Customer Relationship Management

Salesforce recently announced its agreement to acquire ExactTarget for a whopping $2.5 billion, making it, the largest deal ever done by Salesforce. This news came as a surprise to many as the expectation was that Salesforce would go for acquiring Marketo or Neolane (Adobe going to acquire Neolane) (1). There were several obvious reasons behind it: 80% of Marketo users are also Salesforce users (2) , Marketo is categorized as Leader in Gartner's quadrant for CRM Lead management and has better financial performance compared to ExactTarget. When Oracle acquired Eloqua in February, 2013, a leading marketing automation solution company, several companies operating in same area e.g. Marketo, ExactTarget, Neolane had become hot target. In my view, not getting acquired by Salesforce would cause several challenges for Marketo in coming days as Salesforce would try to push its own marketing automation solution to customers now.

Continue reading "Salesforce acquiring ExactTarget: Is it really on Target?" »

Posted by Amit Kumar at 6:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Have you ever tried to search, using company's intranet, about company's travel allowance policy or connect someone in company who understands a technology better than you and not in your direct network? How interactive and user centric you find your company's intranet? What if you need this information while you are on move? Chances are good that you would be required to search through multiple links, files and directories before hitting at required information. While traveling, even this search may not be feasible at all. As collaboration and mobility are gaining momentum, is this the time to take a look at your legacy intranet system?

Continue reading "Company Community: Arrival of Intranet Killer?" »

Posted by Amit Kumar at 5:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

CRM - Customer relationship Management (CRM) is integral part of every organization success story board and using right source of information at the right time, it can change the dynamics of the organization. CRM is used potentially by the business and its underlying data, infrastructure and application are being managed by IT. Most of the time, CRM Application is the most downstream application in the enterprise architecture; CRM gets data from various source system - Point of Sale (PoS) systems like retail, online, direct channel, various data enrichment stream like Big data e.g, Clickstream data, web log, social networking liking and comments, 3rd party file, customer review comments, common touch points like customer complaint, call back information, prospect capture. Some of the CRM application helps in capturing new prospect through direct channel and sometimes is used for updating existing customer contact details along with notes as well.

Continue reading "Enterprise CRM and DWH hand in hand- Supporting Analytics, CRM, BI to drive Business" »

Posted by Supriyo Chakraborty at 2:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Origin of business and commerce dates back to circa 150,000 years back(1) when prehistoric people started using trading to get things they needed. As it is assumed that it must have started by offering whatever one person has in exchange for some other thing which he wants. It established three basic elements of business; Buyer, Seller and Transaction. With progress in civilization, Business & commerce has evolved a lot and would continue to change in future too.  However, I believe, fundamentals of business has always been remain same and in coming future too, they would remain valid i.e. customer on realizing need for some product (buyers) would approach sellers of the product (organization) and make payment to get the product (transaction).  What is going to change in future is the way customer's need is recognized by customer herself and by organizations, the way alternatives are searched and information is processed by customers and organizations, and the way purchasing decisions are made by customers.

Continue reading "Future of Business & Commerce in next decade: Part 1" »

Posted by Amit Kumar at 7:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Come 2012 and Salesforce.com (SFDC) will add another lethal ammunition to its stable, taking the cloud wars to the next level. On December 15, 2011, Rypple, an innocuous start-up into cloud based human capital management (HCM), signed agreement to be acquired by SFDC. It will be re-christened as SFDC Successforce (http://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-releases/2011/12/111215.jsp). This plugs a significant gap in SFDC offering portfolio, and will have significant (upside) impact for go-to market strategy for its enterprise social offerings. While Radian6's acquisition was aimed at improving the social strategy for SFDC client's customer, Rypple's focus will be on employees of SFDC clients.

Continue reading "Salesforce.com - Expanding footprint of Social Strategy" »

Posted by Saptarshi Basak at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Social commerce is being talked about as a game changer for organizations in the near future. The adoption will be quicker for those operating in B2C domain. Social Commerce in itself is an umbrella under which many sub-models can be defined. One such model that is gaining popularirty are the emergence of Group buying sites like Groupon, Snapdeal.com and others.

This business model has seen lot of growth in recent times. Be it the incessant amount of funding for start-ups or the craze among customers, this concept has caught the eyes of all alike. Being a customer for few of them, somehow I couldn't resist myself in analyzing the model from CRM standpoint. Thanks to my passion with stuffs that brings value to customers :).

Continue reading "CRM Essentials for Group-Buying Sites" »

Posted by Nishith Gupta at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The analogy of the command-and-control and sense-and-respond helps me to connect with the style of management/practices and see the evolution of social CRM in that context. There are emerging discussions about the enterprises that are managing the business in 'sense-and-respond' approach and my post here is somewhat aligns to that thought process. There is a very good post here for those of you who are interested in further venturing into it. Coming back to the topic, let me now drive through the key difference that 'sense and respond' paradigm brings into social CRM.

Continue reading "Social CRM - shifting from 'command control' attutide to 'sense and respond' behavior (Part 2 of 2)" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Often, I have come across the term "Enterprise collaboration" and that too mostly in the context of Social CRM.  In my view, the primary relationship between Enterprise collaboration and Social CRM is due to 'Social' behavior shown by the people and that's about it. The objective for using either of these in the organization can be as different as chalk and cheese.

Continue reading "Enterprise Collaboration and Social CRM - exploring the relationship?" »

Posted by Nishith Gupta at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Scene-1
A tweet by client9 - @no1insocialmedia | thanks for the demo today. Would love it if the community creation in the tool could latch on to the private cloud.

Scene-2
Our Mike, Matt and John(the CIO) are in a meeting to pore over tomorrow’s sales pitches.
Matt: John, Mike was mentioning about some feedback he received on Twitter today from our client from the coast side, about cloud integration capability.

Scene-3/Act1  John: Yeah, Matt lets put it on our to-do list anyways the product management has a long list.

Scene-3/Act2  John: Great Mikey! Matt, let’s use this feedback and see if we can prioritize this one as client9 has been a good advocate of our business. Lets use this feedback effectively as otherwise we need to request such ones. It also costs you see.

Continue reading "Social Media – Feedback is essential and an important ingredient of SCRM. Use it to benefit" »

Posted by Venkataraman Ramanathan at 4:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)