InsideCRM

KANA gives service a process to control service processes

2009-07-01T23:54:48Z

By Chris Bucholtz There’s been a push recently – especially in marketing automation – toward making systems easier to use. First came things like campaign management, so the ordinary marketer could use the system without the need for a trained “expert” to translate ideas into actions. Lately, we’ve been seeing approaches that help make process creation easier, so that things like lead routing can be defined easily and quickly and allow managers to react in real time to changing conditions. Nothing...(read more)

LucidEra: shuttering SaaS

2009-06-22T22:33:36Z

News came today of the wind-down in operations of LucidEra, which offered an SaaS business intelligence product that we discussed with CEO Ken Rudin . The first indication I received of this was an email on Friday from Ken telling of a change in email addresses from his corporate to his personal address, never a good sign for a chief executive. Other companies in this space were quick to react to the news. For example, another SaaS provider, youcalc, is offering LucidEra customers six months of free...(read more)

How social media’s impact goes beyond lead generation

2009-06-19T18:08:03Z

By Chris Bucholtz Everyone knows that social media is going to have a major impact on CRM (the concept and the technology), but as lot of people on the sales side struggle with exactly how that will manifest itself. There doesn’t seem to be any such struggle on the service side of the equation; there’s a group of companies who seem almost overly eager to bring social media into a service context. There’s a real cultural difference between these companies and their competitors, I think; one group...(read more)

Is there a service innovation shortage?

2009-06-15T19:22:26Z

By Chris Bucholtz I’ve written about this in the past , but it bears repeating: All the CRM technology, process refinement, customer intelligence and sales efficiency in the world is worthless unless your company is truly customer-focused, and never more so than when a customer has a service issue. One bad service experience can turn all the relationship-building a company does into nothing more than hollow promises and unmet expectations. It’s like a friendship: It’s easy to pal around when things...(read more)

Gap-bridgers: Marketo delivers sales-ready marketing data

2009-06-10T18:25:26Z

By Chris Bucholtz We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the sales/marketing misalignment that exists at most companies, and we keep hearing from readers that this seemingly never-ending issue saps efficiency from their companies in ways that endanger the success of both sides of the equation. Luckily, as sales efficiency grows in prominence, some companies are trying to address this – which is tough to do, since solutions either come from the sales side or the marketing side, and that creates a...(read more)

Knotice-ing and untapped resource

2009-06-03T20:53:01Z

By Chris Bucholtz When we talk about mobile CRM, the concept is generally understood to mean the projection of CRM into the field on the handheld device s of the people who use CRM data – initially, sales reps, but increasingly, other people, especially field service staff. There’s one thing we’re missing, however: CRM in this day and age is no longer a one-way operation. There should be an aspect of mobile CRM that affects the customer, at least beyond informing the sales pitch or the service information...(read more)

SugarCRM’s customers’ needs served with 5.5. beta

2009-05-28T20:45:16Z

By Chris Bucholtz We had a concept internally we liked to call the “CRM-isphere.” The idea here is that your business is like a cell; what you emphasize determines what system forms the nucleus around which the rest of your enterprise is oriented. For example, if the emphasis was on manufacturing, then ERP might be the nucleus, and other functions would revolve around serving ERP. Some tech companies seem to be centered around marketing, so you might expect them to revolve around marketing technology...(read more)

Word-of-Mouth 2.0, Treehouse Interactive-style

2009-05-27T20:04:51Z

By Chris Bucholtz All the talk about social media and CRM the last few years is finally starting to really take root, turning up in vendors’ products with relentless regularity (as the news from RightNow last week indicates). It was pretty obvious that it would be up to the vendors to start making this integration happen; users were very unlikely to commit to the concept until the path was built for them, nor could they be expected to do so. So now it’s happening. And, as I said in talking about...(read more)

Right lead generation at the right time: DemandBase

2009-05-26T22:40:34Z

By Chris Bucholtz The most encouraging aspect of the current economic conditions (if there are any encouraging aspects) is that it’s forcing companies to seriously consider new sales tools that look at aspects of the selling process in different ways, or at least in more efficiency-driven ways, and that most assuredly goes for areas that have been overlooked in the past. For example, last week, DemandBase released the second version of DemandBase Professional, and according to CEO Chris Golec, the...(read more)

