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One of the greatest challenges to the successful implementation of a CRM solution is winning employee participation and cooperation. "It's a quandary," said Craig Klein, president and CEO of SalesNexus. If the sales staff is reluctant to use the new system, it will be very difficult to get it off th...

Contact center managers have started to think beyond "service levels," "average talk time" and "wait time." Slowly yet steadily, FCR has found its way into customer operations dashboards. A dual function of customer experience and contact center efficiency, FCR accurately portrays the overall health...

Excellent online customer service may be worth $17.3 billion in 2010, according to a new Ovum survey commissioned by StellaService. That's the round figure for the 10.7 percent premium the report suggests customers are willing to pay for good customer service. The survey was conducted across multipl...

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." If you haven't heard that one multiple times, you aren't really in business. It's a truism -- and part of being a truism is that it's true, for the most part. When a new business strategy emerges, it can temporarily topple truisms -- but soon, they're ...

I recently read Tribes by Seth Godin and I think it might hold some clues to the future of CRM. Godin is a business blogger and author of more than a dozen books with titles like Permission Marketing and Purple Cow. He's not about the status quo, he's all over change and leadership like a junkyard...

Business process management vendor Pegasystems will be acquiring CRM company Chordiant for $161.5 million, or $5 per share. While the deal will clearly provide synergies to both companies, it is also a function of the general consolidation in the CRM and BPM space, Nucleus Research Vice President Re...

A successful CRM implementation starts with good preparation. It is a good idea to document the goals and objectives of the small business first and test the system with the users, Sheryl Kingstone, director of the enterprise research group at Yankee Group, told CRM Buyer. "Be proactive," she advise...

Throughout the economic downtown, business managers heard virtually every cost-cutting measure, from furlough days to reducing IT investment. As we see shoots of recovery, we are reminded that no company can cost-cut its way to excellence; without some focus on the customer, eventually service start...

Few marketers would argue against the importance of relevant, timely, personalized marketing communications. In fact, research has consistently proven the value of personalizing marketing messages by segmentation, targeting, or one-to-one messaging. Personalized email campaigns generate two to thr...

Service is becoming perhaps the most important leg of CRM. It's not just me saying it -- it's many others, including Paul Greenberg, who literally wrote the book on CRM. With the economy in the state it's in, that makes sense; keeping the customers you already have has never been more important. How...

I wasn't sure what the reaction would be to last week's column on customer experience. Maybe I hang around with vendors and other analysts too much, because customer experience is a hot topic among, us and it's generally seen as a good thing. However, judging by last week's mail and some further d...

When it comes to implementing a new CRM system, small companies have several options. If they have enough resources and experience to devote to the task, they can implement the system themselves. If they choose not to go that route, a third party can be brought in to help them implement it, Craig Kl...

Users of apps from BIRT, the open source Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools project, will be able to access them on the iPhone starting Monday. Actuate, which founded the BIRT project and coleads it with the Eclipse Foundation, is putting its BIRT Mobile Viewer on the App Store. This viewer, ...

There's an adage in the CRM industry that every successful CRM implementation is customized in some way. That may not be as much of an absolute as it once was. But, in order to gain a true competitive advantage from CRM, your business needs to find ways to use it differently than your competitors do...

Software AG has developed a vertical social networking and collaboration platform that for the BPM industry. Now in open beta, ARISalign is built on Amazon's Web Services and equipped with modeling capabilities, as well as virtual versions of tools typically used by process experts, said Matt Durham...