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Crowdsourced App Helps Otis Lift E-Service to Another Level May 24, 2013 
Mobile CRM is well entrenched in the sales and marketing spaces -- perhaps too entrenched in some cases. However, the third tier of traditional CRM -- service -- has barely been breached by mobile technologies. Some headway has been made, but for the most part it has been in fits and starts. Only a few vendors offer e-service applications for the mobile environment.
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When Customers Get the Shaft, Companies Are the Biggest Losers May 23, 2013 
Do you ever wonder why some companies flourish and grow while others struggle? Why you love doing business with some but not others? It all has to do with how they interact with customers. Hilton Head Island in South Carolina has become my family's favorite vacation destination. There are two big brand name hotels there, and we've experienced a big difference in the way they treat customers.
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Integration Plus Intelligence Equals Multichannel Campaign Success May 23, 2013 
The personality inventory known as the "Myers-Briggs Type Indicator" is premised on the idea that different people process information in different ways. Some people are verbal processors. Others are visual processors. Some people respond more strongly to images -- others to text. The most effective way to learn is to map the different learning styles to each individual's characteristic strengths.
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Criticism: A Security Chief's Most Valuable Resource May 17, 2013 
This past week, a lesson about enterprise information security found its way to me via a somewhat unorthodox channel: specifically, an episode of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. In this particular episode, the upshot was that Ramsay wasn't able to help. Why not? The owners weren't able to take criticism. There's a lesson in this for those of us in the network and security space.
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Bloomberg Caught With Hands in the Customer Data Jar May 16, 2013 
Bloomberg has been embroiled in scandal since news broke last week that its reporters were using the company's corporate terminals to monitor its customers' activities. The story began to unravel when news surfaced that Goldman Sachs had confronted Bloomberg over the possibility that reporters were accessing its account data.
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CRM's Stairway to Stardom May 14, 2013 
Although the acronym "CRM" has been around for a long time, most people have no idea what it means. That's kind of a shame, because they brush up against the effects of CRM every day in their interactions with the businesses they patronize. As a result, when I say I write about CRM, I'm often asked to explain what it is. That leads me to think a lot about a practical definition of "CRM."
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Improving IT Ops Service Levels and Efficiency April 22, 2013 
New tools are available to help with service level management, but they require a new perspective on how IT infrastructure components should be managed. The key is to embrace a new ideal of managing every infrastructure component from the perspective of how it impacts end-user service levels. To do this, IT operations teams must understand the three laws of service-oriented IT operations management.
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Kana Adds Context, Subtracts Search April 16, 2013 
Kana Software on Tuesday debuted its next generation of Kana Enterprise, a multichannel customer service application with functionality for both the agent-based desktop and self-service. Its features include case management; Web self-service; mobile chat; co-browsing; social listening, analytics and community engagement; email, campaign and white mail management; and advanced knowledge management.
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United Sinks to Bottom of Customer Satisfaction Barrel April 09, 2013 
Airline travel experiences were relatively satisfactory for passengers in 2012, based on a number of metrics -- except for the most telling one of all: customer complaints. Those rose sharply, according to the Airline Quality Rankings Report, which examined 14 of the largest U.S. airlines and their performance. Overall, Virgin America claimed the highest customer satisfaction rank, while United Airlines scored the lowest.
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Salesforce Cranks Up Chatter for Social Intelligence April 05, 2013 
Salesforce.com has upgraded Salesforce Chatter with a new feature that collects and aggregates unstructured data -- or perhaps better put, social intelligence -- onto one page for easy reference. The feature is called Chatter Topics and Expertise, and it lets users find information and related resources and identify experts, based on topics of interest.
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Cook's Apology Part of China Brand Rehab April 02, 2013 
Apple CEO Tim Cook issued a public apology to customers in China this week following nationwide criticism over the way the company handles warranty and return policies in the country. For the past two weeks, several media outlets in China have run stories claiming that Apple's customer service policies, particularly in regards to the iPhone, leave much to be desired.
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Apple Apologizes to Chinese Customers Following Media Beatdown April 02, 2013 
Apple CEO Tim Cook apologized Monday to Chinese customers over the company's warranty policy, adding that he would improve customer service in China, which is now Apple's second-biggest market. The apology may be linked to a mid-March television special that aired on "Consumer Rights Day," claiming Apple's Chinese customers were treated worse than their Western counterparts.
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Finance Companies Bristle at Public Airing of Consumer Complaints April 02, 2013 
The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau announced last week that it has expanded the Consumer Complaint Database it launched last summer, increasing the number of complaints about credit card companies from 19,000 or so to 90,000. The added data comes from additional players such as mortgage companies, banks, private student loan providers and other consumer lenders.
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CallCopy Lets Managers See What Customers Are Saying April 01, 2013 
CallCopy recently unveiled cc: Discover 5.1, an upgrade to its flagship workforce optimization suite. Many of the changes incorporated in this version were made at the behest of customers who provided feedback at the company's first annual User Conference last fall, said Patrick Hall, CMO of CallCopy. Taken as a whole, the upgraded application "provides a simple solution to solving complicated problems."
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Walmart's Latest Bright Idea: Let Customers Do the Schlepping March 29, 2013 
Walmart reportedly wants to get the jump on e-tail competitors such as Amazon by widely offering same-day delivery for online purchases. Instead of contracting with a shipping provider, it would use one of its most plentiful and never-ending resources: the customers who stream into its 4,000 stores every day.
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Walmart Rattles Amazon's Locker March 27, 2013 
Walmart ratcheted up the e-competition a notch with the announcement Tuesday that it would soon begin offering a locker service similar to the one Amazon recently rolled out. There appear to be few differences between the two offerings: Both provide secure locations, available 24 hours, where consumers can pick up purchases they made online.
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Convergence Tales March 27, 2013 
For years Microsoft has been telling us that they have great new products in the pipeline that were competitive, and an approach that was social and customer-centric. For the last couple years, however, we had to watch the slow maturation of that vision. The last step has been getting new enterprise products into the hands of users.
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The Perils of Making Up Your Social Media Policy as You Go March 21, 2013 
Social media and its close relative, social CRM, allow you to connect with customers in new and meaningful ways, on a greater scale and at a greater velocity than ever before. When it's done right, that is. When it's done wrong, like anything in this era of increasingly automated communication, your mistakes are amplified and intensified by customers.
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KXEN's Predictive Offers Helps Agents Get Inside Customers' Heads March 18, 2013 
KXEN has launched Predictive Offers, a real-time next best action tool for customer service and call center agents, on Salesforce.com's AppExchange. The product's goal is to improve customer retention, boost upsell and cross-sell, and improve the overall customer experience by providing agents with the best recommendations for the customers they're speaking with in real time.
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Avaya's New CEM Platform Makes Everyone a Customer Agent March 11, 2013 
Avaya unveiled the latest iteration of its customer experience management platform last week, introducing new analytics functionality and a multichannel focus on communication. The new platform's big-picture mission is to foster holistic customer service -- an experience that will become a differentiator for that business, said Laura Bassett, director of product marketing for Avaya CEM and emerging applications.
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