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Developing good relationships with your customers pays off when all is going well -- but it can also pay big dividends when things go very wrong. In fact, as a recent case illustrates, those relationships nurtured through CRM can set the tone for your corrections and preserve your business. The busi...

One of the more interesting developments of the last week has been the announced acquisition of ATG by Oracle. ATG is one of the leading suppliers of e-commerce solutions, and Oracle liked their stuff well enough to plunk down a cool billion bucks for the logo. I thought it was a good idea at the t...

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison took the witness stand Monday to testify that the illegal downloading of Oracle software by a unit of SAP cost his company $4 billion in missed license fees. When asked to back up his claim of $4 billion in damages, however, Ellison said he could not point to any documentati...

SugarCRM has released an upgrade to Sugar 6, expanding its CRM suite with new features that will build up its social bona fides. For the first time, it is giving users a mobile app -- Sugar Mobile for iPhone -- developed directly by the vendor. Other new features bolster Sugar 6's global functional...

Reports surfaced recently that SAP shelled out US$120 million to Oracle for agreeing not to seek punitive damages in the latter's lawsuit against the company. However, SAP spokesperson Saswato Das ducked questions on this topic. "I cannot comment on this because this has been sealed by the court," h...

Shoutlet, which last year launched an app designed to help companies manage their social media operations, has expanded its feature set to include CRM functionality. It is a natural extension of Shoutlet's original feature set, explained President and COO Aaron Everson. "Shoutlet lets a company set ...

Cisco on Wednesday announced two products and a rich media capture platform to extend its contact center capabilities. One product is SocialMiner, software that lets companies search the Web for relevant material. The other product is Cisco Finesse, a Web 2.0 collaboration desktop for customer care ...

A lot of information is coming together this quarter that begins to put a new spin on social CRM. While we've all been busy getting networked in our personal lives and professionally, a huge mountain of data has been accumulating that will make our work in social technology more valuable. Last week...

Oracle announced Tuesday that it will acquire ATG -- a provider of e-commerce applications and platforms -- for $6.00 per share, or approximately $1 billion in cash. Oracle and ATG both pointed to the complementary nature of their applications. ATG provides an e-commerce platform that includes a cro...

Online consumers are more demanding than ever. They have little, if any, tolerance for website issues, poor site design or longer-than-necessary processes. For organizations with e-commerce channels, this leaves little margin for error. In fact, research indicates that when saddled with an unsatisfy...

Swix has enhanced its original application, Swix Analytics -- a dashboard that tracks ad campaigns and subsequent user engagement across 20 social media communities -- with Swix Social Marketer, a new product that tracks the returns those campaigns are delivering. "Businesses realize there is power ...

It's often hard to maintain high visibility in the marketplace if you happen to be a private company, and for good reason. Private companies tend to be small, and they often do not attract the attention of the financial press precisely because the financial press thrives on the transparency and num...

When it comes to the broad topic of "CRM failure," you often hear the same tales: a too-complicated integration, an incompetent integrator or inflexible technology. The reality is that technology is usually not the problem, nor is it integration or integrators. If you push, you'll find that the most...

Based on the findings of the Competitive Framework and interviews with end-users, Aberdeen's analysis of the Best-in-Class demonstrates that the success of the contact center strategy depends on a combination of specific capabilities and technology enablers. Aberdeen's research has identified sever...

Best-in-class sales organizations that leverage B2B teleprospecting stand out. How? They consistently achieve 90 percent of their sales team quota; they experience at least a 10 percent year-over-year increase in average revenue per sales rep; and they gain an average 7 percent year-over-year improv...