CRM News Feed

Monitronics will apply NICE’s contact center interactions solutions to increase the quality of customer interactions through improved agent monitoring.

A web-to-case form can be used to capture cases from your website and route them as fielded information into salesforce.com. While it’s easy to generate the HTML for a web-case-form from inside salesforce.com, Chris Bonacore a salesforce.com Sales Engineer, has…

Amcat Technology Wins CRM Excellence AwardManchester, UK, 28th July, 2005 – Amcat’s contact centre technology has been awarded the ‘CRM Excellence award’ from Customer Interaction Solutions magazine in its July 2005 issue.

In a town renowned for big bets and high rollers (called “whales” by casino management), Harrah’s laid down the biggest bet of all on June 13th when it concluded its merger with Caesars Entertainment. Harrah’s paid US$1.87 billion in cash and $3.27 billion in stock, also assuming $3.86 billion in Caesar’s debt.

Don’t they have to do some kind of training before they get these positions, or is it that the powers that be just don’t care who they hire once the job gets done?

Larry Ellison is at it again. After spending approximately US$800 million to gain a foothold in the retailing software market, the chief executive of Oracle is now turning his attention to financial services. The Silicon Valley software giant is in talks to buy Citicorp’s 43 percent stake in i-flex Solutions of India, sources familiar with the discussions confirm.

New Retail President for IRIDaily Research News Online, UK - 10 hours ago… Prior to founding MindMeld, he was Executive VP and Group Executive of Equifax Knowledge Engineering, the global customer relationship management company of …ADP Dealer Services Achieves Double Milestone With Its Next …Autochannel - 5 hours ago… integrates with ADP's other Web-Enabled business applications, such as [...]

Campaigner for Salesforce from GOT Corporation, is an email communication tool available within Salesforce (the same user interface), to send an unlimited number of targeted personalized emails directly to your Salesforce leads and contacts. Sales, support, and admin users can…

Bedside bar-code scanning of medications is one of three “high-impact” technologies advocated by industry representatives because of the system’s proven benefits in making healthcare safer. Other technologies include e-prescribing and secure Web-based access to patient information.

On the fence as to whether or not you’re going to attend Dreamforce this year? Need help building a case for your boss? This PDF document provides a great overview of the benefits you’ll derive from attending Dreamforce 2005 in…

According to the American Bankers Association, the average consumer has two accounts with any one bank. One is typically a checking account, and with the plethora of free checking options available today, that one hardly counts. It’s not profitable. Relationship banking is the carrot, not the stick, approach to growing profitability.

What we think of as authentic offshoring can hurt companies if it’s not done very carefully. In this case, the company does work in that country only for this one function. That is, if it hadn’t offshored this activity, it wouldn’t have chosen to be in that part of the world.

After a slump, the CRM software market stabilized in 2003 and began to turn around in 2004.

"By some estimates, the potential market is still quite substantial," says Steve Butler, Senior Analyst at eMarketer and author of the CRM Software: Spending and Trends report. "That’s illustrated by Siebel Systems’ bold prediction that worldwide spending on customer-facing technology solutions over the next 10 years will be nearly five times larger than the total for the preceding quarter century."

But growth never comes easily, Mr. Butler says: "Siebel itself, which pioneered the CRM space, has seen software sales tumble this year."

IDC currently estimates that worldwide sales of CRM applications will increase by a compound annual growth rate of 8.9% between 2004 and 2008, to reach $11.4 billion. The research firm predicts that analytic CRM applications will continue to lead the market, after topping $908.7 million in global sales and posting 12.7% growth in 2003.

In North America — which by some estimates accounts for nearly half of global CRM software sales — CRM license revenues are forecast to grow by 4.2% in 2005, to reach $2.8 billion by the end of this year, according to Datamonitor.

A third comparative estimate from Forrester Research predicts that worldwide spending on CRM projects will reach $13 billion in 2005, of which $3.2 billion will be spent on new software licenses. The remaining $9.8 billion will go toward integration, administration and maintenance costs.

According to its breakdown of worldwide CRM software sales for 2004, AMR Research estimates that customer service applications accounted for 21% of spending last year. Call center infrastructure made up 19%, followed by SFA at 16% and marketing automation & analytics software at 12%.

Looking ahead to 2005, AMR Research notes that hosted CRM solutions gained acceptance during 2004, and will continue to gather momentum this year. In support of its outlook for further spending growth, AMR points to early project activity in areas such as specialty chemicals, high tech, consumer products, retail, and discrete manufacturing (the production of items that can be individually marked or counted, as opposed to products sold by weight or volume, such as gasoline.)

The CRM services market is also expected to grow. IDC predicts that during the next two years, CRM services spending will increase at a "modest to moderate" pace through mid-2007, after which it should accelerate to "moderate to strong" growth through 2009.

"Most analysts agree that the factors driving increased CRM services spending are the improving economy and business profitability," says Mr. Butler, "as well as a need for more complex systems that require more consulting assistance, particularly with change management issues."

U.S. database solutions developer Oracle has highlighted its Venezuelan operations as an important driver behind the regional growth it saw in Latin America during the fiscal year just ended. Data released by Oracle Latin America shows that the Venezuelan unit virtually doubled license sales and database solutions sales in the year ending May 31, compared to fiscal year 2004.

3 Global delivers CRMs over Cisco network (CIOL)BANGALORE: 3 Global Services, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) firm and a subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa Ltd., has deployment Cisco-powered heterogeneous network comprising routing and LAN switching solutions to service its global operations out of its support centres in India.Columbus Telegram Selects Relationals CRM Suite (Market Wire via [...]

Today, the first place your customers look for help is online. Gartner Group has estimated that capturing a new customer is 4 to 10 times more expensive than providing good service to an existing one. They additionally said over 68 percent of customers defect due to poor service.

SAP in Hosted CRM About-Face (ComputerWire via Yahoo! Australia & NZ News)SAP AG has made an about-face on the issue of hosted CRM with the revelation from CEO Henning Kagermann that the company is planning to launch a hosted CRM service later this year.Siebel shows Q2 sales drop, lowers Q3 forecast (InfoWorld)( InfoWorld ) – [...]

Once you know about customer value, your best customers’ migration path and what would lead those customers to defect, you enter a whole new acquisition game, writes Graham Hill.

Is your bank’s marketing strategy still powered by the old rules? asks Alan See, who explains that under the old rules, marketing uses a “spray and pray” approach to business development that reaches a large number of the wrong targets.

Howard Barrett asks you to imagine a world where advances in technology and changes in lifestyle and attitudes lead to a seismic shift in the way in which consumers interact with suppliers.