Crm News & Articles

So your company is on social media. You have a Facebook page, a Twitter presence. You dabble with Pinterest and have a blog. But what happens when someone asks a question about a product, upcoming release or the implications of that new research study? Do you reply? Or is it radio silence? A few months ago, the folks at SocialBakers, after conducting a study that found that Facebook page admins ignored seventy-percent of the questions they received, challenged companies to open their Facebook walls to a productive dialogue. So what happened?

Now that Salesforce Marketing Cloud has added several new Social Insight Partners, it's clear that the company is ready to push forward from simply listening to the social stream to turning it into real action.

Buyer behavior patterns are changing as a result of their access to increased data, and marketers must use the same trove of new information to meet them halfway. This was the main message of “Marketing and Sales Intelligence: Using Data to Meet the Buyer,” a session at the Revenue-Driven Marketing Summit hosted by Aberdeen Group in Boston, MA on Thursday, Oct. 18.

Small and medium sized businesses have a shiny new toy to help connect their productivity apps.

As the world moves from a product-centric economy to a customer-centric economy, marketers must move in tandem to ensure the customer experience is always at the heart of their efforts. Tim Gilbert, Chief Marketing Officer of Campus Management, a provider of enterprise software for the higher education industry, addressed this issue during a session at today’s Revenue-Driven Marketing Summit
held by Aberdeen Group in Boston, MA.

Citrix is offering support for what it identifies as the new workshifting business environment with the release of GoToAssist Service Desk. The company is introducing the cloud-based support tool at its Citrix Synergy 2012 conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Now that Eloqua has become a publicly traded company, it has taken a logical next step by offering a new automated marketing tool focused on financial investors.

While we have seen before that customer experience management technologies are becoming increasingly sought after, running parallel to their development is the development of e-commerce suites that are increasingly sophisticated, that provide multi-touchpoint solutions and that are becoming increasingly agile, according to new Forrester research.

Lithium has bought up social CRM provider Social Dynamx and turned it into Lithium Social Web, a social customer care service capable of responding to the deluge of social commentary now found in the mobile, connected world.

To help mid-sized public sector organizations respond to their constituents, hosted customer service provider KANA Software is introducing Lagan Express.

Recently, we took a first look at Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social CRM, and in particular those vendors who made it into the Leaders quadrant. We also noted that by far the most populated quadrant was the Niche player’s quadrant, making it unique among Gartner’s MQs. Today we will look at who those Niche players are, what they are selling to qualify as Niche players, and what is likely to happen to them.

Gartner has just been published its latest edition of "Magic Quadrant for Social CRM" -- and with it, the challenges facing vendors in this space have finally been articulated. Not least of those problems is the need for vendors to demonstrate the economics of deploying these Social CRM systems in multiple customer relationship management use cases, including marketing, sales and customer service.

Although analysts peg the value of the CRM industry at between US $12 billion and US$ 18 billion annually, CRM has yet to deliver its full potential of transforming the customer experience. But Social CRM, or the incorporation of external social networks and online communities with more traditional CRM channels such as email and text, may hold the key to unlocking CRM’s transformative potential.

The San Diego-based MindTouch, provider of a social help system and knowledgebase, has announced a partnership with Salesforce that offers a connector for its enterprise-level product to Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Service Cloud.

Why do you buy customer relationship management (CRM) software? In most cases it’s because you have an issue in the sales department that’s screaming for attention. Forecasting may be going awry, lead data may be loose and impossible to locate, or your sales team is no longer able to discover best practices in selling.