August 2005

Magazine Features

CRM in an Age of Legislation

Privacy laws have forced sales callers and outbound marketers to clean up their act and given them a chance to polish their image.

Energizing Customer Relationships

Utilities are finding ways to improve service through automated technology. The result is increased ROI in the field, at the call center, and across the business.

Do It Yourself

Self-service done right--in the right enterprise--can return some real benefits. Here, a review of the five top vendors with robust, integrated solutions

Front Office

Embracing Change

New product coverage only helped to inflate the 1990s technology bubble by focusing more on the technologies' gee-whiz factor than on the business problem they aimed to solve.

Reality Check

Demystifying the ROI of CRM

Know your biggest pain points and determine how damaging they can be to your business if left untreated.

Customer Centricity

A Recipe for Reduced Turnover: Find the Right Mix

Recent advancements in selection technologies now make it possible to identify various individual traits and attributes before job offers are made.

The Tipping Point

Three Trends to Watch

Business process management, flexible hosted solutions, and return on customer will drive business decisions.

Pint of View

All Up in Your Business

Fixing business relationship problems, advice columnist style.

Insight

The Pulse: What are your data security problems?

RFID: Beyond Concept

Radio frequency ID tagging is no longer a what-if question, but other questions remain.

The Next Step in Anger Management

Speech analytics solutions are enabling companies to track and analyze emotional cues.

A Glimpse at DR-CAFTA

"Outsourcing has more to do with linguistics or the language than it has to do with the trade regulations."

Statistically Speaking

Helping Consumers to Swallow Cookies

Winning customer trust is key to gaining access to personal information.

Required Reading: A Closer Look at Sales and Marketing Alignment

destinationCRM Dashboard

SMBs Are Upping Tech Spending

Technology developments are enticing SMBs to invest more in CRM and ERP applications.

REAL ROI

Headsets Get Set

"If our phones are down for an hour, that's $20,000 in lost business."

Blooming Customer Service

A multichannel flower retailer's handling of peak holiday call volume blossoms.

Learning the ABCs of Marketing

An educational products company uses Omniture's SiteCatalyst to build its Internet marketing campaigns.

Back From the Dead Lead Management

Rainmaker Marketing's Lazarus integration of ACT! resurrects a phone reseller's sales, relationship growth, and agent efficiency.

The Money Tree

A financial services company estimates an 850 percent ROI from implementing Teradata's data warehouse and CRM solutions.

The Bunny Hops Into Marketing Performance

A new data warehouse and software help improve customer retention efforts.

Re:Tooling

Tech Solution: Social Networking Applications

Business Problem: Employees don't share contacts.