Articles by Kelly Shermach

Since the end of the U.S. presidential campaign, the issue of outsourcing has ceased to be daily fodder for television news outlets. But it remains an issue that many American corporations struggle with on a daily basis Aside from controversy surrounding the loss of American jobs, companies must decide what processes to outsource and which countri...

Companies allocate significant resources to customer satisfaction measurement and improvement Wayne Hoyer, chairman of the marketing department at University of Texas-Austin's McCombs School of Business, says satisfaction with product or service quality has a strong and positive impact on customers' willingness to pay. In fact, the longer customers...

In today's marketplace, the word "solution" appears beside the word "software" so frequently that we unconsciously stutter the pair of words rather than one or the other when talking about new purchases or shopping for something to aid our businesses This is marketing genius. Somewhere, the standard-issue salesperson who first married the two words...

On Monday, Oracle announced its US$5.85 billion acquisition of Siebel Systems, its largest competitor and tag-team vendor to many of its customers The acquisition came as no surprise to industry experts, although the timing of it preceded some experts' expectations. "We were actually a bit surprised Oracle did this deal as soon as it did," says AMR...

Today's organizations increasingly experience the creep from the general tracking of customer contacts and responses by CRM to the general tracking of marketing activities and their returns by the CFO Marketers have to look at the bigger picture, at their contribution to the entire enterprise, rather than just at the campaigns and messages they con...

According to the American Bankers Association, the average consumer has two accounts with any one bank. One is typically a checking account, and with the plethora of free checking options available today, that one hardly counts. It's not profitable Relationship banking is the carrot, not the stick, approach to growing profitability. Banks incent th...

As one of the primary functional prongs in CRM, the marketing department should use coordinated customer data to advance the sophistication, even the science, of its practices Eastman Kodak, Rochester, N.Y., drew customer awareness, perception, satisfaction and purchase information from decades of experience in the traditional photography products ...

Despite 2004 marketing budgets estimated at US$9.45 billion by the American Bankers Association, 93 percent of banks do not treat inbound consumer inquiries as sales opportunities. They spend money on marketing, but for what? Marketing's purpose is to sell more, to more people, more often, at higher profit margins. But what Datamonitor, New York, u...

Even when companies outsource some functions, they often keep control over far more than their core competencies. Unless outsourcing will deliver a cost savings with equal or better service quality, they keep it in-house "They say, 'We want a service level, a service assurance at a price, and if you don't hit that, we're going to penalize you,'" sa...

In the recent cases of customer data sales by bank employees, employers came face to face with their biggest security challenge: trusting their employees "It's pretty much the toughest security problem to deal with," says Rich Mogull, research vice president at Gartner, Phoenix....

In the economic clouds of recent years, marketers discovered a silver lining in multichannel marketing. Numerous reports and case studies showed that online marketing of big-ticket items such as automobiles improved offline purchases. Similarly, mail-order catalogs prodded many stay-at-home shoppers to shop online, their virtual carts jammed with clothing and home furnishings...

Phishing is one of the most significant threats to online consumers, and as the incidence of this type of fraud increases, so does the perpetrators' average take. Phishers who lucked out and lured several customers of a British bank into false communications recently made off with an average of 5,000 pounds sterling, or US$9,348, per phished account...

Phishing as a way of pilfering private consumer information has become a major security concern. What started as fraudulent e-mail requesting personal information has morphed into sophisticated phony eBay transactions and fake online bill-pay opportunities Consumer fears, combined with the sometimes-involved process of automating electronic bill ...

The theory goes that each side of the brain controls a distinct mode of thinking: holistic and synthesizing on the right and logical and sequential on the left. Many people believe that they lean to one side or the other in their approach to learning and doing Now help is on the way for right-brained thinkers who must make sense of CRM systems -- ...

ChoicePoint Inc., a seller of information about most households and their inhabitants, became an overnight household name last month The Alpharetta, Ga., company disclosed that criminals posing as legitimate business operators had acquired 145,000 consumer records in October 2004. This announcement was followed by a report that the company experien...

The demand for enterprise portals -- software that connects the applications at work inside a company -- will be strong for the next five years, according to "Two Technologies, One Direction: How CRM and Enterprise Portals Can Coexist," a recent report by IDC The report details the rapid adoption of enterprise portals such as SAP's NetWeaver. Desp...

Vendors of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) services have made big promises to corporate America and consumers about the cost savings to come from VoIP. The possibilities of VoIP savings have stirred excitement even among jaded CFOs But the adoption of a technology that accommodates data and telecommunications streams, converting both to bits...

Interactive marketing has come a long way. In 2005 it will appear more often not only on the big screen -- the computer screen, that is -- but on the little screen of the mobile phone as well. With a cell phone the constant companion to more than 170 million Americans, there's a lot of potential A marketing phenomenon that already has achieved grea...

Since the end of the U.S. presidential campaign, the issue of outsourcing has ceased to be daily fodder for television news outlets. But it remains an issue that many American corporations struggle with on a daily basis Aside from controversy surrounding the loss of American jobs, companies must decide what processes to outsource and which countri...

Prior to Oracle's announcement of its PeopleSoft integration road map, there were rumors that it would shed J.D. Edwards & Co., a business purchased by PeopleSoft in 2003 The unit, considered a poor fit for Oracle because its software products focus on IBM technology, became a hot topic of conversation for industry watchers no longer able to dish a...