The blend of CRM with social media engagement is evolving the “contact center” into the “customer engagement center.” This Gartner Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center analyzes and ranks the vendors in this dynamic market based on Gartner’s stringent and thorough market and product criteria. Discover who the leaders, visionaries, challengers and niche players are among this group of 13 solution providers.

Strong CRM depends on a balance of push and pull strategies. To achieve sustainable engagement, relevance and value must be delivered. By connecting experience-driven brand engagement (online and offline) with tangible in-store behavior, marketers can develop strategies to drive both emotional and physical loyalty. It’s time to re-envision your CRM strategy with consumer-led insights so you can earn long-term loyalty from your best consumers and acquire more of the ‘right’ consumers.

The benefits of CRM integration are many and companies that pursue smart integration strategies discussed in this eBook will reap the rewards: tighter alignment with their sales and customer support teams, customer engagement and loyalty, and rising sales.

This eBook calls out and explores four significant advantages of CRM integration:

- Expanding beyond lead generation
- Supplying data your business leaders need
- Holding Sales accountable for lead follow up
- Motivating customer evangelism and engagement

Cars.com uses IBM software to gain a 360-degree view into its technology infrastructure and applications, giving the company visibility into the user experience of its consumers, dealers and advertisers.

The IBM Institute for Business Value produced this executive report. Learn how social business has a significant impact on the way organizations create valuable customer experiences and accelerate innovation across the entire organization.

Top organizations are looking for a new generation of ERP that supports multi-tiered businesses, is easy to use, flexible, and powerful enough to support a growing organization. Aligning these solutions with a carefully selected service partner can fuel growth and maximize ROI.

Help create business value by becoming a social business in the cloud. IBM SmartCloud for Social Business social collaboration services provide integrated email, social business capabilities and third-party applications to help deepen relationships, drive operational effectiveness and optimize workforces.

Contact Centers are the Life Blood of Companies. Too often, companies don’t see it as the business asset it is. This is compounded if you are not a Fortune 500 company who can afford large dedicated  technical resources for the contact center, and who do not have a multi-year customer service strategy in place. As technology has evolved, contact centers have become valuable assets that drive business performance through their impact on your customers.

Savvy executives recognize that effectively utilizing their contact center technology and human resources can mean the difference between being a market leader and just being one of the pack. In this paper, The Broadening of Contact Center Horizons, we’ll look at how investing in the right contact center solution can help transform your enterprise and enhance your business outlook.

While customer service can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, companies should take caution as experts agree, those who approach it on a defensive footing can end up doing more harm than good. In  fact, according to a 2010 study from Harris Interactive, 82% of consumers stopped doing business with a company because of poor customer service.

Adopting a proactive approach to customer service has the potential to attract customers rather than losing them, to drive growth and innovation instead of hindering both. This resource outlines Five Ways to  Transform Customer Service into a Strategic Advantage. Read on to learn how to:

•  Change perspectives and create a service-oriented culture
•  Make service part of your brand
•  Measure and measure again
•  Build long-term, valuable relationships with your customers
•  And more!

Every company wants to provide exceptional customer service, but many feel challenged to deliver – both technically and philosophically. Sometimes it seems like only the largest companies with the deepest pockets and revered customer service mindset can achieve that goal. That’s old thinking. Today, any company with the right basics and methodology can deliver exceptional customer service.

To learn how your company can take steps to delivering customer service once thought only for the most sophisticated companies, download the white paper: The Changing World of Customer Service: Building a Customer-first Foundation to Stay Ahead of the Game. This whitepaper discusses a deeper logic to multi-channel communication - addressing the needs of today’s media-savvy customer with your company’s need for an integrated strategy of core beliefs and a foundation to grow on.

Customers are interacting with your brand through multiple channels including the website, retail store, contact center and even social media. You have to understand all of these multichannel interactions collectively to develop a complete Voice of the Customer.

Download this white paper and learn how you can easily gather and leverage data from all customer touchpoints, including social media, to deliver a superior multichannel customer experience.

This TRUSTe research report will help you to understand consumer concerns, consumer trust, and business impact related to online privacy of adults in the U.S. It will provide insight on how customers are responding to privacy issues related to websites, mobile apps, e-commerce, social networks and email. It will also provide legal, marketing and product development professionals with tips on managing data privacy to ensure compliance and build trust.