crm posts, articles, and infographics

The Year of the Social Predator Has Arrived & The Social Mind

January 25, 2012 by Peter Auditore
with 185 views

The Year of the Social Predator Has Arrived [read more]

Are You Ready? Transforming Your Business for the Smarter Customer

November 8, 2011 by Brent Leary
with 86 views

Many businesses feel like they’re in an uphill race to keep up in our increasingly connected world. With social media sites and conversations multiplying like rabbits, and 24/7 access to learn about, shop for and buy stuff on mobile devices, the world of commerce is radically and irreversibly changing. [read more]

How a Social Care Strategy Can Increase Overall Brand Sentiment

September 30, 2011 by Jennifer Bach
with 304 views

As business continues to adopt social media into overall their communications, providing customer service through these networks is an emerging trend. “Social care” involves providing assistance to customers via platforms such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter. I’ve just finished pulling together a new benchmarking study of seven Fortune... [read more]

The Zen of Sales

August 19, 2011 by Todd Schnick
with 49 views

Photo: Courtesy of Todd Schnick

Technology is both a friend and foe. CRM systems can be helpful, but not all customers and not all situations, fit nicely into someone else’s system. Each individual is different, and require customized actions. Forcing customers and prospects into technology that doesn’t suit them is not a good thing. [read more]

Social CRM: A Customer-Oriented View on the State of Affairs

August 16, 2011 by Thomas Wieberneit
with 66 views

Image by Digitalart

I have spent the last week talking about CRM and SCRM to three retail companies. They cover different, although overlapping ranges and are of very different organizational maturity states. They are also on different positions on both, the CRM and SCRM scales. What they have in common are a desire to have a 360 degree on their customers... [read more]

Whether the Cloud?

July 25, 2011 by Global One
with 52 views

Photo: Kevin Dooley/Flickr (Creative Commons)

There are a few ways companies define “Cloud”, but most of the descriptions boil down to technology, more or less, run as one of three service models – Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and one of three deployment models – Public, Private, and Hybrid. [read more]

Relationships Don’t Get You The Order!

July 25, 2011 by Dave Brock
with 246 views

Before you misunderstand, relationships are very important in sales. If everything else is equal, I’d much prefer to have a deep relationship in any competitive sales situation. So I don’t want to diminish the importance of building and maintaining strong relationships. The issue, though, is everything else is never... [read more]

The Importance of Positive Customer Service Experiences

May 18, 2011 by Mitch Lieberman
with 2,803 views

Customer experience is made up of the sum of all interactions and touch points between the people, products and services a company provides and their customers. Customer service experience is a subset of the overall customer experience, with a slightly different focus. Specifically, a customer service experience is the sum of the... [read more]

Self-Service for the Social Customer?

May 16, 2011 by Hansen Lieu
with 468 views

However, my take-away from Maoz's observation is that it is still important for companies to offer a combination of touch points in the future. Organizations need to balance the level of service they deliver to the resources that they have while making a reasonable return for their investors. Self service offers organizations the ability to help customers solve their problems quickly and provides a high ROI. [read more]

Natural, Organic, Social - That's Where CRM is Going

April 12, 2011 by Leigh Dow
with 606 views

Organic CRM: Aggregating information and contacts to have a more natural open dialogue with your customers. [read more]

Mobility for Customer Service

April 5, 2011 by Hansen Lieu
with 593 views

You may wonder how mobility can help to deliver exceptional customer service. As it turns out, one of the low-hanging fruit scenarios for mobility is field service. [read more]

A Case for Social CRM

November 23, 2010 by Lauren Carlson
with 734 views

We have heard a lot about this "2.0" buzzword "Socia CRM," and it has even emerged as a recognized segment of the market. While the talk surrounding social CRM is informative, software buyers are more concerned with how they can actually use it to gain a competitive advantage and improve customer relations. So I put together a list of 5 real world examples that illustrate how these new social CRM technologies are helping organizations cut costs, while improving their front office operations. [read more]

And if the next CRM concept was "Customer Experience"?

October 28, 2010 by Laurent Blondeau
with 2,022 views

Don’t run to imagine your next product or service, maybe it already exists. And maybe the next big picture is about “experience”, more than delivering…While brands always search to surprise customers, dealing with trend and fashion, there’s probably much more important elsewhere…Not really elsewhere but in another register…sensation... [read more]

Egging on the Social CRM Battle

September 16, 2010 by Blake Landau
with 870 views

Every ten years disruptive technology comes along to change business. Henry Ford once said “if I’d asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses.” We are there again…and brands are clumsily hobbling along in horse powered buggies. And rather than battling over the definition of social CRM, we will have more success focusing on the business challenges caused by obsolete internal technologies and processes. Soon enough the horse and buggy will collapse. While Henry Ford was obviously not a fan of VOC (voice of the customer), in social CRM we desperately need to talk to customers. Every industry, and specific organization, has different challenges. We need to find out what those are on an ongoing basis. [read more]

Experience in High Gear: Theodore Kinni’s ‘New View of Consumers’

August 27, 2010 by Margot Heiligman
with 668 views

Theodore Kinni's piece in August 2010 strategy + business magazine examines Customer Experience from its academic roots and through to the thought leaders of today. [read more]

Three Things You Must Understand to Get Customer Service and Social Together

July 17, 2010 by Esteban Kolsky
with 5,116 views

Ah, the allure of Social Media.The rise of the Social Customer and the advent of Social Media has thrown a monster-sized monkey wrench into the operations of the organization. Slowly we have seen good examples emerge of adoption of Social Media by the different business units and stakeholders in the organization.Social sales has... [read more]

A CRM Lesson Learned, from a Gardener

May 14, 2010 by Mitch Lieberman
with 293 views

So, what exactly did I learn from my Gardener? (Gardener not Gartner) And, how in the world can I apply it to CRM, or further, a CRM implementation? In a nutshell, I learned that proper planning for application development, deployment and just many initiatives seems to be a lost art. This seems to ring especially true for Social Media... [read more]

Care for Customers: 5 Complacency Killers

May 9, 2010 by Todd Schnick
with 274 views

You don't need another damn blog post about… …focusing on the little things. …being remarkable. …making your customers say “wow!” Oh sure, I got inspired to write this post because of a “little thing that was a big deal” kinda thing at my local Starbucks. And true enough, it was... [read more]

Social: Moving from Head to Heart

May 9, 2010 by Rachel Happe
with 202 views

[This is a guest post by a Community Roundtable member, Michael Pace.] I know it's a foofy title or should be a Lifetime movie with Meredith Baxter Birney, so save the snark until the end. In November, I took a position at Constant Contact as their Director of Customer Support, focusing on “alternative” support channels... [read more]

Thank You Beyond Anything CRM

May 6, 2010 by Paul Greenberg
with 195 views

Every now and then, something strikes me rather deeply - deeply enough to emit an outright gasp of an unshaped, almost unrecognizable emotion. Some times it's flash of insight into a problem or idea I've been wrestling with for a long time. Sometimes it's a welling up of a feeling that leans in the direction of tears but because it's... [read more]