The CRM Week In Review

By Tracey E. Schelmetic

Editorial Director,
Customer Inter@ction Solutions magazine

 

Welcome to Friday, and therefore another edition of the CRM Week In Review. We know that you don’t feel complete until you’ve educated yourself on the goings-on in CRM, and we wouldn’t want you to start your weekend off feeling incomplete.

TMCnet Contributing Editor David Sims reported this week on SurveyMethods.com, a survey software company that provides online survey creation, deployment and analysis software tools. The company has announced that it now offers the ability to integrate its software into virtually any CRM, call center or ERP system. Support centers often “make the mistake of rating customer support agents on the number of calls they take,” said the company, or how quickly they can get off the phone with one customer to answer the next call. This is a bit like commending a pilot who crash landed an airplane for his efficiency in having shaved valuable minutes off the flying time.

David also reported this week that Canada-based Quorum Information Technologies Inc. has announced the signing of five more dealership customers to XSELLERATOR. Said David, “Awright, now that’s the kind of product name we need more of in this business. Forget these boring anodyne names, we want names that sound like superhero weapons from 1950s comic books and TV cartoons. The X-Sellerator! The Custo-Phaser! The Electro-Profitometer! The Rival-Crushator!” The CRM Week In Review is gently urging David to cultivate an interest in gardening.


Is your CRM mobile? If your workers are mobile (which, unless you’ve tied them to their chairs, they probably are), your CRM ought to be mobile as well. Salentica Systems Inc., a vendor of client management solutions based on Microsoft (News - Alert) CRM 3.0 for financial services firms, announced this week the release of its Salentica Mobile Express. Extending the core functionality of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 to mobile devices is expected to allow Salentica users to access and update information from their CRM systems.

FrontRange Solutions recently conducted a study in which they came to a sobering conclusion: Businesses both large and small increasingly understand the benefits of converged voice and data applications in improving customer service. Yet, despite the ability of such solutions to support effective service differentiation, businesses continue to take a "one-size-fits-all" approach to service delivery. The survey results state, "It is disappointing to note that an overwhelming 81 percent fail to seize the opportunity converged technologies offer to prioritize and give their best customers however defined — the best service and so improve the chances of keeping them.”

The sweetly named SugarCRM this week announced the availability of SugarExchange, a marketplace of Sugar community-built applications and extensions for SugarCRM end-users and administrators. David Sims reported on the new offering, stating, “Taking a page from salesforce.com's playbook, SugarExchange will offer production-ready community extensions as well as Sugar packages (please call them ‘cubes,’ please, please, please) and components to meet all the needs of a Sugar implementation.”

Choosing the right CRM and call center software can help manage information, improve customer service, boost staff productivity and keep you from years of banging your head against the wall because you're stuck with the wrong product. With the vast array of different solutions on the market, each claiming to be “the best,” it can be difficult to zero in on the right solution. This week, TMCnet’s Stefania Viscusi spoke with Christina Valdivia, marketing specialist for contact center software provider Zeacom, about the Top 10 indications that your call center software is the right choice.

JasperSoft Corporation, a vendor in the open source business intelligence space, announced the availability of Jasper4Salesforce for salesforce.com’s AppExchange. Jasper4Salesforce delivers access to advanced reporting by building on top of the AppExchange on-demand platform to integrate its open source reporting product into the Salesforce suite of applications.

That’s all in the world of CRM for this week. As TMC’s Call Center 2.0 show (www.callcenter20.com) kicks off next week in San Diego, we’ll keep you posted on all the latest and greatest news and solutions in the realm of CRM.