Oracle’s attempt to tackle the customer experience cloud market has been advanced with the new acquisition of cloud-based marketing automation solutions provider Eloqua. Oracle expects to achieve an extensive product, which will help companies market, sell, and support their customers. The solution should be able to offer multi-channel and personalized client interactions. Read the rest of this entry »

Social media provides data to the enterprise on how its customers are interacting. Even though most decision makers understand that gathering and analyzing this data is important, it’s not always easy to know how.

Astute Solutions was founded in 1995 to offer call center and issue management software, which later became a full customer service solution. The acquisition of RealDialog from LiveWire Logic in 2006 added knowledge management to the offering. In 2010, Astute acquired Gamma Engineers for its social media management technology. This has evolved into today’s Astute Social Relationship Management (SRM) solution, with the ambition to offer functionality not just for managing social data, but for using the results in the cross-channel customer relationship activities of a company. Read the rest of this entry »

CRM has changed enormously over the past decade. New technologies and changing customer behavior have both had a great impact on the way companies manage their existing and potential clients. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday Nimble released the public beta of its social CRM platform at the Demo Spring 2011 event. In a future blog post, I will share my thoughts on the platform after trying the beta release, which is by the way open for invites. Read the rest of this entry »

In part one of my interview with Martin Schneider, Senior Director of Communications at SugarCRM, we discussed the history of SugarCRM and the open source customer relationship management (CRM) space. Part 2 describes SugarCRM’s approach to development, their partner ecosystem, and how social media has changed CRM. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Martin Schneider, Senior Director of Communications at SugarCRM where he provided information about the company, Sugar 6 (latest version), and social customer relationship management (SCRM). In this first up close and personal blog post, Martin will discuss what made Sugar CRM the most successful open source CRM product and one of the best CRM products in the market.

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If you have decided to use social customer relationship management (SCRM) to sell your products or services, you should be ready to adapt to what your customers consider SCRM to be, not vice versa.

As I mentioned in my post Social CRM is Dead, Long Live Social Media Flavored CRM, I see the “social” in SCRM as being related to human welfare and not only to social media. Therefore, SCRM should not only allow me to use social media when interacting with companies and brands, but it should also allow both companies and their customers (potential or existing) to have a positive impact on human welfare. Read the rest of this entry »

According to Paul Greenberg, an expert in customer relationship management (CRM) and social CRM (SCRM), the term “social customer” was coined by Chris Carfi “some six or seven years ago.”

But before being social customers, we are social media users—we use Facebook, Twitter, create blogs and comments on Web sites, and sometimes we can even integrate some of these tools and make them work together. Unfortunately, this is not an easy thing to do and if you use three or more social media tools, you will have a hard time integrating all of them (or most of them). Why? When a social media company launches a new product, they want to keep their followers, users, etc. and they would rather not share them with others (for instance, Twitter has an application that lets you find followers on Facebook, which was recently blocked by Facebook). Read the rest of this entry »

Maximizer probably needs no introduction, but I will do it anyway for people who are not very familiar with the customer relationship management (CRM) space. It was founded in 1987 and is one of the CRM pioneers that created personal information management systems (PIM) and opportunity management systems. The first version of the product (3.0, launched in 1996, one year after the acquisition of the Maximizer product line from Modatech Systems) was promoted as “a full-featured contact management system with activity scheduling.”

Many things have changed since 1996, including: Read the rest of this entry »

Customer relationship management (CRM) is not and cannot really be social, since social means “of, relating to, or occupied with matters affecting human welfare” (definition taken from The Free Dictionary). In my opinion, CRM does not really affect human welfare, since it brings advantages only to its users and to the customers of the companies using it.

In this blog post, I will explain why CRM is not social and why social CRM (SCRM) is nothing more than CRM using social media tools. Read the rest of this entry »