Guest Blogger: InsideView CEO Umberto Miletti

2009-05-22T19:12:13Z

InsideView’s a neat company, and I encourage you to read up on them if you haven’t already learned about what they’re up to. When business visionaries in the 1990s talked about how information would be the asset of the future, they were unwittingly foreshadowing the arrival of companies like this one. Umberto Milletti, InsideView’s CEO, jotted down some thoughts about what’s going on with social media for us. His timing is motivated, no doubt, by the announcement that...(read more)

RightNow’s inside-outside May ‘09 edition

2009-05-22T00:49:51Z

By Chris Bucholtz Next week, RightNow’ s going to release its May ’09 edition, and it’ll add a couple of things that I think will become pre-requisites for CRM in the very near future. Those two things are social media monitoring and analytics. Usually, RightNow has tightly-themed sets of new features in its releases, but these are fairly disparate, but they do have one thing in common: both help vault RightNow out in front of the pack in these two areas. Now, there are point solutions that target...(read more)

Step 1 to real CRM 2.0: Listening

2009-05-21T00:36:42Z

We often hear from users that the potential benefits of Social CRM or CRM 2.0 are not difficult to understand, but is difficult to envision how it would be employed and deployed in their organizations. There are a number of reasons for this: organizations are loathe to commit manpower without an idea of the possible ROI; people are overwhelmed by the variety and number of social media channels; and people often lack the vision to see how social media and CRM can be linked. There’s also the...(read more)

Speech Analytics for the Little Guy

2009-05-19T21:27:27Z

By Chris Bucholtz Upon calling for service, we’ve all heard that “calls may be recorded for quality improvement or training purposes,” or some similar message letting us know that our discussion would be captured and used somehow. But simple logic dictates that not every one of these recordings can be listened to – and, in fact, the main value of recording calls has been to conduct post mortems on transactions that went particularly badly. Just as solutions are in place to track Web users’ experience...(read more)

Salesforce Sees Significance of Service

2009-05-14T17:58:26Z

By Chris Bucholtz Not long ago on the Inside CRM Blog we spoke about service’s emerging importance as a pillar of CRM (along with sales and marketing). This week’s announcement of Salesforce.com’s Summer ’09 release backs that up; it was already clear that the service writing was on the wall when Salesforce’s Service Cloud was announced, but the new announcement reinforces the idea that service is a truly important focus for the company. The most interesting service component of the new announcement...(read more)

Small vs. Big, and Customer Retention vs. Acquisition

2009-05-07T18:59:22Z

By Chris Bucholtz I’ve opined in the past that it’s hard for big businesses to scale up that small-business feel for customers, which I think is one of small businesses’ secret weapons. Similarly, it’s hard for small businesses to scale up the relationships they build naturally with customers during periods of growth, especially rapid growth. These are natural trends that have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with human nature, and ones that organizations should put more thought...(read more)

Field service - a forgotten CRM impact point

2009-05-06T19:58:59Z

By Chris Bucholtz For a long time, CRM was defined in part as a technology and a det of processed that included two critical areas: sales and marketing. That’s been the classic definition, and it reveals a lot about why CRM has had a hard time living up to its promise. However, the the “R” part of the acronym is slowly becoming more appreciated, and as that happend a third leg on the CRM stool is evolving around service. When you back up and look at CRM the way it should be viewed...(read more)

Zuora aiming to disrupt billing as usual

2009-05-01T21:21:59Z

By Chris Bucholtz Tien Tzuo of Zuora was in our offices the other day to talk about where the company stands after a year of operation. We’ve talked with Tien in the past (see here and here ), and it’s interesting to see how the company’s vision of billing is starting to synchronize itself with the way business is evolving. The two are coming together pretty neatly, and not just in the ways that technology people foresaw. It was easy to see that SaaS vendors would take a shine to an on-demand billing...(read more)

