Customer management white papers

Everyone, it seems, is talking about the cloud. This white paper is one of a series that aims to move beyond the hype that currently surrounds the cloud.

In today's challenging global economy, strengthening customer relationships and improving operational efficiencies are top priorities for banks and financial institutions. As competition for deposits and pressure to reduce risk increases, banks continue to seek ways to gain greater customer knowledge and collaborate across divisions to improve service and retain profitable customers.

Streamline and automate your sales processes and enable sales people to create a single view of the customer to help ensure a shorter sales cycle, higher close rates, and improved customer retention.

Provide marketing professionals with robust data cleansing and segmentation tools, leading campaign management features, and insightful marketing analytics to increase the effectiveness of marketing programs, improve efficiencies, and better track key metrics.

Deliver customer information, case management, service history, and support knowledge directly to the desktops of customer service representatives and supervisors, giving them the tools to deliver consistent, efficient service that enhances customer loyalty and profitability.

This Microsoft/ Magic Quadrant whitepaper looks at customer service software for the human agent in the contact center versus self-service. Enterprise demands for analytics, integration with Web customer service and communities are driving changes in the industry.

Long before recessionary pressures gripped economies, businesses were struggling with the challenges of an increasingly competitive sales environment. As more companies vie for the attention of demanding and information-empowered customers, the ability of sales, marketing and service organizations to improve the efficiency of their customer-facing teams becomes a competitive essential.

Lean in a supply chain context is about a holistic view of procurement, manufacturing distribution and sales order processing. This means that some level of enterprise technology is necessary to view the organization in an integrated context instead of as functional islands. However, before technology can facilitate the lean supply chain, manufacturing executives need to start thinking in lean supply chain terms. We will be reviewing those terms and sharing the key concepts that are the foundation for the lean effort.

Selling through a slump: An industry-by-industry playbook to help you prepare for the recovery brings together 11 top sales blogger-trainer-authors from 11 distinct vertical market sectors, ranging from retail to healthcare to telecoms — because one size doesn't always fit all. It contains the best of the best — Top 10 (and more) lists on how to sell in a recessionary market from well-known sales experts. Each list is a mixture of practical-tactical tips and experience-based wisdom.

This white paper report discusses how Web 2.0 systems and applications can support management of sales processes. Instead of focusing on specific technologies such as social networking, blogs, wikis, or other technologies, it focuses on business processes.

Over the past decade or more, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has been the strategic approach that most companies had taken in trying to figure out how to supervise their customers' behavior. Typically, it was via technology and processes and analytic algorithms that were tied to an often amorphous management strategy. Gathering data about the customer and tracking all customer transactions were the way that CRM was used to ascertain the individual customer's thinking. But that is CRM 1.0 - traditional CRM.

A few years ago, a salesperson heading into a meeting with a new prospect in a distant city could not count on much help from her mobile Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application. The problem was that the application was usually a replica of the corporate CRM application, meant to be used on a desktop, not on a handheld device.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) used to be relatively straightforward. Customer relationships were managed exclusively by the company, its employees, and its partners. However, times have changed. The way customers, partners, and employees interact has changed. And, as a result, CRM needs to change as well. The spread of Web 2.0 concepts in everyday consumer activities has altered the way people relate to one another and how information is delivered. People want applications that are engaging and that can deliver the answer they need instantaneously.

Continual cost cutting and greater financial responsibility is the pressure that today's organisations are under — so much so that they may inadvertently reverse the effectiveness of their supply chain, which increases costs and waste instead of profitability. There exists a very real financial stress caused by corporate objectives and Wall Street expectations when a company goes public, at which time costs, gross margins, and quarterly profit and loss reporting become the dominant decision-making influencers.

Does your organisation see the recession as a sales problem or a strategic business opportunity? Most organisations see it is as the former, missing significant opportunity to grow their business. A lot of companies are responding to the recession as if it was just a slow sales time. But there are fundamental differences between a time of slower sales and a recession.