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At a recent gathering of customer-service professionals at the RightNow Technologies conference, one of the recurring themes was the value of a good customer experience. While this is not a new realisation, it is clear that there has been movement in terms of execution, with a clear focus on proactive engagement with customers resulting in positive business value.
OpinionWire Articles - published 14/12/2009 - Angela Eager
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Customer service CRM specialist Kana Software Inc is to be acquired by private equity firm Accel-KKR for approximately US$48.9 million. The proposal is currently at the definitive agreement stage. If it is concluded (it has the backing of the Kana board of directors so there is no reason to think otherwise), the company will be split into two. The current operating business, consisting of software, services, and licensing, will operate as a private company under the Kana name. The OTC Bulletin Board-list…
OpinionWire Articles - published 12/11/2009 - Angela Eager
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There is a lot of debate over the difference between traditional CRM (operational, internally-facing, transactional) and social CRM (outward facing, customer conversations, multi-way interactions) but this type of discussion is a distraction from the more meaningful issue of how to manage the intersection between the freeform aspects of social CRM with the formal transactions and processes (including business processes and sales methodologies) characteristic of traditional CRM.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 30/10/2009 - Angela Eager
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Salesforce.com has added to its stable of products with an entry-level, paid for, contact management application called Salesforce Contact Manager Edition. The cloud-based product provides a single location to gather all contact-related information together – the sort that would normally be spread across business cards and on spreadsheets – plus data such as contact history and related actions, and information on to-do lists. As items can be associated with a contact, collateral such as presentations can…
OpinionWire Articles - published 04/09/2009 - Angela Eager
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Microsoft now has one million users of its Dynamics CRM application. Getting the first million was no walkover, but a whole new proposition is needed to get to the next customer milestone, and that proposition is based upon moving beyond CRM and embracing the concept of xRM – Relationship Management of any type. This also means abstracting the classic sales, marketing, and service features from the CRM engine so that the engine can be used to run new types of relationship-centric applications, which in t…
OpinionWire Articles - published 20/08/2009 - Angela Eager
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KANA 10, the latest release of the company’s service-centric customer management system, is not just another feature and functionality upgrade. KANA took the brave decision to rearchitect its existing suite to embrace Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), not just in the interests of technical modernity, but as the means to address the ongoing problem in the customer service sector of fragmented systems, resulting in fragmented customer service experiences.
OpinionWire Articles - published 09/07/2009 - Angela Eager
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The Financial Times reported this week that the value of cancelled merger deals for this quarter is almost equal to that of deals actually completed. The announced Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) activity was down 27% this year compared with 2007, and the quarterly rate of withdrawn deals has hit a two-year high. This is bad news for many businesses that are looking to market consolidation for survival in these recessionary times. Indeed, some executives will be actively investing time and effort into mak…
OpinionWire Articles - published 05/12/2008 - Sarah Burnett
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RightNow Technologies takes the view that customer service lies at the heart of valuable customer relationships, so its on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution focuses on this aspect. Being consumer-centric rather than sales management-centric, it is designed to help organisations deliver improved customer experiences. A key design feature is the use of what can be described as operational artificial intelligence (AI) whereby AI algorithms are embedded into its knowledge foundation to p…
Technology Audits - published 25/11/2008 - Angela Eager
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Chordiant Software last week launched a new application to help organisations understand, manage, and improve their interaction with their customers. Chordiant Cx Visual Business Director allows senior business executives to use real business data, derived from customer interactions, to simulate the effect of changes in business strategies on business operations. Whilst aspects of the concept are not new, but similar to the executive information management tools of the 1990s, Chordiant has added new dime…
OpinionWire Articles - published 23/10/2008 - Angela Eager
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At its annual OpenWorld event last week Oracle put more flesh onto the social Customer Relationship Management (CRM) concept it has been developing, with new applications and insight into its thought processes. Although the new applications – Sales Campaign and Sales Library – look like they will be able to deliver value to sales personnel, what Oracle is really doing is trying to work out how to utilise the consumer Web and Web 2.0 type technologies in the enterprise CRM environment. It is not alone in …
OpinionWire Articles - published 03/10/2008 - Angela Eager
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Customer support experiences come in waves. You have none for months on end and then they all happen at once. It may not be convenient, but it provides a good opportunity to compare and contrast the levels of service organisations can provide to consumers. This comes at a time when the importance of customer service is increasingly being recognised, and will become ever more significant as the uncertain economic situation unfolds. A recent experience of mine was one of my own (or rather a friend’s) makin…
OpinionWire Articles - published 18/09/2008 - Angela Eager
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RightNow Technologies, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Customer Relationship Management (CRM) provider specialising in customer service and support, has released the latest update of its namesake suite. Regular updates are par for the course but what the company has done this time around is increase the level of interactivity, thereby expanding the options for Web 2.0-type interactions in a bid to improve the on-line customer service experience. Specifically, it has added a Customer Portal facility that…
OpinionWire Articles - published 05/09/2008 - Angela Eager
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NetSuite CRM+ is a broad-featured, integrated, hosted Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application covering the core areas of sales, marketing and customer support plus additional functions not usually found in a CRM system. It can be used stand-alone or in conjunction with the back-office oriented functions of NetSuite’s namesake suite. CRM+ also includes access to a hosted application development platform. Limited integration, poor suitability to task, and unintuitive interfaces have all played a…
Technology Audits - published 20/08/2008 - Angela Eager
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Unica Affinium 7 is an end-to-end marketing platform providing a central management and execution resource for all marketing functions and users. Automating and optimising the marketing function has been an uphill battle within most organisations, due to cultural resistance and a lack of suitable tools capable of dealing with the multiple types of activities and touch points that marketing requires with other applications and external parties. Marketing is under increasing pressure to become more efficie…
Technology Audits - published 18/07/2008 - Angela Eager
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www.MarketingGovernance.com, a site run by marketing vendors and practitioners to promote the concept of end-to-end marketing operations and management, cites growth levels for the marketing platform sector of 20% per year until 2013. That level of growth has proved a temptation to vendors and sure enough the Marketing Resource Management (MRM) sub-segment appears to be a hot market with the total number of players (which describe themselves as operating in this space) growing from 60 in 2006, to 80 in 2…
OpinionWire Articles - published 16/07/2008 - Angela Eager
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Last month the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) advised BT that it would not take action over an alleged breach of European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) following complaints of BT’s trial use of a third-party service in 2006, which monitored individual Internet users' browsing patterns in order to serve up targeted advertising, without the individuals’ consent. This month it emerged that the European Commission (EC) was thinking about taking the ICO to task over its deci…
OpinionWire Articles - published 19/06/2008 - Angela Eager
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There is no neutral mode in business. Organisations need to demonstrate growth or they risk being perceived as being in decline. In this environment, strategies for customer retention, loyalty, and maximising customer lifetime value gain priority, and when these goals are combined with the recognition that every interaction with a customer impacts their effectiveness, the result is a focus on managing the type and totality of the experience the customers have with the company.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 28/03/2008 - Angela Eager
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