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8 Habits of Successful Customer Feedback Managers November 05, 2009 
Customer relationships are damaged when companies hear too late about customer concerns or issues to do anything to repair them. Even worse, many crucial concerns aren't being heard by the right people at an organization. For example, are managers aware of which customers are unhappy? Did an employee treat a customer unfairly? What are the specific factors that caused a customer to leave?
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Social CRM: Size Matters November 03, 2009 
There's no longer any debate about whether social media's going to have a huge impact on CRM. Social media's a little different than the usual emerging business technology, mostly because it didn't begin as a business technology. It started with consumers -- and how they use it varies dramatically.
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Judge: Customers in Ameritrade Class Action Deserve Better Deal October 27, 2009 
A federal judge has refused to approve a class-action settlement over contact information stolen from online brokerage TD Ameritrade. U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco says the deal offers little significant benefit to the more than 6 million current and former customers affected.
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Citi Dumps Credit Card Customers at the Pump October 23, 2009 
Shannon Burdette tried to pay with her Shell Mastercard after filling up her gas tank this weekend but found the card rejected. Confused, she called the Citibank customer service line and was told the account was closed because of something that appeared on her credit report. The only negative thing on her report, it turned out, was "closed at credit grantor's request" on the Shell MasterCard account.
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Debt Settlement Firm Penalized for Customer Fraud October 16, 2009 
An Arizona-based debt settlement company accused in a lawsuit of preying on people who can't pay their bills has been ordered to pay nearly US$200,000 in penalties for defrauding customers in New York state. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo launched a nationwide probe last spring into a "renegade industry" of debt settlement businesses.
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CRM + BPM: Raising the Customer Experience Bar October 16, 2009 
For decades, organizations have been dealing with the challenges of driving more effective customer service. Traditional CRM solutions have focused on presenting consolidated customer information, but they still rely heavily on employees to resolve customer issues. This means that the customer's experience can vary greatly depending on the manual processes and efficiency of the staff at any given organization.
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T-Mobile Offers Glimmer of Hope - or $100 Credit - in Data Loss Debacle October 13, 2009 
Service is now largely restored to Sidekick users, but T-Mobile is apparently still struggling to retrieve content and data lost due to a server malfunction over the weekend. At the same time, the carrier is piling on the mea culpas to its customers, many of whom are furious about the incident.
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Social Sites New Conduits for Customer Service October 13, 2009 
A Seattle woman tweets from an airport that JetBlue's birthday present to her was forgetting to put her wheelchair on her flight. Seven minutes later, an airline official tweets back that the crew will work quickly to make things right. On a Facebook page used by Delta Air Lines, a traveler suggests Delta wrap its WiFi fee into its ticket price rather than charge separately. The airline doesn't respond.
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Dell, Salesforce.com Join Forces in SMB Territory October 13, 2009 
Dell and Salesforce.com have added another tie that binds -- a service offering Salesforce.com's flagship CRM applications to Dell's SMB customers. Data integration and quality control are among the value-add features Dell is bringing to the table through its integration services division.
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IBM and Apple: Why We Love Monopolies and Then Kill Them October 12, 2009 
The age of the computer started in the 1950s, and one of the first things that happened to a then relatively tiny IBM was it got nailed by the Department of Justice. The result was competition and the modern age of computing. Last week, the DoJ opened another, very similar, investigation of IBM. It was -- you'd never guess -- on the mainframe.
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Bonobos Wants to Do for Pants What Zappos Does for Shoes October 10, 2009 
Brian Spaly's quest for the perfect pair of pants led him and former roommate Andy Dunn to start a Web-only clothing company that wants to sell men's trousers that fit -- without the need for fitting rooms. Business is good for their company, Bonobos, though it's too early to tell whether the startup can achieve the heights of another online apparel store with a remarkably similar beginning.
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Bookit.com Has Some Nifty Features Hiding Under the Clutter October 09, 2009 
Clutter, clutter, clutter -- will they never learn? Well into our survey of travel-planning Web sites, a common design theme continues to predominate: a crowded user interface that detracts from the supposed utilitarian purpose of the site. As I examined Bookit.com, though, a few features jumped out of the busy display, dispelling my initial less-than-dazzled impression.
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Redefining the Value of Cloud October 09, 2009 
One of the biggest challenges in today's rapidly evolving cloud computing market, if you're an aspiring vendor, is how to clearly differentiate your offerings in an increasingly competitive environment. This is especially difficult because of the Web's knack for sucking the value out of everything it touches.
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Employee-Customer-Employee: Closing the Feedback Loop October 09, 2009 
Organizations with the most loyal customers not only measure and monitor employee interactions with customers, but also share that feedback with employees. This creates a closed-feedback loop that allows customer-facing staff members to understand the impact of their interactions on customers, enabling them to improve those interactions over time.
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For Digital Marketing Startup Edo, Success Is in the Facecards September 23, 2009 
If you ask Edo Interactive CEO Ed Braswell the classic Facebook status update question -- "What are you doing?" -- he's liable to answer that he's providing a new spending avenue for consumers, along with a mother lode of digital marketing information for retailers.
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Taking Customer Loyalty to the Next Level September 18, 2009 
Today, loyalty programs come in all shapes and sizes, and they give retailers, financial institutions and hotels opportunities to reward their best customers like never before. There are many benefits to offering a loyalty program that is tailored to your customers. However, there can be risks, too.
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