A Company’s website is not often looked at when implementing a CRM solution or CRM processes, but it represents a major facet of the relationship that a company has with its customers.  The website is the public face of every company, and represents a major entry point to customer communications and relationships.  Yet the corporate [...]

Social CRM is all of the buzz right now, but an equal opportunity for CRM lies in the merging of two recent technology trends, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) and cloud computing.  While numerous success stories exist for both SOA and cloud computing, no one has taken the concepts and realized them to their fullest potential in [...]

This is part 4 of the series “Targeting The Customer“, a 5-part series on using marketing automation to target customers and improve marketing effectiveness.
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we discussed the role and methods of profiling customers and prospects.  In part 3, we discussed how to utilize profile data to send [...]

This is part 3 of the series “Targeting The Customer“, a 5-part series on using marketing automation to target customers and improve marketing effectiveness.
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we discussed the role and methods of profiling customers and prospects.  Yet obtaining valuable data about the interests and habits of a customer [...]

This is part 2 of the series “Targeting The Customer“, a 5-part series on using marketing automation to target customers and improve marketing effectiveness.
In the first post of this series, we discussed the importance of profiling and it’s purpose in gathering information regarding customer behavior and preference, and utilizing that data to target the customer [...]

This is part 1 of the series “Targeting The Customer“, a 5-part series on using marketing automation to target customers and improve marketing effectiveness.

Sending off blind email blasts without regard to the end recipient is like a sales rep using the same sales pitch for a product, regardless of the customer’s specific needs.  While email [...]

As I’ve stated previously, Marketing Automation has become the forgotten child of CRM.  It’s features are underdeveloped, it is always an “afterthought” in CRM implementations, and has often been relegated to simple email marketing off of the CRM’s sales leads or contact management databases.  As important as email marketing is, in most CRM systems its [...]

All too often, when doing a CRM implementation, my customers will request dozens and dozens of email notifications from the system, for every event from a new lead being assigned to a scheduled activity being due, to a note being updated on an account.  I once had a sales manager request an email notification every [...]

A few years ago, one of the biggest hot-button items for sales force automation that rarely produced satisfactory results was offline synch.  The process of creating synchronization modules, coupled with data consistency issues and the dependency of the reps to initiate the synch (some offerings had automatic sync, but that brought its own set of [...]

Late last week, I called into a customer service department that had your standard “please hold” IVR.  It had no options telling me how long the queue was, and, as typical, had the most generic and annoying hold music.  After about 20 minutes, I gave up, and hung up the phone in disgust.  It is [...]

This past weekend, an event occured in our world’s history that has shaken up the way we look at news and the way we look at the world.  A little more than a week ago, elections were held in the nation of Iran, and the results were considered by many to be suspect.  People in [...]

One Challenge of CRM (and of any business application) is the distributed nature of data.  Data is one of a companies most valuable assets, yet it often exists in application silos throughout a companies IT environment, often leading to data duplication and inconsistency.   Over the years, many tools have been created for the [...]

The modern call center has evolved from a simple answer-and-respond environment to a complex, multi-channel environment for servicing customers.  This revolution started with the advent of CRM and the Internet a decade ago, with the introduction of email and web portals.  Customer support has gone digital to the point that many “call centers” have gone [...]