Uncategorized

Companies have long recognized the importance of customer data in the context of revenue growth and cost reduction. Today, more companies are also waking up to the value of customer data in the context of direct mail waste reduction, which is fast becoming not only an environmental imperative but al...

Retailers in Japan and South Korea have been using image capture technology for several years now, and with the growing base of smartphones, companies in the U.S. are rolling out a wide range of new mobile applications, including some that use interactive digital symbols captured in photos to provid...

Avaya has introduced Intelligence Presence, a new software application that gives users -- both in corporate environments and call centers -- the ability to view so-called presence information across multiple sources. For example, it would allow a contact center rep engaged with a caller to see if a...

Microsoft's annual lollapalooza of a conference, Convergence, has come and gone, but the blogs it triggered live on. The team behind Microsoft CRM Live -- the on-demand application scheduled to be released later this summer -- has been particularly prolific, with "how-to" posts on the company's late...

The front office meets the back office at the Web 2.0 enterprise portal. The enterprise 2.0 portal is a single accessible location intended to consolidate resources and serve up data from systems throughout an organization so that each "touch" a company has with its customers, prospects, partners an...

Microsoft is on schedule to release Dynamics CRM Live this summer, CEO Steve Ballmer assured the crowd at the Convergence 2008 keynote address. The application's features and functions are, for the most part, familiar to users and partners. They are largely the same as the Dynamics CRM 4.0 applicati...

To say the Federal Communications Commission isn't responsive enough to citizen complaints about telemarketers or TV programs likely would be an understatement of monumental proportions, if a new study from the U.S. Government Accountability Office is accurate. On Thursday, the GAO issued a report t...

Like their peers in the private sector, government agencies are under pressure to deliver services around the clock and in digital form. "Customers increasingly prefer to serve themselves whenever and by whatever means they wish," Gina Pearson, director of the National Energy Information Center, U.S

With the launch of On Demand, version 15, Oracle is introducing robust new Web 2.0 functionality -- and it's sending a strong signal that more of this type of application development is on the horizon. Oracle's message is that Web 2.0 is now part of the CRM family, Beagle Research founder Denis Pomb...

Bloggers -- especially those whose traffic volumes can rival a minor newspaper's -- are getting used to the royal treatment. Consumer electronic vendors, hotels, auto manufacturers -- heck, even politicians -- are reaching out to the people who have made it their avocation to blog about them. Every...

There are those partnerships where the companies swap logos and do joint press releases and that's about it, and then there are partnerships where true integration happens. This latter type of partnership is starting to emerge between Salesforce.com and Google, and that's a very good thing for the C...

Contact consolidation is not for the lighthearted. For years, contact center management has been attempting to control costs by reducing the number of agents, physical sites and consolidating software and hardware solutions. Often these attempts are in conflict with customer and corporate demands.

RFID has gained ascendancy in the corporate world more by fiat than through efforts to persuade suppliers that the technology could deliver internal returns -- at least, in the beginning. With the requirement to deploy it or lose contracts handed down by such entities as Wal-Mart and the Department ...

The fact that we pay the taxes that support the costs of government ought to make us the customers of the government, right? That seems logical, but often taxpayers and constituents are treated more like an annoyance than a valued customer. However, some government agencies are starting to see the l...

PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and a host of others succumbed to the pull of its tractor beam. Could Salesforce.com be next on Oracle's list? Though this rumor has been around for several years as idle speculation, in the last several months it's taken on new life. The tenor of the gossip has change...