Vendors

Activist investors frequently, but not always, strip a company of its equity, load it with debt, and cast it off, a quivering hulk of a once dynamic company. It's too early to say this fate awaits Salesforce, and it's important to see the process work out because there is some truth in the need for ...

The Handwrytten app is part of an automated CRM tool that lets businesses — and individuals with an entrepreneurial passion — integrate computerized automation with personalized handwritten notes to customers. The result is a novel approach to updating one of marketing’s best-known strategies ...

Zoho Marketing Plus is an attempt to bring things back into focus so that SMBs can do the same things in marketing that larger companies do with more labor. You might call this the second democratization of information

The ongoing tech real estate boom shows vendors planting their flags in smaller cities where home prices are more affordable, and commuting is less a gladiatorial sport. Studies suggest that much of the higher salaries people command in big cities gets eaten up in housing costs, so moving to smaller...

Salesforce held its Dreamforce NYC on schedule in early December, which you might have missed because of other news like Omicron and the looming chaos of the holidays. What was so interesting was how un-CRM-like it was

The Freshstack product suite combines Freshworks' products to unify startups' customer support, sales, and marketing teams in an easier-to-use package. The new scalable CRM bundle helps startups personalize marketing to generate pipelines, deliver omnichannel service, and grow faster at a price poi...

A new Forrester survey commissioned by Capgemini, Salesforce, and MuleSoft reveals companies face the same recurring customer experience (CX) struggles. They lack an integrated single source of truth for customer data and are strapped with subpar personalization capabilities

Surround strategy is the antithesis of rip and replace. Rather than replacement, a business can move parts of its workload from some workhorse system, say ERP, to Zoho -- where things like pre-built reports and Zia, an AI-based digital assistant, can help business users interrogate data stored on th...

This is not good. A new report commissioned by Replicant tells a story of customers frustrated when service fails or is way too slow. That's not new -- and Replicant is not the only vendor to ring the alarm. For many years Oracle has reminded vendors that one bad service encounter is enough to make ...

When a complex need arises, customers expect to be connected to a well-prepared agent who can quickly resolve the situation. That fix must be applied in a way that leaves both the customer and agent feeling great about the outcome. Fortunately, the technologies now exist that allow contact centers t...

Dreamforce happens this week, emanating from San Francisco and reaching out to the world via the global cloud computing network Salesforce helped to create. With that, this may be the last time to say with all sincerity that Salesforce is a CRM company. Truth be told, the transition has been ongoing...

If you follow a market long enough and if it's a successful marketplace, you notice that some of the companies in it go through a succession of moves; first in new products and then in finance. The confusion comes when a company like Oracle lives through multiple up and down cycles. When you look at...

With the recent completion of the Slack acquisition, Salesforce can look forward to improving the quality of the customer-facing business processes that it supports with more and better collaboration. However, the presence of Slack may now highlight the reality that while vendors operate at the spee...

First, cloud-based CRM democratized business information, then it erased the distance between customers and vendors. Now it is poised to expand into other areas with similar democratizing opportunities. I am speaking about how we work -- at least those of us in the knowledge economy -- but there's a...