CRM Magazine articles from September 2009

CRM Magazine archives from September 2009

CRM Bucks the Downward Financial Trend
September 1, 2009... THE IMPACT of the recession has thoroughly shaken many companies to the core--even traditionally stable companies. Microsoft, for example, announced its first drop in year-over-year revenue as a publicly traded company. But, despite the...

Search Engineering
September 1, 2009... BEAUTIFUL ARTICLE by Associate Editor Jessica Tsai ("Search Engineering," July 2009, http://sn.im/0709tsai). Search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), and online marketing in general continue to be hot topics. The theory...

CRM's Still Getting Social
September 1, 2009... I DON'T SEE ANY of the traditional CRM vendors being that strong in social CRM currently, as it relates to real integration with social networks (CRM magazine's Social Media Issue, June 2009, http://sn.im/jun09-issue). All they're mostly...

Survival of the Relatively More Fit: CRM Is Changing, Evolving to Suit the Demands of the Moment Letters May Be Edited for Length or Clarity
September 1, 2009... EVOLUTION MAY BE the cleverest algorithm ever discovered. It truly was discovered--by Charles Darwin--not made up like some of the equations the rocket scientists on Wall Street came up with over the last couple of decades. Part of its...

The Lessons of the Magic Curry Kart: Your Local Street-Food Vendor Can Teach Your Company a Thing or Two
September 1, 2009... AS AN industry analyst, I use the Twitter microblogging service daily to perform work tasks: to keep up with news and trends from the technology vendors I advise and write about, and to stay in touch with other analysts and their opinions, as...

Stand Up for Your Rights! How to Ensure the Software You Use Isn't Abusing You in the Process
September 1, 2009... OF ALL THE ASSETS that an enterprise acquires, software brings the most unusual, onerous, and restrictive set of ownership constraints. Think about it: Not only are licensees precluded from reselling, reusing, or sharing their licenses, but they...

Microsoft's Million-Member March: Major Milestones, and Major Roadmap Promises, at the Vendor's Worldwide Partner Conference '09
September 1, 2009... Microsoft certainly covered a lot of ground during its seventh annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in New Orleans in July. The company released several new products, updated others, celebrated milestones, and unveiled a roadmap that...

CRM Market Grows for Fifth Straight Year
September 1, 2009... The worldwide CRM market extended its growth streak to a fifth consecutive year, according to a report from Gartner, up 12.5 percent in 2008, from revenue of $8.13 billion in 2007 to $9.15 billion in 2008. While the growth rate may seem less...

CRM on twitter.(Insight)
September 1, 2009... The new math: Customer dissatisfaction + social media = a first-class pain. Just ask United Airlines (@UnitedAirlines), the subject of an unflattering viral video by passenger Dave Carroll (@DaveCarroll), who claimed his guitar was damaged by...

Jetting to a Better Customer Experience: The Airline Industry Is Looking for a Flight Plan to Combat the Headwind of Low Satisfaction Scores
September 1, 2009... The airline industry as a whole has had to weather some turbulence in terms of customer satisfaction. Just how rough the ride has been is in the eye of the beholder, but the J.D. Power and Associates 2009 North America Airline Satisfaction Study...

Do You Accept the Terms of Engagement? Eager to Play with Social Media, Employees of CRM Vendors Are Finding Themselves Burdened by New Rules
September 1, 2009... In the scope of social media guidelines, technology companies Intel and IBM have emerged as poster children for establishing protocol. (See "Social Shepherds," June 2009, for more on that.) That poster needs to make room for at least one more...

Don't Worry, Be Creative
September 1, 2009... Twenty years ago, all Hugh MacLeod had were his cartoons, which eventually ended up on the backs of business cards--creativity exploding from the underside of the strait-laced. The drawings led to a blog (http://sn.im/gapingvoid1) and to...

The 2009 CRM Market Awards.(Cover story)
September 1, 2009... Excellence is its own reward. Well, maybe so, but we plan on adding a little something extra anyway. The last 12 months have been hard on everyone in the CRM industry--the software vendors, the service providers, the CRM users, even (maybe...

The 2009 Influential Leaders
September 1, 2009... By the editors of CRM magazine One of the most heartbreaking stretches of no-man's land is the hair's breadth that separates the dreamer and the visionary: The dreamer appears bathed in disappointment, while the visionary seems destined for...

The 2009 Rising Stars
September 1, 2009... By the editors of CRM magazine A "rising star" should be more than a brilliant flash that disappears before you can point it out. The CRM Rising Stars, in fact, are companies that we expect to see burning brightly long after we anoint them....

The 2009 Market Leaders
September 1, 2009... By the editors of CRM magazine CRM is all about taking down silos, so why draw hard-and-fast lines defining 10 categories? We believe specialization matters, and deserves recognition. That just highlights a core dilemma: Does a...

The 2009 Elite
September 1, 2009... It's no surprise that we like to praise successful CRM implementations--but each year around this time, we try to draw attention to a select few. Metrics always make nice bullet points--and we've certainly included some here--but the best part...

Beyond the Contact Center Walls: Lucrative Return on Investment Is Driving Companies-And Vendors-To Look More Closely at Mobile Service Applications
September 1, 2009... PLENTY OF INK--in CRMand elsewhere--is spent on customer service within the walls of the contact center, whether those walls are made of bricks and mortar or they're virtually enclosing your work-at-home agents. Field service isn't talked about...

The Best of the Rest: The Market Awards Are Done, but There's So Much Left Unmocked!
September 1, 2009... SEPTEMBER, A MONTH whose dreaded name the editors of CRM magazine utter only in a whisper, even though the work appearing here--the Market Awards--was completed long ago. That effort's past, so it's time to turn elsewhere. Then again, maybe...