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The logistics industry is facing challenges in adopting a sustainable and profitable CRM strategy, and there is inertia when it comes to replacing or augmenting disparate CRM solutions adopted by different business units, like retail, as well as various channels, like phone, Web, email, etc. These ...

Zoho has rolled out a major update to its CRM app, completely redesigning the user interface and adding new social and productivity features. It is a massive overhaul, Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna told CRM Buyer -- one the company plans to extend to other applications throughout its business suite o...

Social media is often held up as the wind sock to gauge how fast the winds of change are blowing. When Google+ gained 25 million users in just six weeks, it was used as evidence that people had become willing to shift the channels and methods they used to communicate at the drop of a hat in our new,...

Every year around this time, I write two columns -- one on the year that was and another on what I expect the new year to bring. There is no methodology for this process, and I believe this lack of method is important. I take a blank screen and fill it up with what has been on my mind for the last ...

The mainframe application forms the core of the system where the bulk of the order processing takes place. The traditional mainframe UI in, say, SCOBOL (Screen COBOL) is being augmented/replaced through the front-ending applications built in VB, ASP, .Net, etc. The front-end screens fetch the custo...

Radian6 Social Marketing Cloud has been released -- it's the first Radian6 product to come to market after the company's acquisition by Salesforce.com earlier this year. It is also the first product in which Salesforce.com's functionality has been tightly embedded in the Radian6 feature set, althoug...

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote famously in his essay "Self-Reliance" that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." These days, many people drop the "foolish" out of the statement and thus completely pervert the saying's meaning, creating a justification to bash the idea of consistency. C...

Forrester Research has been heating up the marketplace lately with a string of interesting reports and forecasts that impact CRM and the front office generally. One that I saw, "Capitalizing on Live Video Chat" by Diane Clarkson talks about the bright future of using video rather than text chat in ...

The logistics industry faces several challenges with the tremendous growth observed in the last two decades. Global manufacturers in industries such as automotive, IT and consumer goods have outsourced supply chain activities such as distribution and warehousing to third parties. The industry has be...

Operational for just barely four months, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has received some 5,000 complaints about credit card companies. The bureau issued an interim report on the nature of the complaints, ranging from objectionable advertising and marketing practices, application processi...

I was sitting in the "blogpound" at Cloudforce New York, the seating area where Salesforce.com considerately places press, analysts and bloggers along with tables, power and WiFi, when it dawned on me: Despite all the articles, blogs and books dedicated to the social media phenomenon in CRM, we may...

SugarCRM, an open source CRM provider, has released 6.3, a new version of its flagship product line. It has also upped the ante in the cloud wars by partnering with IBM on its SmartCloud platform. The upshot, said CMO Nick Halsey, is a CRM app more than able to go head to head with long-established ...

Each dollar spent on CRM yields $5.60 in benefits, according to a recent report. Though the findings are interesting, the methodology is questionable. The 70 participating companies were customers of a firm that had been profiled in case studies, meaning that they were not necessarily typical CRM u...

Economics is a social science, much to the chagrin of neoclassical economists who prefer to think of it as a hard science, like physics, full of equations and certainty. I think of myself as a Keynesian, and while I can see the equations, the certainty eludes me. What I see mostly are people, all ...

A special congressional panel is facing a deadline of Nov. 23 to propose more than a trillion dollars in federal budget reductions over 10 years. If the panel fails, an automatic budget-cutting mechanism will take effect. Either way, the U.S. government will be launching a major austerity program th...