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A new year! Blank screen! OK, let's talk! I think sustainability will be a big theme for me from this year onward. If your idea of sustainability is mostly about rain forest preservation and similar topics, I hope you will read on and think new. I have given a lot of thought to the concept and do...

Cyber Monday may be the most visible symbol of the increasing use of e-commerce technology in the retail sector. On just one day, Nov. 30, consumers operating from home or office computers in the U.S. spent $887 million on Internet purchases. The spending level amounted to a gain of 5 percent versus...

You might say that supply chain management has entered the philosophical realm. SCM investment has flatlined to a large extent, and the market's focus has changed as supply chain headaches become more complex and cut a broader swath. Although there is no one compelling trend in the SCM space, the in...

Making sure that every customer gets the personal touch may be fairly easy for the owner of a neighborhood bakery, but in a mass market of millions, making each customer feel like an individual is a formidable challenge. In the information age, tools like customer relationship management software ma...

Enterprises expend considerable effort to understand their customers and provide a superior experience and enhanced services to them, but still they see an enormous difference between their understanding of customers' requirements and their customers' actual expectations. This difference might be du...

Insurers constantly caution seniors that their Medicare Advantage perks such as hearing aids, dental payments and even gym memberships will fizzle if Democrats get their way and cut government subsidies for them. However, tens of billions of Medicare dollars funneled through insurers also pay for ex...

Small businesses frequently rely on a haphazard assortment of tools to manage their CRM processes, such as email, contact managers and spreadsheets. However, such methods are usually not sustainable or scalable. "Their customer data ends up fragmented across 10 different applications and physical lo...

In the past, businesses typically used lists of leads in a type of marketing strategy that Michael Port, author of "Book Yourself Solid," refers to as "interruption marketing." The goal was to get in front of a potential customer, book an appointment, and sell the product. However, that model is ch...