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Service is becoming perhaps the most important leg of CRM. It's not just me saying it -- it's many others, including Paul Greenberg, who literally wrote the book on CRM. With the economy in the state it's in, that makes sense; keeping the customers you already have has never been more important. However, service has some internal cultural hurdles to clear before it gets the respect it deserves. Luckily, technology and the customer landscape are both shifting in ways that will allow more companies to realize the value of service and give it the priority it has long deserved...

There's an adage in the CRM industry that every successful CRM implementation is customized in some way. That may not be as much of an absolute as it once was, with SaaS allowing smaller businesses to handle the basics of sales and marketing with what's already in their CRM solutions. But, in order to gain a true competitive advantage from CRM, your business needs to find ways to use it differently than your competitors do...

Had a meteor hit the Dulles Westin outside of Washington, D.C., two weeks ago, it would have set social CRM back 10 years. That meteor, in addition to melting a lot of snow, would have vaporized in a trice the vast majority of the world's serious thinkers on the topic of social CRM, gathered there for the BPT Partners' Social CRM Strategies for Business Seminar...

Although service is gaining in importance as the economy is forcing customer retention to the fore, sales has long been the dominant leg of the CRM stool. Many CRM efforts were spearheaded by sales, and in many organizations, the SFA functions of CRM software remain the only features that actually get used ...

Businesses all over the world have made enormous investments in service -- both in people and in technology. The amount of thought dedicated to service is enormous, and the time spent trying to make service divisions more efficient is countless ...

CRM systems are on a steep evolutionary slope, but marketing automation is evolving even more rapidly, spurred by a rash of innovative thinking and the SaaS delivery model. With the technology offering so much potential, integrating a crackerjack CRM system and an effective marketing automation solution seems like a surefire way to boost sales numbers...

As anyone familiar with CRM knows, adoption is the key to whether you live or die by your CRM solution. You can make detailed plans, do arduous research, negotiate great deals, execute a deployment plan flawlessly -- and then see it all go for naught when your users fail to use the system. ...

Earlier in my career, I covered the telecommunications industry. Nothing better prepared me for a career examining CRM than the sight of enormous corporations with immense customer bases failing to build any kind of relationship with their users and instead resorting to price as their major differentiator. ...

Let's say you're a CRM vendor. Your constant mission is to provide users with what they need, and your biggest fear is that your competitors will be better at that than you are. ...

Those of us immersed in CRM take it for granted that people understand what the acronym stands for and what it really means -- the technology, people and processes that go into building stronger relationships with customers, or customer relationship management. Quite naturally, the people who sell, support and comment on CRM understand all of that. But do the intended users?...

With the proliferation of smartphones and similar handheld devices, it only makes sense that data -- especially customer data -- is following these devices into the field. The scenarios in which sales and field service people can use the data collected by CRM are many and, in a lot of cases, obvious. However, there are also many ways for CRM to go into the field, and it's crucial to match the needs of your workers with the IT and security priorities of your company...

There's no longer any debate about whether social media's going to have a huge impact on CRM. The questions now hew to two distinct tracks: ...