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Popular Articles
Forecasting Clouds' Top 20 CRM Blogs of 2009
The Top 10 Open Source CRM Applications
The business ecosystem quilt, and how Demandbase fits in
A warm welcome to the new portal
How CRM can Sow the Seeds of a Better Business Ecosystem
Social CRM, and how it could show how important employees are
ValueRight: examining the business of Social CRM
What "Up in the Air" Says About Customer Loyalty
Culture Shock: How CRM can redefine your company’s view of its customers
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Is Open Source CRM Ready for Prime Time?
Explore Article (12 hours, 22 min ago)
Open source is making waves in enterprise IT; even so it’s a flood short of a tsunami when it comes to CRM. The bulwark preventing its rise is built of open source’s own limitations and enterprises’ inflated expectations. The expectation of free equaling something-for-nothing provides the first letdown. The second comes from the deflated promise of scalability and high-availability.
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Comment on Article Mentions: Salesforce
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Putting numbers behind the value of social service
Explore Article (Sep 8 2010)
We’ve talked before about “social service,” or the use of social media to supplement and improve customer service. We’ll have a big article on the topic coming out in the next couple of weeks, too. It’s one that deserves attention, because clever use of social channels to help improve your service efforts can improve service and reduce costs simultaneously – if it’s really internalized and not used as a band-aid, P.R. sort of thing to mollify the loudest customers. Add to the growing pool of solid thinking on this topic some analysis by Brent Leary. He’s crafted a white paper ... (Read Full Article)
Comment on Article Mentions: Brent Leary
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CRM Comparison Guide: A Peek Under the Hood of Nine Top Vendors’ Products
Explore Article (Sep 2 2010)
Our Comparison Guide is designed to arm you with some of the basics about nine of the most important CRM vendors. The applications we compare have much greater complexity than we can go into here, so take this comparison guide as a first step in your decision making process.
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Comment on Article Mentions: Brent Leary RightNow Aplicor
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Service draws even with sales in CRM importance - finally
Explore Article (Sep 2 2010)
Bill Band just published a survey of 99 companies to try to establish some benchmarks to help scope CRM projects. He unearthed some interesting nuggets. The one that stood out to me is that customer service has pulled even with sales as the most frequently used component of CRM. Customer service came in at 67 percent, versus sales force automation at 66 percent. Three years ago, customer service would have trailed by a hefty margin, but now the economy is forcing businesses to look at service in a totally different light – and probably one that’s healthier for CRM as ... (Read Full Article)
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Shortcuts to Your CRM Shortlist
Explore Article (Aug 31 2010)
In order to select the CRM software that’s best for your organization, companies have to enter into a process that is far different from the typical IT purchase procedure. CRM affects all aspects of the business, and thus a thorough understanding of sales, marketing and service processes is needed in order to narrow the field down to a final set of vendors. Organizations must understand not only the products and vendors available to them but the way their own business works.
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Comment on Article Mentions: Graham Hill
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Little things that make a big customer experience impact
Explore Article (Aug 31 2010)
Mitch Leiberman of Comity Technology Partners likes to talk about CRM as the art of scaling up the personalized experience you get at a mom-and-pop store, and I think many large businesses hear that and their minds go blank. Hyatt, instead, figured out a very simple way to add that personal touch and in the process reinforce its brand and build loyalty among customers. (Read Full Article)
Comment on Article Mentions: Aplicor
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The Top 10 Open Source CRM Applications
Explore Article (Aug 25 2010)
Comment "Open source is good, but often brings a lot of problems. When comparing to a SaaS (software as a service), ..." - davidmorisseau
CRM vendors come in all shapes, sizes and business models. To help you narrow the field, we took a long look at this market and selected what we believe to be today’s top 10 open-source CRM vendors. By its nature, this is a fast changing market, so what’s in the top 10 today may change. But we examined utility, business models, developer communities and history, and that’s led to this list of open source CRM vendors who’ve earned their stripes.
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2 Comments Mentions: Martin Schneider Microsoft
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Comcast service revisited: great people working with broken processes
Explore Article (Aug 18 2010)
By Chris Bucholtz When you write about CRM, customer service and social media, Comcast is the gift that keeps on giving. I used to treat them as a whipping boy, but increasingly I think they’re more useful as an object lesson in what can happen if you don’t get a handle on customer service – and don’t make any attempts to do so until it’s too late. I had yet another opportunity to write about this poor, stumbling behemoth this week, when my wife decided that a 31 percent cost increase over two years should mean that our Internet worked ... (Read Full Article)
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Analytics for CRM: the Real Measure of Success
Explore Article (Aug 12 2010)
At the CRM Evolution show last week, one of the things that stood out was the prominence of the idea of analytics. Unlike almost every other technology-driven trend in the past, which seemed to discover analytics only after considerable pain had been suffered by the earliest adopters, social CRM is (Read Full Article)
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The Myth of the 360-Degree Customer View
Explore Article (Aug 3 2010)
The term 360-degree customer view dates to the early days of CRM, when marketers ruled this world and dispensed jargon like Johnny Appleseed dispensed Granny Smiths. Sadly, it’s remained with us and is still dropped into conversations as a synonym for “knowing a lot about the customer.” But even with the rise of social CRM, we can’t have a complete view of the customer, the customer’s circumstances or the customer’s motivations. We have at best a 270-degree view in most cases, and it’s the result of several techniques and technologies which provide overlapping arcs of data. (Read Full Article)
Comment on Article Mentions: RightNow Microsoft SAP
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Is Social Media the Gateway to VRM?
Explore Article (Jul 29 2010)
Customers are already getting more used to interacting with the companies they buy from. There’s a growing expectation that companies will participate in customer conversations, which may make social media the means by which customers grow toward adopting a VRM view of the buyer-seller relationship. Think of it as the gateway drug for VRM. (Read Full Article)
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Are open source CRM and ERP companies as stable as proprietary software companies?
