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I have a friend who's a musician, author and former radio personality, and he likes Facebook. A lot. ...

The idea of taking CRM into the field has been around for a decade -- long enough to lull many people into ignoring it in favor of newer, flashier and more social ideas. ...

This story was originally published on March 3, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. ...

I've written several CRM Buyer Guides in the last four years, and the buying process I recommend hasn't really changed much. Unlike people who leap into the technology right at the outset, I always advocate a period of self-assessment for the company -- in other words, a thorough internal examination of how a business works and what the employees in the business do...

In long-distance navigation -- like in a boat or an airplane -- if you're going to make an error, it's better to make it later than to make it early on. A half-degree mistake can multiply itself into hundreds of miles over the course of a long voyage, but the same error made toward the end of the trip needs just a slight jog to set things right ...

"What's my motivation?" Sounds like a corny question an overwrought actor might pose to a director on the boards or in front of a camera. But we all have motivations -- and it's smart to understand your own and those of your vendor when it comes to CRM ...

My wife is a recruiter working in high technology. Recruiters are like every other profession: There are some bad ones, a bunch in the middle who are competent, and some who are truly excellent. I may be biased, but I think she falls into the latter category ...

I'll admit it -- I have a secret life. In addition to being a CRM reporter, I'm also a small businessman. A tiny businessman, in fact; my goofy, niche company grosses about US$5,000 a year. We make detail parts for scale model airplanes -- and while you can't get much more niche than that, you also can't find a better place to discover some CRM secrets that make a big difference...

Applications delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS) are great. They allow businesses to scale their operations, reduce up-front costs, relieve themselves of tasks like backups and software updates, and speed up deployment of applications ...

One of the great promises of the Social CRM revolution was -- at least in my mind -- the opportunity for quick, creative, smaller companies to develop the same sort of customer relationships that larger companies could afford to create. ...

As hard as it may be for CRM veterans to accept, there are still a great many businesses out there who don't have an application to track the customer and to feed data to sales, marketing and service. These businesses -- mostly small -- are not in the position to afford an employee designated as the CRM decision-maker or implementer; like the other activities in these businesses, customer relationship management is just one of a number of tasks being juggled by an all-too-small group of employees...

Around the time the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed and signed into law, I was a reporter covering that area of technology. Specifically, I was writing about service, measurement, data management and the software that made all that possible for telecommunications companies. ...

One of the goals often cited for implementing CRM is an improvement in customer loyalty. That sounds like a logical objective, and knowing more about your customers and the history of your interactions with them certainly helps you understand how to keep them coming back ...

As I've written before, social CRM best practices don't exist -- but only because in order to be most effective, each business needs to tailor its social CRM approach to its specific customers. However, that doesn't mean you're doomed to a long evaluation process and a tough spell of trial-and-error efforts that won't pay off for years. ...

One of the misconceptions that has bedeviled CRM has been the idea that it is simply a technology you buy and implement, thus solving your problems. Technology is a part of scaling your processes for managing customer relationships, to be sure, but in reality it's a link in a chain of decisions and activities that form your business' discipline around CRM. Any weak links will cause the whole chain to fail...

The emergence of the social customer is forcing businesses to think differently about how they reach the people to whom they sell, and much has been written about ways for businesses to cope with this. However, as is all too common in CRM discussions, the customer is often forgotten as we default to dwelling on processes and software that are decidedly business-centric in their nature...

This story was originally published on Oct. 28, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. ...

Wouldn't it be great if customers who had questions about your products could get the answer from other customers? Wouldn't it be wonderful if customers brainstormed on ways you could improve your service processes? Wouldn't it be tremendous if you could see trends in service needs and adjust your processes to meet them earlier and more effectively?...

McDonald's used to have a hamburger called the "McDLT." The peculiar selling point of this burger was that it was served in a two-compartment Styrofoam container that "kept the warm side warm and the cool side cool." The diner would then put the two halves together. ...

This week, I interviewed a small business owner who told me a very interesting story. He'd done some planning before implementing his CRM solution, and his new technology took rapid care of the problems he anticipated ...