Headline Feeds|
Customer Focus Is an All-Hands Exercise February 10, 2012 
Last week, after dropping off my Prius at the dealership for routine service -- as I've done regularly since I bought the car in 2007 -- I ambled over to the shuttle stop for a ride home. "Where you headed?" barked the driver, never raising his head from his newspaper. When I let him know where I was going, he immediately recognized me and his demeanor changed entirely.
|
Microsoft Dynamics Update Promises 'CRM Anywhere' February 06, 2012 
Microsoft has taken the wraps off of its forthcoming service update to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which will be released in Q2 2012. The service update will build on Microsoft's rollouts last year in such areas as social CRM and mobile. "We are on the path to deliver a significant new set of capabilities," said Craig Dewar, director of Microsoft Dynamics CRM's product management group.
|
|
Vendor Videos With a Spark of Personality February 01, 2012 
I take briefings from all sorts of vendors every day, from established companies with a new release to emerging companies with what they hope will be The Next Great Idea that the market will seize on. I am always happy to give my opinion and advice, and sometimes it's even taken. But I am usually reticent to write about most of them simply because it's not my job to provide free advertising.
|
Oracle Adds RightNow to Cloud Wars Arsenal January 30, 2012 
Oracle has closed on its $1.5 billion acquisition of RightNow, developer of a cloud-based customer self-service application. Oracle announced the deal in October 2011. For Oracle, the deal makes eminent sense: It fills in a missing gap in its cloud-based CRM functionality and gives it a broader base from which to compete against Salesforce.com.
|
|
No Rest for the E-tailer January 28, 2012 
Your online store did record sales this past holiday and you are a happy person at the start of the year. After a few days of rejoicing, it is time to get back to the grind and look at how you can move forward and take your online store to even greater heights. There are a few fallouts of the holiday season that you will need to manage, and then there are some initiatives that you should plan.
|
Customer Experience Problems: More Diagnoses Than Prescriptions January 18, 2012 
Customer experience is leading off the year as an idea that we need to pay more attention to. In the last week, two important publications have surfaced that highlight this importance. SAP gurus Reza Soudagar, Vinay Iyer and Volker Hildebrand collaborated on a new book, The Customer Experience Edge: Technology and Techniques for Delivering an Enduring, Profitable and Positive Experience to Your Customers.
|
|
Riding the Tumultuous Retail Waves January 12, 2012 
The retail space is changing. Twenty years ago we used to shop and buy in person at retail stores. Ten years ago, the Internet started a change Wave. We could buy online but were not ready yet. So we shopped online, but we still bought in person at stores. Now we have reversed this trend completely. Today we shop in retail stores to see and touch, but we buy online because prices are lower.
|
New Challenges in Store for Customer-Facing Gov Websites January 11, 2012 
Just how much information about the U.S. government is available on the Internet is anybody's guess. But U.S. citizens should be comfortable knowing that if they are persistent enough, they should find much of what they are looking for regarding the federal government online -- whether it's tax information from the Internal Revenue Service, benefits data from the Social Security Administration, or some obscure economic table.
|
|
CRM in 2012: Big Changes in the Wind January 09, 2012 
The CRM landscape is shifting gears -- and it looks as though 2012 will be the year that will see investments in technologies to cash in on a veritable explosion of social media, mobile and integration opportunities. The winners in 2012 will be those that can figure out new ways to distinguish themselves on the customer service front, said Ajay Kapoor, vice president of customer service for Avaya.
|
Oracle's Downward Spiral January 05, 2012 
Let's be frank: The main reason Oracle's latest quarterly revenues nosedived was backlash from users fed up with two years of price hikes on products, technical support, maintenance and licensing contracts -- and not because of a correction in the overall server hardware market. Yes, it's true that the latest quarterly financials of other high-technology bellwethers also disappointed.
|
|
Bad Employee Attitude in a Social CRM World: It's Payback Time January 05, 2012 
In our careers as consumers, we've all encountered employees from time to time who display a shocking lack of manners, aggressive ignorance of what their company sells, or a toxic attitude that suggests we're seen as an enemy rather than a customer. "How in the world did this person get this job?" we might ask as we hang up the phone or flee the store. "And how in the world is this person allowed to keep this job?"
|
The Role of CRM in Logistics Companies' IT Strategies, Part 3 December 19, 2011 
The logistics industry is facing challenges in adopting a sustainable and profitable CRM strategy, and there is inertia when it comes to replacing or augmenting disparate CRM solutions adopted by different business units, like retail, as well as various channels, like phone, Web, email, etc.
|
|
The Role of CRM in Logistics Companies' IT Strategies, Part 2 December 12, 2011 
The mainframe application forms the core of the system where the bulk of the order processing takes place. The traditional mainframe UI in, say, SCOBOL (Screen COBOL) is being augmented/replaced through the front-ending applications built in VB, ASP, .Net, etc. The front-end screens fetch the customer account and order data from the mainframe database through custom connectors built in Java J2EE.
|
The Role of CRM in Logistics Companies' IT Strategies, Part 1 December 05, 2011 
The logistics industry faces several challenges with the tremendous growth observed in the last two decades. Global manufacturers in industries such as automotive, IT and consumer goods have outsourced supply chain activities such as distribution and warehousing to third parties. The industry has begun to offer additional value-added services around processing of products.
|
|
Cultivating E-Commerce Trust Across the Globe December 03, 2011 
Online retailers considering selling their goods overseas need to know the expectations of consumers in the countries in which they want to do business. This is particularly important at the checkout -- with payment methods becoming an increasingly sensitive issue, consumer trust will help determine conversion rates. A consumer in Germany, for example, expects to see a retailer with a German address and prices posted in euros.
|
CFPB: Consumers Struggle to Understand Credit Card Policies December 02, 2011 
Operational for just barely four months, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has received some 5,000 complaints about credit card companies. The bureau issued an interim report on the nature of the complaints, ranging from objectionable advertising and marketing practices, application processing delays and high interest rates, to identity theft, privacy intrusions, and the unsolicited issuance of cards.
|
See More Articles in Customer Service Section >>
