Crm News & Articles

Twitter is purchasing RestEngine, a provider of technology that enables social app publishers to send individually targeted emails to subscribers based on their usage history. Befitting an action performed by a company specializing in 140-character blurbs, neither Twitter nor RestEngine appears to have released any detailed information about the purchase or future plans, but that has not stopped widespread online speculation about the deal.

Gartner has recently released a whole bunch of  "Cool" Vendors reports that look at all aspects of the IT industry. One of the more useful ones of the bunch, given the importance of both social media and customer relationship management, looks at Cool Vendors in the Social CRM space.

Social customer experience solutions provider Lithium Technologies is targeting companies that feel overwhelmed by exponential volumes of social media chatter with its new release. Called Lithium Response, the application is designed to allow brands to monitor and engage in relevant social media conversations without having to employ a small army of social media agents.

Earlier in the week, we took a look at Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Customer Service Contact Centers and found that business applications for the customer service and support (CSS) were obsolete in many cases. Today we will take a look at the companies that made it into the Leaders Quadrant.

Yesterday, in the first part of our look at Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Customer Service Contact vendors, we saw many are struggling to understand Social CRM. Among the vendors that were pushing it forward was Oracle, with products like WebCenter, for which it has released the lastest version of WebCenter Sites.

The release this week of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers, which ties in with this month's theme at CMSWire of mobile CRM. In this report, though, Gartner finds a market that is conflicted and fragmented, developing slowly and where business applications for the customer service and support (CSS) function are largely obsolete.

Brands that regard their websites as a primary revenue source have three very distinct priorities: give customers an optimal experience, create loyalty and convert potentially passive browsers into active buyers.

Here at SugarCon in San Francisco, there are four watchwords I’m hearing from the speakers repeatedly: Social, Mobile, Open and Big Data. If you take out the middle two -- which are unique strengths of the hosts of the event, SugarCRM -- you get two trends in CRM that are inextricably linked.

If you have been following us here for a while, you’ll know how important customer experience management is. In fact, we spent the whole month of March looking at it. Now, Gartner is taking our lead and underling the important of CXM now and for the coming years.

Earlier this month we pointed out that Yammer has moved past basic social networking and into primary productivity tool territory. But that news was nothing compared to its latest announcement -- universal search.

Earlier in the week, we looked at some good CRM buying principles outlined by SugarCRM, which, as one of the fastest growing companies in the space, has a lot to say on this. Today, it has announced that it will be getting a lot bigger in the near future courtesy of a US$ 33 million cash boost through its latest financing round.

Last week we took a look at some of the questions around customer experience management and -- as ever -- answered those questions. Before moving on, let’s take a final look at it, and some of the considerations that enterprises need to take on board before investing precious IT budgets in customer relationship management software, better known as CRM software.

I’m not going to name any names, but some companies have horrible customer service.

The cynical technology journalist in me comes out when the topic of gamification is raised. First of all, “gamification” is a silly, made-up word. When I see it, I want to reach for my red editor’s pencil.

The other aspect of it that makes me look on the concept with a jaundiced eye is the way it’s being applied seemingly willy-nilly, often in exactly the wrong way.

Zoho is bringing its impressive lineup of Web-based office apps from the desktop to smartphones with the arrival of Zoho Docs and Zoho CRM for Android (available now) and. Zoho Projects for Apple's iPhone, which will be available shortly.