Customer Relationship Management; CRM

Re:Tooling

Functionality: Modeling and analytic functionality lets marketers map customer trends to increase conversion rates, registrations, or cost per click. Segmentation capabilities allow end users to filter test so they're focused on specific customer segments. Embedded best practices provide marketers with business processes to develop and deploy specific tests while automated allocation features allow personalized content to be distributed across multiple customer segments and channels.

Pint of View: The Bottom Ten

10. "Focus on sales and not on marketing. What good is requiring sales reps to enter their leads without integrating their systems with the marketing department's system?" I've said it before and I'll say it again: Even the most motivated salesperson is lazy when not on the hunt. Give your attention to marketing and ask the sellers why they can't convert leads, and watch 'em jump!

Insight

Super Crm for the Birds

Fans can register on the site Eagles "watch parties" to be chosen to win hats or T-shirts, and can share photos and opinions. Two teams involved in the recent run up to Super Bowl XLI were the Philadelphia Eagles and Baltimore Ravens, both of which have turned to Epic Cycle to personalize their Web sites. The vendor's content management software allows companies to manage Web-site content and digital media, and provides a data management framework for e-commerce and marketing. Fans can regist...

Vocal Ease

Relationship tracking and interaction monitoring are relatively structured approaches-systematically getting data around what customers are thinking-but the underpinning of continuous learning is to regularly listen to customers using less structured methods, according to [Bruce Temkin]. A CRM strategy that just grazes the surface of capturing the voice of the customer (VoC) has no chance of maximizing its potential. Forrester Research in Dec 2006 unveiled the report "Voice Of The Customer: F...

Material Living in a Virtual World

There are certainly drawbacks to consider before a company builds its own island. As with any online environment, the possibility for embarrassment through connection with unsavory content is real. Both [Alyssa LaRoche] and [Nikos Drakos] also cite technical issues in Second Life, and a faster, smarter site might in the near future eclipse this one in terms of popularity. Second Life is a virtual world where the names, places, and people are imaginary; the money, on the other hand, is real. L...

Adapting to Altered Buy Environments

The system includes the photo of the service manager who handles a specific vehicle, and colorful, prepaid postcard questionnaires that DiversiForm scans upon receipt to provide comprehensive feedback information to the dealership and service managers. Moore recognizes those with the top scores for their efforts. DiversiForm notifies dealers and service managers of dissatisfied customers within hours via email, fax, and/or phone. The automotive industry is battling changing consumer tastes --...

Statistically Speaking

* The contact center performance management market will grow by 27.5 percent in 2007 and 25 percent in 2008, according to DMG Consulting's "Contact Center Performance Management Market Report." DMG estimates that the number of CCPM implementations increased from 120 in December 2004 to 641 in September 2006. Adoption is low, though: The current adoption rate for CCPM apps is just 1.03 percent in North America, according to the report.

Destinationcrm Dashboard

IP Telephony and SMBs: A Question of Security Though the IP telephony quality issues that had concerned SMBs have largely been solved, more than half are still wary of IP telephony security issues, according to a new study by the Computing Technology Industry Association. The research on security concerns is contained in a study on a variety of telecommunications and data conversion issues.

The Price of Profiting

[Graham Foster]: There's an old quote that says "People matter more than things, and profit is a thing." In the end, if you upset the customer, you'll kill the stream of profitability. A perfect example is Wal-Mart. Most Americans don't know that Wal-Mart went broke in Germany last year and closed down because no German believes that anything cheap represents something of quality. America used to believe that. In an interview, Graham Foster, author of The Power of Positive Profit, talked abou...

Reality Check

Gethuman? Get Real

Many of gethuman's tactics are admirable and actually help consumers obtain the best level of service from the companies they deal with daily-the updated and expanded database of IVR tips now includes a grade of interaction quality, as well as the methods for reaching a live support agent for at least 500 companies. These methods range from the very simple ("Press 0" or "Don't press or say anything") to more complex methods that would be difficult to just stumble upon. In the past year consum...

The Tipping Point

Architectural Crm

We created an adaptation to consider both front and back positions using Michael Porter's cost, differentiated, and niche strategy model as a standard for back strategy. For instance, if the front strategy is geared toward creating an exclusive brand, extreme customer focus is required and a company must place emphasis on CRM investments to better identify and serve target customers. Keeping pace with changing customer needs is critical in this competitive growth economy to establish unique m...

Front Office

Tenacious Crm

Just two days after the national sales meeting the SFA vendor's project manager quit. The story's protagonist didn't know the SFA vendor was struggling financially and could no longer afford to pay the project manager's salary.

