Search Results

If Winston Churchill had been a CRM pundit, he may have penned the immortal turn of phrase, "never in the course of human events have so many paid so much to have so few use an application." ...

Henry David Thoreau's quiet wisdom is best exemplified by sayings like, "in allthings, simplicity." That's a nice credo to live by -- but it may be a hard one to fullyembrace if you're trying to provide great customer service these days ...

When people are under stress, many respond with remarkable grace, courageand decisiveness. Then there are those who, under great stress, becomeparalyzed, flail about, or lash out in unproductive and unprovoked ways ...

If you mention a certain brand of lower-priced, assemble-it-yourself furniture ofScandinavian heritage, you stand a pretty good chance of getting a response thatdwells at some length on how hard it is to put it together. I've never felt that way-- in reality, I actually like putting stuff together. Thus, I am often summoned byfriends when they're flummoxed by an item of furniture that boasts an umlaut in itsname...

When people ask me what I write about, I say "CRM," but I could just as easily say Iwrite about adoption. Adoption failure is the arch-enemy of CRM, the great CRMinvestment-waster, the adversary to those who want to organize, rationalize andeconomize their customer data and how it's handled ...

CRM technology -- along with the way we use it -- is going through an interesting patch ofdevelopment right now. In part because mobile devices are now delivering on theirpotential, there's a renewed vigor around mobile CRM. At the same time, becausethe case for social media's permanent status as a critically important component ofhow we deal with customers, social CRM continues to gain attention and energy...

Travel always seems to elicit great customer service stories -- that is, great storiesfrom my perspective as a person who writes about CRM; not great as in "myexperience while traveling was wonderful, stress-free and restored my faith inhumanity." ...

This story was originally published on April 5, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. ...

About a year ago, I heard a great story on National Public Radio's "Marketplace" that illustrated the concepts of sunk costs and opportunity costs using baseball players as a sample group. ...

There's a lot of opportunity for CRM vendors seeking to reach small businesses.While there are 15 million seats of CRM in action today, there are a lot more than15 million customer-facing workers out there, and the vast majority of them are insmall businesses. ...

In a past life, I was a bosun's mate in the U.S. Navy. A bosun's mate's job is best described as "sailor stuff" -- running small boats, tying up and casting off in port, steering the ship, maintaining things, and lots and lots of painting ...

This story was originally published on Feb. 23, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. ...

I remember being an impatient kid when something I really wanted was on its way.The first time I was aware of my parents mail-ordering something for me (I thinkit was a baseball jersey I especially coveted) I can recall bombarding them with achorus of the phrase, "when is it going to get here?" ...

Customer service is a crucial part of the customer experience. That seems immediately obvious. And customer experience is the big buzzword right now, so companies are going bonkers revamping their customer service operations. Right? ...

There are three things certain in life. We all know the two cited by Benjamin Franklin, but there's a third certainty that we all face regularly and have to cope with constantly ...

I just wrote a note to a friend of mine thanking him for his participation at a conference I recently helped organize. It was a thank you note, and he's a CRM industry influencer; I won't divulge names, because it's not important to my point, nor do I want to seen like too much of a suck-up ...

CRM is not a small market. Nor is it a niche sequestered away in a corner of the larger CRM market. CRM is a US$13.045 billion industry in 2012, and it will grow to $16.694 billion in 2015, according to Gartner. No matter how you look at things, that's a lot of money ...

"You can't get there from here." ...

At last year's Dreamforce event, the word "koan" was used quite a bit, thanks to CEO Marc Benioff's Buddhist proclivities. The word means "a paradox that is to be meditated upon," typically used to train novice monks to abandon dependence on reason to achieve enlightenment. ...

"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made." ...