SugarCRM is out to make some things moot

2009-04-29T22:50:37Z

By Chris Bucholtz SugarCRM rolled out its newest product today, and the ideas contained in it are reflective of the evolution that the company (and open source CRM) have gone through in the last 18 months. It’s a rapid evolution that’s seen a shift in message, from one centered on the open-source nature of the product to one highlighting the capabilities, affordability and growth potential of the product as a CRM tool – and, oh yeah, it’s also open source. That’s actually a difficult evolution to...(read more)

United’s fat-unfriendly skies

2009-04-28T18:47:28Z

By Chris Bucholtz Back in the early days of aviation, when aircraft engines were less powerful and engineering types ran things, there was one airline that had a prominent scale right at the front of the checkout counter. Every passenger had to step up and be weighed; the total weight would determine just how many people and how much cargo could safely be carried. The safety aspect makes sense, but the idea of weighing people in front of their fellow passengers is pretty awful. This airline, like...(read more)

Natalie Petouhoff: Learning to make the business case for customer service technology

2009-04-27T20:47:11Z

By Chris Bucholtz Today, we introduce a guest blogger: Dr. Natalie Petouhoff. The good doctor covers customer service as one of Forrester Research’s analysts; you may have seen her work in the BusinessWeek issue spotlighting the value of customer service, or you may have heard her speak at conferences examining the value of good customer service. She’s written four books on the subject - Reinventing Your Contact Center: Managers Guide to Managing Multi-Channel Contact Centers ; Integrating Your People...(read more)

Teaching sales managers to put the data together

2009-04-21T21:24:39Z

By Chris Bucholtz The aim of CRM, as articulated by many, is to gain a “ 360-degree view of the customer.” That’s a great idea – except most companies, and especially sales organizations, don’t have a 360-degree view of themselves yet. Visibility into the pipeline is often murky, and decisions are still made on hunches instead of data. So while you may think you know the customer, you may be uncertain about how effectively your sales staff is working with the customer. There are ample opportunities...(read more)

Webinar Tuesday: Social Media in B-to-B Marketing

2009-04-18T00:10:16Z

By Chris Bucholtz Next Tuesday, our company’s CEO, Scott Albro, is the featured speaker in a webinar entitled “ Using Social Media in Your B-to-B Marketing: The 5 Best Practices for Building Dialogue & Demand ,” a topic which we’ve talked an awful lot about here on Inside CRM and in this very blog. As others have said (Like Paul Greenberg ), these channels of communication don’t replace the selling tools you need to close sales, but they can make it easier to build relationships with prospects...(read more)

Coming soon to Inside CRM: David Taber

2009-04-14T21:25:27Z

By Chris Bucholtz One of the neat things about editing this site is the opportunity to meet so many people who are thought leaders in CRM. One indication that they truly believe in what they’re saying is that they’re nice people – the ability to build personal relationships is an underpinning for building customer relationships, I think. That’s why Paul Greenberg , Brent Leary , Michael Thomas , and many others who truly lead the way in spreading a better understanding of CRM are themselves very...(read more)

CRM infrastructure can be outsourced; creativity can not

2009-04-13T22:56:05Z

By Chris Bucholtz Outsourcing is old hat in the call center space , but don’t be surprised to see it catching on elsewhere in CRM. After all, isn’t SaaS a form of outsourcing in its way, since all the backup, update and infrastructure issues are “outsourced” back to the vendor? EDS’s Steve Ditto hopes that trend continues to gain momentum. As vice president of CRM services at the company, which was recently acquired by Hewlett Packard, he thinks the climate is right for a big uptick in the number...(read more)

Shaving seconds off the call center: Knoa’s EPM

2009-04-08T21:52:54Z

By Chris Bucholtz A decade ago, I was given the chance to interview Jackie Stewart , the three-time Formula 1 world champion and incredibly fast-talking Scottish television commentator. He was at HP Labs, purportedly to talk about new sensors for his race cars but, in actuality, was hoping to secure an assurance from new CEO Carly Fiorina that his race team’s sponsorship would remain intact (Fiorina’s predecessor, Lew Platt, was a big motor sports fan who had personally pushed for the sponsorship...(read more)