By Bruce McCracken, Business Writer Small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are implementing or evaluating CRM in droves. With limited expertise, infrastructure, and budgets, business demands can exceed internal resources. Outsourcing to a hosted solution allows SMBs to deploy CRM and…
This is the second of a three-part series on how corporations are breaking up their internal technology monopolies. In part one, we talked about how many organizations are discovering, in most cases, their own IT monopolies are no match for…
Microsoft’s long-awaited customer relationship management (CRM) software is here. The software giant today announced the North American availability of Microsoft CRM through its Business Solutions division. According Microsoft, the software is aimed at midmarket organizations and is available as an…
Conventional wisdom says it’s easier (and less expensive) to keep a current customer than acquire a new one. Why, then, is it so difficult for current customers to get any help? Weak online support systems include terrible knowledge bases; painfully…
Looking to meet customer demand for an open-standards based customer relationship management (CRM) solution, E.piphany Inc. , a San Mateo, Calif.-based provider of CRM software, today announced that it has entered into agreements to integrate IBM’s WebSphere and BEA Systems’…
By Bruce McCracken, Business Writer Permission-based targeted e-mail is proving to not only be a viable marketing tool, but an essential one according to many recent studies and research reports. While increasingly effective, the volumes of e-mail being sent and…
For a period of nine or 10 days, America Online users were unable to post messages to the venerable USENET distributed discussion system, apparently due to a technical problem which prevented messages from propagating beyond AOL’s news servers. Other AOL…
CRM at the Speed of Light By Paul Greenberg 480pp. Berkeley, CA: McGraw-Hill. $29.99. What’s the simplest way to generate sales online? Make that one-time purchaser at your site a repeat customer. Repeat customers are a business’ bread-and-butter. And it’s…
In parts one and two, I shared reader feedback and recommendations on reporting tools, in response to a previous column. This week: more tools and more feedback. Let’s get started. Memetrics’s XOS XOS is a campaign optimization tool allowing users…
Once, not long ago, though strong technical skills didn’t necessarily guarantee employment, they clearly made a techie a highly marketable commodity. In the brave new world of declining IT budgets (in corporate communications jargon, “negative technology spending growth”), technical staffs…