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The Hidden Risks of Mobile CRM, Part 2 April 19, 2013 
Mobile marketing may just be in its infancy, but it already has ushered in a world of new risks -- or rather, existing risks that have been repackaged. They range from running afoul of still-developing regulations to security concerns, to consumers misinterpreting content. As people connect with the Internet through multiple access points, keeping a marketing message consistent is becoming more essential.
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Doubling Down on Data April 17, 2013 
About ten years ago, I wrote a paper that predicted that analytics and social media would converge in CRM. I believed that for two reasons. First, I believed social media was inevitable, though I had no idea what form it would take. Facebook was not on my radar and had not officially launched, MySpace was something for kids, and Twitter had definitely not been invented yet.
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Kana Adds Context, Subtracts Search April 16, 2013 
Kana Software on Tuesday debuted its next generation of Kana Enterprise, a multichannel customer service application with functionality for both the agent-based desktop and self-service. Its features include case management; Web self-service; mobile chat; co-browsing; social listening, analytics and community engagement; email, campaign and white mail management; and advanced knowledge management.
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Google Takes Another Step Toward Omniscience April 16, 2013 
Google has engaged the Behavio team in a "hiring exercise." The startup uses mobile sensors to collect data and predict behavior. Its technology recognizes data such as location, contacts, nearby destinations, recent phone activity, daily movement, and surrounding physical information. Data can be analyzed to let consumers know anything from whether their morning coffee stop is unusually crowded to which traffic routes are clear.
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The Hidden Risks of Mobile CRM, Part 1 April 12, 2013 
As mobile marketing evolves, so do its risks. The Federal Trade Commission last month released its updated "Dot Com" guidelines. An update long in coming -- the first since the report was released in 2000 -- the guidelines take special note of mobile. In short, they state that the same rules that apply to ads in newspapers, radio and television apply to mobile devices -- and social media too, for that matter.
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United Sinks to Bottom of Customer Satisfaction Barrel April 09, 2013 
Airline travel experiences were relatively satisfactory for passengers in 2012, based on a number of metrics -- except for the most telling one of all: customer complaints. Those rose sharply, according to the Airline Quality Rankings Report, which examined 14 of the largest U.S. airlines and their performance. Overall, Virgin America claimed the highest customer satisfaction rank, while United Airlines scored the lowest.
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Salesforce Cranks Up Chatter for Social Intelligence April 05, 2013 
Salesforce.com has upgraded Salesforce Chatter with a new feature that collects and aggregates unstructured data -- or perhaps better put, social intelligence -- onto one page for easy reference. The feature is called Chatter Topics and Expertise, and it lets users find information and related resources and identify experts, based on topics of interest.
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Cook's Apology Part of China Brand Rehab April 02, 2013 
Apple CEO Tim Cook issued a public apology to customers in China this week following nationwide criticism over the way the company handles warranty and return policies in the country. For the past two weeks, several media outlets in China have run stories claiming that Apple's customer service policies, particularly in regards to the iPhone, leave much to be desired.
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Apple Apologizes to Chinese Customers Following Media Beatdown April 02, 2013 
Apple CEO Tim Cook apologized Monday to Chinese customers over the company's warranty policy, adding that he would improve customer service in China, which is now Apple's second-biggest market. The apology may be linked to a mid-March television special that aired on "Consumer Rights Day," claiming Apple's Chinese customers were treated worse than their Western counterparts.
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Finance Companies Bristle at Public Airing of Consumer Complaints April 02, 2013 
The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau announced last week that it has expanded the Consumer Complaint Database it launched last summer, increasing the number of complaints about credit card companies from 19,000 or so to 90,000. The added data comes from additional players such as mortgage companies, banks, private student loan providers and other consumer lenders.
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CallCopy Lets Managers See What Customers Are Saying April 01, 2013 
CallCopy recently unveiled cc: Discover 5.1, an upgrade to its flagship workforce optimization suite. Many of the changes incorporated in this version were made at the behest of customers who provided feedback at the company's first annual User Conference last fall, said Patrick Hall, CMO of CallCopy. Taken as a whole, the upgraded application "provides a simple solution to solving complicated problems."
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Walmart's Latest Bright Idea: Let Customers Do the Schlepping March 29, 2013 
Walmart reportedly wants to get the jump on e-tail competitors such as Amazon by widely offering same-day delivery for online purchases. Instead of contracting with a shipping provider, it would use one of its most plentiful and never-ending resources: the customers who stream into its 4,000 stores every day.
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Don't Rebuild Those Silos! March 28, 2013 
It's hard to overstate the impact that the arrival of Software as a Service had on the CRM world. Spearheaded by Salesforce.com and picked up by almost every other vendor in the CRM space, SaaS made CRM available to virtually every business, and has paved the way for the continued health of the CRM space.
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Walmart Rattles Amazon's Locker March 27, 2013 
Walmart ratcheted up the e-competition a notch with the announcement Tuesday that it would soon begin offering a locker service similar to the one Amazon recently rolled out. There appear to be few differences between the two offerings: Both provide secure locations, available 24 hours, where consumers can pick up purchases they made online.
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Convergence Tales March 27, 2013 
For years Microsoft has been telling us that they have great new products in the pipeline that were competitive, and an approach that was social and customer-centric. For the last couple years, however, we had to watch the slow maturation of that vision. The last step has been getting new enterprise products into the hands of users.
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Travel Industry Grapples With Mobile App Challenges March 26, 2013 
Consumers give hotels, airlines and car rental companies high marks in customer satisfaction for the mobile experience they provide, according to the "ForeSee Mobile Satisfaction Index: Travel Edition." Online travel agencies, however -- not so much.
Specifically, of the measured travel categories, hotel mobile sites and apps had an average score of 78.
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The Perils of Making Up Your Social Media Policy as You Go March 21, 2013 
Social media and its close relative, social CRM, allow you to connect with customers in new and meaningful ways, on a greater scale and at a greater velocity than ever before. When it's done right, that is. When it's done wrong, like anything in this era of increasingly automated communication, your mistakes are amplified and intensified by customers.
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KXEN's Predictive Offers Helps Agents Get Inside Customers' Heads March 18, 2013 
KXEN has launched Predictive Offers, a real-time next best action tool for customer service and call center agents, on Salesforce.com's AppExchange. The product's goal is to improve customer retention, boost upsell and cross-sell, and improve the overall customer experience by providing agents with the best recommendations for the customers they're speaking with in real time.
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New IBM Lab Explores the Science of Personalization March 15, 2013 
IBM pushed deeper into the customer experience space with the launch on Thursday of its Customer Experience Lab. The lab brings together various elements of IBM's expertise, technology and staff to integrate mobile, social, cloud, Big Data and advanced analytics for its users.
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Subscriptions, Social and CRM March 13, 2013 
"Who is the customer?" It's a great question, one that my managers liked to ask when I was a young sales representative. Like all great questions, it got to the meat of the matter with an economy of words that were impressive as much for their brevity as for thir meaning. The customer's identity is often far from obvious, and it's why professional sales and marketing people obsess over it.
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