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.

WISDOM THROUGH UNDERSTANDING
In this White Paper you’ll find nine distinct essays covering best practices in business intelligence, analytics, and data mining. The common goal of these essays is to help organizations better understand the world around them by making sense of raw data. In fact, the first essay, "Turning Information into Insights," asks you to imagine every person in your business making better choices—every time, and in every situation. This broad and sweeping premise may sound a bit utopian, but it’ s at the crux of what these tools are intended to help us accomplish in the first place: recognizing patterns that help us make smarter decisions.

DIFFERENTIATE YOUR COMPANY WITH SELF-SERVICE THAT SATISFIES YOUR CUSTOMERS - AND SAVES YOU MONEYLearn the latest techniques and strategies from the latest installment in CRM magazine’s Best Practices series and get five different thought provoking white papers from these leading solution providers:

• Microsoft - REDEFINING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE THROUGH SELF SERVICE: Are your customers falling through the cracks?
• Genesys - THE INTELLIGENT CUSTOMER FRONT DOOR: Rolling out the Red Carpet for Increased Customer Satisfaction
• Oracle - "GOING GREEN" WITH ORACLE SELF-SERVICE E-BILLING: Reduce Your Carbon Footprint While Transforming Customer Relationships
• eGain - eGAIN BUSTS FIVE WEB SELF-SERVICE MYTHS
• Astute Solutions - AM I GETTING THROUGH TO YOU? Leverage the real "voice of the customer" to ensure your self-service doesn’t lead to dead ends

As marketing has grown in complexity over the pastdecade, the demands on those in charge—the ChiefMarketing Officers—have also increased to a point wheretheir positions are becoming increasingly untenable.According to a recent study by the CMO Council, theaverage tenure of a CMO is now less than two years. Thepressures of targeting, acquiring, and retaining customersin a hyper-competitive business environment are forcingCMOs to look to new solutions that can help themincrease their efficiency and effectiveness while providingmeasurable results.

Does your contact center deliver world class service to your customers and prospects?

Download this special supplement from CRM magazine's February issue and learn Best Practices in Contact Center Solutions from nine leading solution providers — all in one place.

In this 16 page section, you will get these concise viewpoints to help you gain competitive advantage:

• "Going Green" in the Contact Center - Reduce Costs and Improve the Customer Experience while Making a Positive Impact on the Environment Oracle
• Increasing Agent Productivity & Satisfaction - Winning strategies to improve agent effectiveness, increase profitability and ensure customer satisfaction Genesys
• Doing More with Less in Contact Centers: Strategies and Best Practices eGain
• Analytics-driven Workforce Optimization: Greater Insight for Enterprise Customer Service Verint
• Maintain Your Competitive Edge with Interaction Analysis Autonomy eTalk
• Solve Customer-Related Challenges and Achieve Operational Efficiency - Streamlining processes from the contact center across the supply chain moves retailers from multi-channel to cross-channel—providing an optimal customer experience. Sterling Commerce
• Best Practices for Survey Success DO's and DON'Ts Vovici
• Customer Insight 2.0: Managing unstructured data brings brilliance to Voice of the Customer initiatives Astute Solutions
• Essential Managers Guide to Extraordinary Customer Service Avaya

Probably the biggest innovation in sales forceautomation (SFA) since the early days was theintroduction of the "software-as-a-service" (SaaS) model,which offers two major benefits. The first is pricing, inthat SaaS allows for relatively inexpensive subscriptionsto be sold on a per-seat basis. The vendor takes care ofhosting, upgrades, and service issues, and the salesforce gets low up front costs, shared database access,and expandability. The second big innovation is theimproved capability of mobile CRM for salespeople onthe go.

But the success of SFA implementations still relies on theadoption and compliance of individual salespeople, andencourages as much by offering solutions that are easyto use, presenting a unified view of customer issues andhistory, and featuring useful personal productivity tools.Most SFA offerings available today have been able to findthe balance between making the process as painless aspossible for salespeople while giving managementaccurate reporting and forecasts. For many organizations,especially those in the business-to-business space, SFA isthe key element in their overall CRM strategy.

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.