CRM News Feed

Customer Reference Management and the Self-Service Imperative The win is in the measured use of your customer references and the preservation of those valuable relationships.

10th November 2005. So. Why Do People Leave.? 1% – Die 3% – Move House 5% – Buy from a friend 9% – Sold to by a competitor 14% – Product or Price 68% – Perceived Indifference That’s right.

Successful Questra Customer Conference Validates Market for Intelligent Device Management 01/11/2005 – 00:02 – (BMS) – Cisco Systems, Inc. Keynote Presentation Kicks Off Two-Day Gathering of Fortune 1000 CompaniesPRNewswireREDWOOD CITY, Calif.Oct.

We spent today at the 13^th annual Gartner CRM Summit in San Diego. VP Distinguished Analyst Scott Nelson, who joined us in a Webinar on the Eight Golden Rules for CRM Success earlier this year, presented the keynote address on the current and future state of CRM. Scott discussed that there are really only four main guiding principles for successful customer-centric strategies.  Scott emphasized that organizations should work on all four strategies at the same time, but one of them will dominate, based on the goals and culture of the company.  The idea is organizations need to understand the four main customer-centric strategies because this will help them to plan and prioritize their investments accordingly, which improves their chances of success. To learn Gartner’s four guiding principles for successful customer-centric strategies, read on.

Strategy 1:  Extend the depth and breadth of relationships to achieve a larger share of the customer relationship.

Organizations should assume that they are underrepresented in the customer’s thinking, and that they can enlarge their "fair share" of the relationship.

Strategy 2:  Reduce delivery channel costs; create barriers to entry for competition. 

Organizations should move customers and transactions from high-cost channels to low-cost channels, such as the Internet.

Strategy 3:  Reinforce the brand.

CRM is the fulfillment of the promise created around the brand. This strategy emphasizes the handoff from branding media, such as television, to more interactive media, such as the call center.

Strategy 4:  Create customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The goal is happier customers. Every interaction with the customer either creates satisfaction or destroys it.

Which customer-centric strategy is your organization pursuing?  Do you find one strategy has dominated your investments in CRM? Maybe it’s time to change your focus?

Purisma, which has been in stealth mode for two years, will unveil this week the Purisma Customer Registry, a technology for matching and managing customer identities.

Hoping to appeal to smaller businesses and fend off competition from open-source rivals, Oracle plans to release a free version of its database software. The company has not made it official yet, but the expectation is that by week’s end, Oracle will announce that Oracle 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) will be available for free download before the end of the year. Oracle rolled out a new version of the 10g today, but did not refer to the free version.

Both Salesforce.com and NetSuite’s founders worked for Oracle before branching off to start their own companies. TARGUSinfo On Demand data – Get critical customer and prospect information right the first time, every time.

Having prevailed in a clash with the U.S. Department of Justice over its purchase of PeopleSoft, Oracle is again under the DOJ’s antitrust scrutiny.

In a world where all products and services are becoming commodities, what increasingly defines a business today is its customers, who create all its value and, at the same time, are its scarcest resource. Don Peppers, a founding partner of the consultancy Peppers and Rogers, explained last month that we need to win a customer’s trust and to maximize a new metric that he calls “return on customer” and which can be regarded as “a speedometer of organic growth.”

Vendor quick to ease rising concern among resellers caused by recently unveiled hosted service Resellers have expressed uncertainty over the benefits of Sages new hosted CRM service, launched last week.

The project will look to develop a “common, open source CRM platform for deployment throughout Europe,” one which will be offered as a cost-effective ASP service that “can be readily integrated into pre-existing applications.”

By WS&T Staff Wall Street & Technology October 27, 2005 Financial advisory firm Stout Risius Ross, Inc. (

Unless a person has an inherent desire to provide great customer service, external reinforcement only offers a temporary solution, writes Larry Chao.

You can’t buy customer loyalty. But you can earn it. Loyal clients aren’t simply the by-product of doing your job well. That will get you a room full of satisfied clients who may drop your name a time or two. It takes customer relationship management (CRM) to develop clients who provide a steady stream of “slam dunk” referrals and repeat business throughout a life-long business relationship.

Extract not available.

The request is a strong reminder of the legal clash between Oracle and the DoJ last year over the database giant’s purchase of PeopleSoft. A federal judge in San Francisco in the end ruled in favour of Oracle. ‘

R&D in networking hardware and software is accelerating, as several new development projects have been announced this month in Bangalore and Pune, India, and at least one foreign firm has located operations in the United States, according to experts. Last week Cisco Systems, which first established operations in India in 1995, broke ground on a brand-new, 1 million-square-foot R&D facility in Bangalore, budgeting US$50 million for the project and planning to hire 3,000 scientists, engineers and researchers.

General News of Friday, 28 October 2005 GT to bridge digital divide in rural areas with e-CARE Accra, Oct.