Customer Centricity

Community Activism

Three unique characteristics enable communities to provide valuable feedback to companies and to deliver innovative ideas: trust, freely revealed ideas, and authentic communication. Trust is provided by a secure, democratic online forum where between 300 and 500 customers get to know each other and the company well, and have the ability to initiate and respond to communication around the clock. Three strategies that address winning customers are product enhancement, product line extension, an...

Real Roi

Taking Out the Trash

Like a lot of companies we have acquired information over time, whether through corporate mergers and acquisitions, or by buying lists of prospective customers," says Steve Heindl, manager of business systems for Onyx Waste Services. "And each data source has information stored in different ways and formats." The problems ranged from simple to complex. Certain data sources had information for a customer's "city" routinely in the "address" field. As one of the leading waste and environmental s...

Molding Marketing Mindsets

Sybase had previously prepared design work so that the company was able to complete a full-scale, enterprisewide integration across its North American division in a mere three months in 2005, after which Sybase began its global implementation, which took six months (primarily due to language restraints). Sybase, as a provider of enterprise software for database management and data mobilization, found that its old legacy systems were not able to properly measure the company's ROI, nor could th...

System of an Up

Key capabilities of StreetSmart that RI uses include address book, application sharing, calendar, email, tile sharing, instant messaging, knowledge base, mailing lists, PDA sync, Web-site publishing and hosting, and workflow functionality, according to Siamak Farah, CEO of InfoStreet. The cost of RI's StreetSmart installation was $32,500 (costs for RI's alternatives to StreetSmart tallied $145,000), resulting in total first-year savings of $112,500. Relief International (RI) is a Los Angeles ...

Peace, Love, and Unity

How did you select Green Beacon? We found a consultant here that bought into our philosophy of doing plenty of background research about what CRM is and how best to go about implementing it. In other words, we're going to stop assuming we know what the hell we were doing. That's sometimes difficult to do. With our previous implementation, we made every single mistake possible with CRM, so this time, we wanted an expert to guide us. In an interview, Jon Inaba, director of sales at DirectNet, t...

Sponsored Content

Attaining True Market Leadership in a Customer-Driven Age

Oracle is the leading global CRM provider. We recently released Siebel 8.0-the most innovative, complete, and technologically advanced CRM solution available today. With this release we have delivered an entirely new paradigm for serving up work-tasks. Tasks are easy-to-create work sequences that allow teams throughout your organization to quickly change how work gets done. We've added business rules to make sure you can quickly change processes in real time.

Actuate

Next Generation Online Channel Reporting for Banking and Investment Firms

Several leading asset managers have been able to gain substantial improvements, thanks to Actuate. Deutsche Institutional Asset Management dramatically accelerated production of client portfolio reporting with no quality compromise, tailored and personalized reports, and greatly improved overall style and consistency across reports. "With the Actuate solution we will be able to incorporate [text and images] within the report far more swiftly, and so really accelerate the process.

X: Ten For Ten

Listen Up

Now we reach a tip that actually deals with how to sell. "Most salespeople immediately jump at the opportunity to finally tell the prospect about the products' features and benefits," says Warren Stokes, vice president of sales for Avidian Technologies. "Yet, a more effective response could well be, 'I am not sure that it is.' Then use this opportunity to find out what is really driving the prospect." This is a great opportunity to drill down and ask questions that can help... Sales is the so...

The Potent Mesh

This opportunity is best harnessed through careful measurement across all efforts to properly understand the impact of any activity your company creates or participates in on the Web. Starting any effort with a small-scale test helps ensure that a large-scale campaign will have a positive impact. Experimentation can be especially valuable for Web 2.0 efforts, as companies often view these campaigns as more risky. The flash-fire speed of Web-tech development and the embracing of online activit...

Intensive Care

A contact center's performance is defined by metrics and its WFM team. "Show management how well you are doing by setting goals and measuring your success in areas like forecasting accuracy, scheduling efficiency, agent occupancy, and cost per call, and then giving your team incentives to reach their goals," says Vicki Herrell, executive director of the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals. Workforce management (WFM) helps ensure that contact centers remain efficiently staffed at all t...

The Enlightened Enterprise

Whether it's Oracle with Project Fusion or SAP with NetWeaver, SOA comes in many different names and flavors, but its goal is always the same-to make a company's IT department more flexible to business processes and changing market conditions. "If vendors are serious about SOA, in theory it could make integration cheaper and easier," [Rob Bois] says. "SOA promises to give enterprises the IT flexibility they've always sought, and to make the consumption of best-of-breed solutions... As big bus...