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By now, common sense, the business media and practical experience have taught the lessons of multi-channel engagement for service. Businesses have come to realize that they need to provide service in whatever way their customers wish to receive it, whether it's through the phone, via chat or text, over email or through social media ...

This story was originally published on Oct. 4, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series ...

The social media era doesn't mean that more people can communicate than in the past. It means that more customers can communicate faster than ever before -- and customers always communicate more and faster when they're angry ...

As I've said in the past, CRM's biggest benefit is in extending your customers'relationship with you for as long as you can. New customers are great, but returningcustomers are profitable -- and profit is what you're really after, right? ...

They don't call it the Christmas rush for nothing. December weekends see masses of customers crowding stores to buy gifts, and at peak times the salespeople can appear overwhelmed. Their objective is to check out as many customers as quickly as possible -- ring 'em up, bag their stuff and move to the next customer. It's a numbers game -- the faster you can move the customers out, the happier everyone is in the end...

As a callow youth, I enlisted in the Navy and found myself at sea aboard the USS Gray as a bosun's mate. That meant standing a lot of watch on the bridge, and being on the bridge meant knowing how to report positions of other things based on a 360-degree arc. ...

I love CRM as a discipline, but I have no illusions about its ability to survive in the cruel world. The reality is that customer relationships are fragile things; they need the right environment to flourish and be profitable. ...

Disasters -- be they man-made or natural, like Hurricane Sandy -- showcase the best in people. Neighbor helps neighbor like never before, people share what they have, and assistance comes from unexpected places. ...

This story was originally published on Aug. 3, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series ...

I'm a gigantic San Francisco Giants fan -- so, two World Series Championships in three years has been something of a dream come true. But when I was a kid, my family was devoted to the Oakland A's -- as they won three consecutive championships from 1972-1974. ...

"It is a good thing to follow the first rule of holes: If you are in one, stop digging." It was only 1988 when this nugget of wisdom was first recorded, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs ...

It used to be that your business could provide a basic level of service and yourcustomers would be perfectly happy. Some form of help, delivered at the speed ofthe business and within the parameters of your company's policies, was usuallyOK -- and if it wasn't, you could probably get away with it. I mean, who would hearabout it, right? ...

As a technology journalist, I interact with public relations professionals regularly,to the point where some firms have asked me to speak internally about whatjournalists are looking for from the companies they cover ...

One of the tricky parts of developing a social CRM (SCRM) strategy is that it requires left brain and right brain thinking. The left brain, where more logical and procedural thinking takes place, is comparable to how "traditional" CRM operates, organizing and distributing data based on predetermined processes. The right brain, the center of creative thinking, is comparable to SCRM, discovering new relationships and communication models and engaging and conversing with customers...

About five years ago, CRM analyst and author Paul Greenberg set out to develop a definition for social CRM, or CRM 2.0, as some called it at the time. Through his impetus, some crowdsourcing, some crowd-editing and ultimately, I suspect, a degree of fatigue, he arrived at a definition. ...

The CRM industry is used to getting a jolt every year from Dreamforce,Salesforce.com's annual mega-event. Each year, the number of attendees swells --this year, it's more than 70,000 -- and that makes CEO Marc Benioff's bacchanal theepicenter of the CRM industry for a week ...

Back in my college days, I worked part-time for an insurance agent. It was an eye-opening job, and not just because it pointed out how many strange and silly ways people could get into car accidents (loose birthday balloons obstructing the driver's vision, concrete poured off an overpass into a brand-new convertible BMW, a catastrophic collision between a Saturn and some Canadian geese, etc.).

CRM is not itself a technology -- it's a discipline enabled by a technology. Butthe ideas are so completely enmeshed with technology today that it's almostimpossible to talk CRM without lapsing into jargon ...

This story was originally published on Jun. 7, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series ...

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, wrote George Santayana, and if you've covered technology as long as I have, you know that the cycles of repetition become shorter with each passing year. When it comes to CRM, we're seeing it again in the form of social CRM: companies are making the same mistakes they made at the start of the CRM era...