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Infor CRM Business Edition Helps SMBs Improve Sales and Deliver Outstanding Customer Service
Infor has announced the availability of Infor CRM Business Edition, a CRM software package designed to meet the specialized sales and service needs of small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs). Infor CRM Business Edition streamlines critical CRM functions, helping sales organizations convert leads into sales and enabling service representatives to nurture customer interactions into long-term profitable relationships. Infor CRM Business Edition consists of the Infor CRM Sales and Infor CRM Service modules.
PerformanceEdge Offers Enhanced Recording and Quality Management with Latest Product Release
The PerformanceEdge Group of Aspect Software, focused on unified communications for the contact center, has announced the general availability of Aspect Quality Management 2.8.1, which provides the recording and quality management capabilities of PerformanceEdge. This release offers tight integrations to Aspect Unified IP, VoIP recording for Aspect CallCenter ACD, and enables Aspect customers to reap the benefits of advanced recording and quality management using a session initiation protocol (SIP)-based VoIP or a time-division multiplexing (TDM) telephony platform.
ATG Joins Bazaarvoice Radius to Help Marketers Execute Integrated Social Commerce Strategies
ATG, an e-commerce platform and e-commerce optimization services provider, has announced that it has joined Bazaarvoice Radius, a program designed to accelerate the strategic adoption of social commerce by brand marketers, direct marketers, agencies, and technology vendors. Through Bazaarvoice Radius, ATG now offers marketers an integrated social commerce tool that combines ATG technology with Bazaarvoice to deliver personalized, user-generated content.
Vovici Announces Availability Of Community Builder
Vovici, a provider of Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM), has announced the availability of the Vovici Community Builder module that will allow organizations to quickly and cost effectively create and manage online community panels and provide a voice to customers, employees and other constituents. The Community Builder module leverages capabilities of Vovici’s EFM Community product to provide companies a better way to gather in-depth feedback, accelerate production of actionable data and guarantee that respondents’ time is effectively spent.
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Featured Webinar:
Putting the Business First -- A Service Approach to Delivering Value
Thursday, June 12, 2008 --11:00am PT/2:00pm ET
Join Pete McGarahan and FrontRange as they frame the foundation for becoming a high performance IT service delivery organization. It starts with a business aligned strategy and transitions to cultural organizational change, new roles and responsibilities and tools that have the ITIL processes built in, avoiding costly customizations.
Let us work for you! This webinar has a unique flair -- we will build the content around your input. Take advantage of this opportunity to tap into industry best practices that Pete McGarahan and FrontRange will provide, by submitting your own real world challenges and questions as you embrace the transition to service aligned IT. E-mail all questions and feedback in advance of the webinar to chealey@supportindustry.com.
Register:
View
the webinar today!
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| Worldwide CRM Software Market to Grow 14% in 2008
Worldwide CRM software revenue is projected to surpass $8.9 billion in 2008, a 14.2 percent increase from preliminary 2007 revenue estimates of $7.8 billion, according to Gartner Inc. The market is poised for healthy growth through 2012 when revenue is forecast to reach $13.3 billion.
North America is the largest market for CRM total software revenue, as it accounted for $4.3 billion of revenue in 2007, and it will total $7.6 billion in 2012. Europe is expected to exhibit steady, positive growth rising from $2.6 billion in 2007 to $3.9 billion in 2012.
Gartner expects the strongest growth in CRM spending to come from Asia/Pacific where revenue is forecast to grow from $410 million in 2007 to $840 million in 2012. Emerging regions such as Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East and Africa will see positive upward trends in CRM spending, particularly in specific industries. Increasing penetration of CRM solutions in developing economies will make greater contributions to vendor revenue during the next few years, although Gartner analysts said that more-significant and less-taxing opportunities in other, more-familiar business environments will cause many vendors to concentrate in Western economies.
Gartner predicts that consolidation will continue in the CRM market as suite vendors look to extend their application portfolios, best of breed vendors seek to acquire solutions to complement their strengths and vertical industry players expand geographically. However, this consolidation will be offset by new, smaller entrants offering specialized functionality.
More...
Consumers Use Social Media to Share Customer Care Experiences and Research Customer Service Reputations
As social media usage becomes more ubiquitous, affluent consumers are using social media channels to share their personal customer service experiences and learn about others’ care experiences when making purchase decisions. This is among the initial findings of a new Society for New Communications Research study, “Exploring the Link Between Customer Care and Brand Reputation in the Age of Social Media.”
