One of the most compelling business concepts to emerge in the past few years is the strategy of customer experience management (CEM). Its proponents see CEM as the guiding principle for creating customer-centric organizations that manage all aspects of customer interaction with a company or its brands, products, or services. CEM seeks to exceed the scope of customer service and to engage customers at a higher level of interaction.

Customer feedback, Web self-service, business intelligence, knowledge management, measuring and improving metrics-all are meaningless buzzwords: Customers and prospects will judge your company by the experiences they have with it. Increasingly, customer experience is determined in the absence of your best salesperson or customer service representative, and the innovative implementation of technology solutions is what will determine how your company is perceived in the market.

The six perspectives included in this special section will undoubtedly trigger your own thoughts on how to improve your company's efforts to manage your customer experiences.

Themes included:
-Practical approach to driving sales through CEM and Social Networking
-5 Best Practices to transform online Customer Experiences
-Web Self-Service Experience
-Top 10 Customer Support mistakes and how to avoid them
-Turbo-Charging your Service Organization
-Enterprise Feedback Management

Now more than ever, business leaders are challenged to guide their organizations through an ever-shifting landscape of opportunities and pitfalls. The current business climate demands clear decision making by executives, and tools that offer better business intelligence and customer insights are essential for achieving optimal outcomes. Making better-informed decisions is essential to the success of executives and the businesses they manage.

In this special supplement to CRM magazine, six leading vendors with very different tools for augmenting the decision-making process share their insights for illuminating everything from the intricacies of "uplift marketing" to pipeline management to combat the classic "disappearing forecast" at the end of a quarter. Business analytic solutions that deliver real-time snapshots of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can not only enhance executive insight into the health of the
organization, but can also help individuals stay on track producing the results that roll up into the larger KPIs.

Some themes from this issue:
-Using metrics to manage customer relationhsips
-Optimizing customer experience with multichannel interaction analysis
-Pipeline management with analytics
-Customer retention
-Maintaining accurate customer contact data
-Unlocking the value of CRM data
-ROI through better customer data and intelligence

There are probably few areas in the modern corporation which are as difficult to manage as marketing on a large scale. Developing, implementing, executing, measuring, and fulfilling
marketing programs and campaigns are an organizational challenge that begs for superb organizational and operational processes and tools to drive top-line revenue.

In this month's supplement to CRM magazine, six different essays from leading vendors offer concrete solutions to help you fulfill your company's objectives.

Themes in this Section:

- Quality vs. Quantity Leads
- Digital Marketing Best Practices
- Marketing Portals
- Database Prospecting and Lead Management
- Customer References for Improved Marketing
- Making Enduring Customer Relationships

In the following pages, eleven stalwart vendors of contact center solutions offer their perspectives on how executives charged with delivering exceptional customer service can succeed in maximizing
customer satisfaction with available resources.

SOME OF THE THEMES INCLUDE:

-Enabling Customer Success
-Online Chat
-Customer Centricity
-Driving Profit with Customer Care
-First-Call Relevance
-Customer Engagement
-Customer Risk Management - Move Beyond Recording
-Customer Data - Security
-Virtual Agents and the Live Agent

You may notice something seemingly odd as you read this special supplement to CRM magazine: The various solutions vendors only briefly mention the benefits of deploying software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. These vendors prefer to concentrate on enumerating their own value propositions as tools for driving benefits to your business. According to Analyst Perspectives, 55 percent of businesses based in North America will have deployed at least one SaaS application by the end of 2008. Clearly, business acceptance of SaaS offerings has moved beyond the early-adoption phase.

In the following pages of the section, you'll find eight leading (but very different) SaaS providers telling their stories and explaining how they can help your company achieve its goals with CRM on demand.

In the following sponsored supplement to CRM magazine, you'll find seven different approaches to knowledge management. These leading vendors have achieved real-world benefits by aligning demand forecasts with inventory control and supply chain management, and by applying best practices to augment your marketing or product-introduction efforts-all using KM 2.0 to guide the process. None of this was even possible just a few short years ago.

Astonishingly quick adoption rates and amazingly deep customer engagement are the drivers that have turned KM into a business strategy with immediate impact on contact centers, Web selfservice, back-office operations, and good oldfashioned face-to-face selling.

For those of you who may not be familiar with Salesforce.com’s AppExchange marketplace, it’s an eminently easy-to-navigate on-demand delivery platform allowing Salesforce.com users to research, evaluate, and purchase applications from third-party independent software vendors (ISVs). These ISVs have built their applications specifically to integrate with the Salesforce.com platform. Currently there are more than 800 applications available in the AppExchange marketplace, from more than 450 vendors.

In this sponsored supplement to CRM magazine, we are showcasing 11 exciting AppExchange solutions from areas such as analytics, contract management, voice automation, marketing automation, mobile technology, and social media.

Field salespeople are mobile. They’re lead hunters. They don’t want to be pinned down to a desk, nor should they be. They’d rather be pressing the flesh with customers and prospects. And, if your organization is at all interested in growing top-line revenue, it should be doing everything possible to support this behavior with better Mobile CRM technologies and solutions. The best companies in your sector probably are.

For more information on mobile/wireless CRM solutions, take a look at the vendors presented in this white paper. Their wireless solutions can help your company hit its sales targets.

Many of the early CRM vendors who started out in specific market segments soon found themselves boxed in, with no place to grow. On the flip side, broader CRM solution providers soon began developing expertise in a whole range of markets, and found they were able to transfer that knowledge quickly to new customers. Much of the value proposition that prospects were looking for amounted to having the vendor answer one question: "What kind of experience have you had working with companies like mine?"

In this special section of CRM magazine, we’ve asked vendors to highlight what their companies do particularly well, so that you can benefit from their specific expertise and experience. The result? Six very different solutions ranging from leveraging social data in the enterprise to productivity solutions that every salesperson can benefit from.

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT AND E-COMMERCE—could there be a more natural combination? In many ways, e-commerce applications, such as the online storefront, are great examples of CRM theory put into practice. Your storefront is like a laboratory, with the aspects of sales, marketing, customer service, and analytics all there to be adjusted, without the unknown variable of employee quality to contaminate the results.

Creating strong relationships with customers online—and, ideally, expanding those relationships to include offline customer interactions—presents special challenges, but new technologies are making it possible. In this White Paper, five leading vendors offer their insights on how to maximize your online channel.

Consumer’s expectations and the advent of broadband accesshave altered the way we interact with our customers and howthey expect to interact with us. People want product information24/7, want to place orders, track shipments, resolve problems, and getsupport at a time and through any channel of theirchoosing. In a very short period of time the expectations ofcustomers for good service and access to information hasmade instant access a true competitive advantage for SMBs.This white paper examines SMB solutions that offer clear businessvalue and complement—not compete with—the resources needed by thecompany’s core business.

The following two sponsored-content pieces presentcomplementary considerations for today's speech applicationintegration strategies. They discusssecure interface necessities and clarify how toachieve extended business value from speechtechnologyinvestments. Both concepts are criticalto your operations and to the success of yourspeech-enabled initiatives.