Explore Article (Jul 26 2010)
We’re have a few major stories on open source CRM and ERP in the works. While those stories have their specific angles, they don’t address the one question that a lot of non-open source software people often ask: how do you make money selling this stuff? (Read Full Article)
Comment on Article Mentions: Microsoft
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Aplicor Comes Around to Community and User Experience
Explore Article (Jul 14 2010)
When I was in boy scouts, my father was the scoutmaster. While this had its advantages – I had a ride to all the events, for instances – he was notably tougher on me than he was on the other kids. In order to get awards, I always had to do more than the other scouts – in fact, when other scout (Read Full Article)
Comment on Article Mentions: Aplicor Microsoft
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E-book Report: Richard Boardman's "Survival Guide" to Buying and Implementing CRM
Explore Article (Jul 1 2010)
We spend a lot of time on this site talking about strategy, concepts, philosophy and so on, but we dwell less on the intricacies of implementing CRM solutions. That isn’t going to last long – we have some big pieces aimed at IT and sales that talk about selection and implementation that will run (Read Full Article)
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Gartner Customer 360 Summit Day Three: Hey, that Social Stuff Sounds Familiar...
Explore Article (Jun 30 2010)
This morning, as I was listening to Paul Greenberg and Michael Maoz talking about the present and future of social CRM at the Gartner Customer 360 Summit, it occurred to me that I have long been running a social media-driven business. It had never occurred to me until this morning - but maybe there's a good reason for that. (Read Full Article)
Comment on Article Mentions: Paul Greenberg
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Day Two of the Gartner Customer 360 Summit: A Social Service Success Story
Explore Article (Jun 29 2010)
As Brent Leary says, most alleged social service efforts are really “social PR,” or efforts to get the squeaky wheels using social media to be quiet while leaving service processes for the rest of the customers broken and unworkable. But Lisa Larson, the director of customer care for Drugstore.com, does not have that problem. She brought an apporoach to the idea of social service (and service in general) that shows what some imagination, a little courage and a good technology partner can do. (Read Full Article)
Comment on Article Mentions: Brent Leary RightNow
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Gartner Customer 360 Day 1: Who in Your Company is Equipped to Care about Customer Experience?
Explore Article (Jun 28 2010)
Comment "Chris, Sadly I agree with Ed's comment on Customer Experience or lack thereof and like the auto assembly analogy also, ..." - JLIONZ
One of the fun things about coming to a show like the Gartner Customer 360 conference is seeing how ideas have progressed from thinking to explaining to doing. I saw a great example of that this afternoon when Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst Ed Thompson did a talk entitled “How to (Read Full Article)
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A list worthy of you attention
Explore Article (Jun 18 2010)
I was very pleased and honored to be included in Paul Greenberg’s list of “experts,” although any journalist who calls himself an expert in anything is in the wrong line of work! That said, I can’t think of any of the folks on that list who’d call themselves an expert; there are too many c (Read Full Article)
Comment on Article Mentions: Paul Greenberg
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Are You Looking for "Relationship Cues?"
Explore Article (Jun 15 2010)
Are there any transactional cues that customers are sending – in responses to marketing emails, in emails directly to the company, in blogs on in social media – that suggest they could be turned into super-advocates? As is the case in many such things, some of those cues will be unique to your vertical market, and some will be unique to your particular business. But keeping an eye out for them is important – and it’s only the first step. (Read Full Article)
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Three Reasons - or Excuses - for a Social Media Backlash
Explore Article (Jun 9 2010)
Denis Pombriant wrote an amusing post today announcing the start of the social media backlash. Denis doesn’t have a lot of material to back this up beyond an article that documented several small business owners’ failed use of Facebook, but it’s still a good post and worth reading. We’ve als (Read Full Article)
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CRM is a Waste of Money - Without Employees who Believe in the Customer
Explore Article (Jun 1 2010)
CRM needs a good foundation. We often talk about that foundation being an application attuned to your specific needs, or the employees being committed to using that application. But it goes beyond that. Your CRM foundation is really your employees – not just your sales people, but everybody. (Read Full Article)
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ERP Requirements Template: Financial Management
Explore Article (May 28 2010)
Critical to the well-being of your business is your financial management system. This aspect of your ERP system touches virtually all aspects of your business and serves as the barometer of your company’s success. To help find the right financial management for your organization, rank the importance of the following features in relation to your unique needs.
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ERP Requirements Template: Human Capital Management
Explore Article (May 27 2010)
Finding a good fit between your company’s needs and the Human Capital Management module of your ERP solution is critical, since the features of this part of your ERP solution touch every one of your employees. Getting it right means managing employees in an efficient and cost-effective way; gett
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The importance of the "R" in CRM
Explore Article (May 26 2010)
Today, we continue our “CRM Experts in their Own Words” series with Mitch Lieberman. When we spoke to Mitch, he was at SugarCRM; he’s now started his own organization, Comity Technology Advisors, to help companies negotiate the rocky shoals of understanding CRM. Mitch, for all his forward-look (Read Full Article)
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CRM Requirements Template
Explore Article (May 21 2010)
Understanding and prioritizing the features you need in a CRM solution requires you to understand your business and its processes, and to know which processes work, which ones don’t and which ones can benefit from automation within CRM. Once you understand that, this template will allow you to compare your needs to the most common features in CRM to the specific needs of your company.
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davidmorisseau » The Top 10 Open Source CRM Applications
Open source is good, but often brings a lot of problems. When comparing to a ...
RahulNair » The Top 10 Open Source CRM Applications
OpenERP though primarily an ERP its modularity allows a customer to take out a specific ...
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