More than 300 consumers who are active Internet users participated in a survey focusing on how customer care influences brand reputation given the widespread adoption of social media. Top findings include:
- 59.1% of respondents use social media to “vent” about a customer care experience.
- 72.2% of respondents research companies’ customer care online prior to purchasing products and services at least sometimes.
- 84% of respondents consider the quality of customer care at least sometimes in their decision to do business with a company.
- 74% choose companies/brands based on others’ customer care experiences shared online.
- 84% of respondents consider the quality of customer care in their decision to do business with a company at least sometimes.
- 81% believe that blogs, online rating systems and discussion forums can give consumers a greater voice regarding customer care, but less than 33% believe that businesses take customers’ opinions seriously.
- Search engines are the most valuable online tools for this research, according to respondents. Those rated of no value include micro-blogging sites like Twitter or Pownce (39%), YouTube (27%) and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace (22%).
Dell and Amazon were cited more often than any other company when asked which types of companies have done the best job in using social media to respond to customer care issues. In terms of industry segments, technology, retail, and travel companies were reported as doing the best job, while utilities, health care, and insurance were least likely to receive positive endorsements.
More...
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| The New Rules of E-Branding
Have you ever considered the differences between traditional "offline" branding and branding on the Internet? Many traditional branding strategies don't translate successfully online. That's because unlike other communications media, the Internet is an interactive channel — one that marries text, movement, sound, and design to produce a comprehensive brand personality. This presents an enormous opportunity but also a daunting challenge. Although your site allows for an animated brand experience, visitors remain completely in charge and competitors are just a click away.
Full Article...
B2B in a Web 2.0 World
Seeking competitive advantage and profitability through good relations with the social media, the B2B (business-to-business) world has energetically embraced the grand online colloquy known as the two-way talk-back "conversation." Blogs, vlogs, e-communities and social networks, Internet forums, message boards, chat rooms, wikis, podcasts, webcasts, videocasts, RSS feeds — these online social media platforms are now in play in the B2B relationships that organizations have with their vendors, suppliers, partners, contractors and other third-party value-chain entities leading all the way to the end customer.
Full Article...
Modeling Customer Behavior in Business Ecosystems
There is a link between the philosophical studies of the nature of being and CRM studies of customer response. This link is seen most clearly when customer response is viewed through the metaphor of business as organism, rather than as machine. This approach is used to guide the design of powerful customer behavior models based on special abstractions of historical time series data. These temporal abstractions are keyed to the response date for each customer (rather than the calendar date) to reflect what customers did during the several months prior to the response to be modeled.
Full Article...
How to Improve Customer Satisfaction with IT
Here's a fun exercise: For the next month, seek out and complete every survey and customer comment card you are offered. The truth is, we are so inundated with surveys that we ignore most of them. Accept this challenge and by the end of the 30 days, you'll be amazed at how many organizations seem interested in obtaining your feedback with the implied goals of improving service and exceeding your needs. But do they use that knowledge to actually improve service?
Full Article...
Useful Analytics
If you have an analytics person on your staff, you should always be looking for ways for her to improve your marketing operations. For example, if you send promotional e-mails to registered customers, she should take advantage of the wilderness of numbers that can be analyzed with profitable results. The trick is to figure out which numbers to analyze, and what to do with the results.
Full Article...
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|  Recession
Storming: Thriving in Downturns through Superior Marketing, Pricing
and Product Strategies
by Rupert Hart
No times are more difficult for the survival of a company than recessions. They are defining moments for managers. Recession-proofing articles talk about keeping your head down and focusing on costs and cashflow. This is a book for managers who have a handle on their costs and covers 5 main areas: understanding the business environment, retaining existing customers, maintaining margins through pricing, moving ahead with new product-offerings, and winning new customers.
For
more information, or to order your copy...
You can find
more industry sepcific books at our web site:
http://www.crmindustry.com/
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Visit the CRM Solution Center
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The CRM Solution Center provides you unlimited access to white papers, case studies, detailed product information and more. Registration is quick and easy -- in 30 seconds or less, you will be on your way to accessing this valuable resource
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