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Building better relationships with customers is an ideal that's not limited to any one market, community, industry or even country. The basics are the same, for the most part; they involves collecting data and applying it where appropriate to drive sales and customer loyalty. Understanding this come...

It had to happen sooner or later; the only question in my mind is why it has taken so long. It appears that the backlash against social media is beginning. All I can say is, yippee! With trends like social media -- or almost any trend -- we tend to over-imbue the idea or offering with our own expe...

The consequences of providing poor customer service are well known. What is less obvious perhaps is the importance of providing on-target customer experience as a means to boost profitability -- in other words, neither underdelivering nor overdelivering in order to secure optimal customer satisfacti...

Making better business decisions is all about understanding what's happening today and then properly applying that knowledge to improve what will likely happen tomorrow. Because business leaders want this improved power, we've recently seen a resurgence of interest and coverage in predictive analyti...

Digital signage is a combination of electronic display devices and content that delivers information, advertising and other messages to a broad or narrow target audience. The benefits of digital signage over traditional static signs are centered on two basic concepts: For one, digital signage conten...

Business software has long been described as "front office" and "back office," which essentially mirrors the arrangement of real-world processes within most businesses. That arrangement made sense in the past -- what went on within the business was usually shielded from the customer. That dichotomy ...

All is not well in venture capital land; at least, it's been a lot better. In April, the National Venture Capital Association, which works with PriceWaterhouseCoopers to develop industry data, reported its numbers for both fund-raising and investment, and it represents a world turned upside down. ...

It's the Holy Grail of contact centers -- creating a virtual agent that performs like that "real, live human being" that so many of us hope to reach when contacting a company. Unfortunately, the gap between automated agents and human ones remains a large one, with voice recognition and language proc...

Over the years, Salesforce.com has gradually transformed itself from being a CRM company to a cloud services provider. Along the way, it partnered with leading-edge Web 2.0 companies such as Google and Facebook, and most recently, it teamed up with virtualization giant VMware to offer VMforce, a new...

CloudApps, a carbon management software company, and FinancialForce.com, which makes accounting software built on Salesforce.com's Force.com platform, have announced a partnership integrating their two products. The CloudApps Carbon solution is designed to allow companies to perform end-to-end carbo...

Adoption is truly the CRM killer. If your employees won't use your CRM system, your investment is an utter waste. However, the way many organizations look at adoption doesn't help matters. All too many adoption failures are attributed to the users -- those darned stubborn employees who can't be both...

Last week was busy in a good way, and also in ways that we have not seen in a while -- and at least some of that busy-ness showed promise for the economy and our industry. In no particular order, Cloud9 Analytics announced it closed its C round financing, SAP held its user meeting in Orlando, Sage ...

A typical physician's office features several common elements: a reception area, a stack of outdated magazines, and shelves of slim file folders holding hundreds of paper medical records. The U.S. government is hoping to change one of those elements with a major initiative designed to convert all pa...

Smarter organizations today realize that attending to the quality of customer experience could just be the differentiator that they were on the lookout for. When Patricia Seybold introduced "Quality of Customer Experience," the entire world sat up and noticed. Why QCE? There area several reasons: QC...

Marketing data does yet not evolve the way individuals evolve. The inability for marketers to quickly adapt to rapid changes in how their customers behave is undermining the effectiveness of their communications. How, then, can what is learned about an individual be leveraged into a better experienc...