December 2003

Magazine Features

Driven by Service

Aberdeen Group surveyed 380 executives earlier this year, asking them to identify their technology investment priorities for contact centers over the next 18 months. The most surprising takeaway is that 45 percent maintained that the contact center was a "critical" part of their company's product and customer strategy.

Five Ways to Be a Good Customer

What every CRM project leader must do when dealing with internal staff, vendors, integrators, and consultants to ensure the CRM initiative is truly fruitful.

A Winning Formula

Executives from five leading vendors speak out on collaboration between sales and marketing.

The Year in Preview

Two thousand three was a year of rebirth for the CRM industry. Trends took shape--and then took hold. It became increasingly clear that they are not fads. In fact, what are hot trends now will likely be considered business as usual by the end of two thousand four.

Front Office

CRM Success Is Your Responsibility

You have to take responsibility for the success of your initiative before it begins.

Reality Check

Creating Realistic Customer Expectations

Customers are willing to stay if they can expect a significant value of some kind from the product or service they are using.

Insight

Noisemakers Versus Newsmakers

Industry pundit Paul Greenberg says he finds it ironic that CRM is supposed to be about making customers happy, when the CRM players are at each other's throats.

The Next Call Center Headache

The new law stipulates that if an unauthorized party gains access to customer data like a social security number or a credit card account number, the company must immediately notify any and all customers of the breach.

News in Brief

Heard and Overheard

Market Watch: Collaborative Selling

Collaborative selling proponents claim it helps companies realize higher close rates, shorten the sales cycle, and gain higher-value deals.

Lending Support to the Support Process

CRM Defined: ETL Solutions

Speech Technology Begins to Realize Its Potential

At least that's what Industry experts were saying at the recent SpeechTEK Exposition and Educational Conference.

REAL ROI

Suite Success

The logical choice for Waters Corp.'s large implementation was to stick with a vendor it knew.

User Buy-In Boosts Sales

The deployment began in May; the plan is to roll out the new system to 1,200 users over the next year.

Hot Projects: Healthcare

BJC HealthCare's after-hours pediatric-nursing help line looked to improve performance and cut costs for the triage service; Memorial Hermann has been working on CRM improvement plans to boost customer service capabilities; and Franciscan Health System works with Customer Potential Management Marketing Group to maintain and mine an extensive customer database.

Service Revs Up Nissan's Turnaround

Nissan Motor Acceptance Corp. needed to gain a better understanding of agent performance levels to provide faster and better quality service.

Secret of My Success

Getting the Most From CRM Technology

Accuweather has blended UpShot into its systems, making day-to-day operation easy for users to maintain through security, added reports, new reports, and new processes they themselves put in place.