Welcome to the Friday, January 18th edition of the CRM Week in Review. You've made it through another week, but we know you wouldn't have a sense of completeness until you've heard all there is to know about what happened in the world of CRM this week. You know you wouldn't.
First, we'll talk about the M&A activity for the week.
Infogain Corporation, a vendor of CRM, ERP, integration and business intelligence products and services, this week announced its acquisition of Spider Systems, Pune. With the acquisition, Infogain officials say, the firm can provide services for Oracle Applications, PeopleSoft, Seibel, Oracle Fusion, as well as Oracle Retail. Infogain officials also point to their new ability to offer an Oracle DBA "Think Tank," a team supporting the company's 75+ Oracle DBAs. Read the full article at
http://billing.tmcnet.com/topics/back-office/articles/18711-crm-vendor-infoga-acquires-spider-systems.htm
PacificNet, which sells gambling technology as well as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in China, has announced completion of the acquisition Octavian International, a worldwide supplier of gambling technology, products and systems. Read the full article at
https://callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com/analysis/articles/18620-crm-vendor-pacificnet-acquires-octavian.htm
How high are customer expectations nowadays? So high, wrote ContactCenterSolutions's Susan Campbell this week, that most companies may not be able to keep up with them. Companies that are focused on delivering a satisfying experience to the customer may or may not be successful in keeping pace with consumer expectations. One of the reasons why could be that expectations are rising faster than standard measurement tools within the contact center can capture. Read Susan's article at
http://www.tmcnet.com/comsol/articles/18573-contact-centers-struggling-keep-up-with-customer-expectations.htm
Is your CRM ugly? Well, spruce it up in time for spring. ContactCenterSolutions's David Sims wrote this week that Upswing CRM has announced a "Spring Awakening '08" promotion for the forthcoming release of Upswing CRM for Wealth Management. The new release, "with its Web 2.0 orientation," will launch in the next few weeks, the Upswingers say. The Spring Awakening promotion, "with its themes of bloom, growth, beauty, and the waking up to a new era of CRM" reflects "the visual and functional design elegance along with a blossoming of new features in the new version of Upswing CRM." Read about the full make-over at:
https://callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com/analysis/articles/18260-upswing-crm-announces-wealth-management-tool-slams-ugly.htm
Customer service deliverables is an important concept in the contact center. In fact, the purpose of the contact center is to ensure that the customer’s interaction with the company is satisfying, if not enjoyable. The challenge for contact centers is that they do not always know exactly how satisfied the customer is, or how to measure what the customer feels would help to improve the interaction. Find out how to rise to the challenge:
http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/workforce-optimization/articles/18407-contact-centers-should-turn-agents-gather-valuable-information.htm
What, exactly, is a customer's "digital body language"? It's the information that can be read by savvy companies from how customers are interacting with you on digital media. As the business-to-business (B2B) buying process moves online, marketing and sales teams need to be tightly aligned in order to capture, read and respond to prospects’ digital body language, such as their response to online campaigns and Web-based activity. These activities can direct sales teams to the best leads and even provide insight into the prospect’s role and stage in the buying process.
Read the full article at
https://callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com/analysis/articles/18371-eloqua-corp-intros-solution-reading-b2b-customers-digital.htm
Salesforce.com, it turns out, is going on tour. The company this week announced "Tour de Force," a worldwide road show designed to "inspire and educate customers, partners and developers" on the Force.com Platform-as-a-Service. The tour kicks off with a day-long event in San Francisco on January 17th that will feature salesforce.com chairman, CEO and lead guitarist Marc Benioff with Marc Andreessen, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. Read the full article at
https://callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com/analysis/articles/18350-salesforcecom-announces-world-tour-de-force.htm
On-demand CRM provider Selltis, LLC this week announced the launch of its next-generation version of the company’s namesake CRM solution, Selltis Sales 5.0, which is delivered via a hosted, software as a service (SaaS) business model. Expanding on the company’s proprietary Hyperrelational technology that offers “many-to-many” data linking, the new Selltis Sales 5.0 utilizes what the company calls a "Link The Way You Think" approach. Read the full article at
https://callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com/analysis/articles/18280-selltis-offers-new-version-its-on-demand-crm.htm
That's it for this week, CRMers.
