvement. The drop was not a large one; overall, passenger satisfaction dropped to 681 index points on a 1,000-point scale. In 2011...

Oracle re-introduced its new cloud/social constellation of stuff last week that it had announced back at OpenWorld. If I count the analyst briefing I got in Redwood Shores in April, it was a re-re-introduction. Oracle is not the only company to follow this strategy. For example, Salesforce follow...

Banks have still not made important reforms or improvements in their checking account practices, according to an update Pew Charitable Trusts made to a report it released in April 2011, "Hidden Risks: The Case for Safe and Transparent Checking Accounts." The original report set out a discouraging li...

If a customer walked into one of your brick-and-mortar stores -- assuming, for this exercise, that you have brick-and-mortar stores -- and asked if you had any Sleepytime Pajamas, how would you want your sales associate to respond? Whether you only carried Sweet Dreams Pajamas, you'd just sold out o...

Ntractive, the developer of Elements CRM, a cloud-based CRM app for Macs only, has expanded its product line to include the iPad and iPhone. Ntractive is taking a different approach from other CRM vendors that have pushed their applications onto these devices, said CEO Justin Bartak. "We basically r...

There's a lot of opportunity for CRM vendors seeking to reach small businesses. While there are 15 million seats of CRM in action today, there are a lot more than 15 million customer-facing workers out there, and the vast majority of them are in small businesses. That's a big opportunity for CRM ...