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An increasing global customer base is driving companies to provide "follow-the-sun" customer support services. In order to enable this level of support, agents are now being located in any part of the world. The challenge is to merge technologies and provide seamless, accurate and real-time customer...

SugarCRM will be building out its global footprint and investing in its engineering bench now that it has completed its latest round of funding. The open source customer relationship management provider just secured a $20 million package, led by New Enterprise Associates, bringing its total funding ...

Amdocs has introduced a new lineup of service offerings designed to help its customers make the transition to marketing their own products and strategies in the digital medium. Amdocs began realigning its product portfolio in this direction last year, when it introduced the Customer Experience Syste...

It wasn't so long ago that the chief technology officer was sequestered in the IT department, cut off for all intents and purposes from the hub of enterprise power. It is different now, of course: The CTO position has grown in visibility over the last 10 years and become more closely tied to that of...

I got a statistic stuck in my head last week during a visit to a client in California. Sometimes you hear or see something so interesting for its oddity that it stays with you no matter what. For me, this was one of those times. There are actually two closely related bits of information, and both r...

There were approximately 40 million women among the 90 million people watching the Super Bowl on Sunday, and Pats fan Andrea Learned was one of them. The night was a letdown for Learned the sports fan -- but not for Learned the marketer and author. This year's Super Bowl ads are illustrative of a fo...

Database vendors, as well as human resources, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and specialist recruitment management systems developers are all working with organizations to improve their recruiting and personnel management capabilities -- and they're taking advantage o...

Most of us have been approached -- gingerly, aggressively, desultorily -- by a sales clerk in a retail store at one time or another as we made our way empty-handed out of the door. What one application -- UpSellit, a virtual chat e-marketing and e-commerce application -- has done is mimicked that la...

As social media become more embedded in our lives, tragedies like the Megan Meier case -- the Missouri teenager killed herself after a fictitious friend invented by the mother of a neighborhood girl left nasty messages on her MySpace profile -- may be the inevitable fallout. Corporate Web 2.0 usage...

The proliferation of marketing channels represents a key challenge for every CMO seeking to optimize return on marketing investments. Today, the marketing department is tasked with maximizing return across dozens of marketing channels. The use of multiple technologies results in silos of valuable in...

ATG is building out its personalization feature set with the $10 million acquisition of best-of-breed vendor CleverSet. It is the first acquisition the company has made since its $48.3 million eStara deal in 2006. CleverSet is an automated personalization engine delivered in Software as a Service mo...

It's long been a management axiom that the knowledge and abilities of employees are among the -- if not the -- most valuable of an organization's resources. While this is generally held to be true -- even in capital-intensive industries -- it is particularly valid for knowledge-intensive businesses....

I was speaking with a CRM vendor the other day about positioning and messaging for sales force automation. The vendor was telling me that the company wanted a back-to-basics message that would focus on the importance of SFA in helping salespeople recover some of the time they invest in unproductive ...

Optimizing the value of customer data and respecting customers' privacy are two immutable and opposing forces that companies always try to balance -- usually unsuccessfully. Few for-profit firms have proven themselves able to avoid challenging the privacy boundary when captivated by the lure of data...

Alltel has joined the ranks of service providers offering mobile CRM functionality to their business customers. The wireless company has introduced SalesNOW, a contact, activity and deal management Web app designed for the BlackBerry mobile device. Most of the application's features relate to contac...