Features

• CRM: When Should Customer Service Run the Show?

  By David Taber | 27 November, 2009 06:46

  CRM systems tend to have a wider user base across enterprise organizations than most other software applications do. Industry analyst surveys indicate that over 60 percent of CRM systems are used by sales teams, about 40 percent used by marketing, and about a third of the systems are used by customer support. Despite this wide range of users, my guess is that the real driver or "owner" of the CRM system is even more strongly biased towards the Sales VP.

• Consumers wary of speech recogntion technology: report

  By Tim Lohman | 02 September, 2009 12:50

  Organisations looking to implement voice automation systems need to think very hard about the needs of their customers before doing so, a new report has found.

• TI's Web 2.0 success story: better customer service

  By C.G. Lynch | 01 July, 2009 08:03

  Back in 2004, Texas Instruments (TI) noticed a problem in its customer service department, one that's typical in companies serving technical customer bases. Some of TI's main customers (engineers) buy and use some of the company's most technical products, such as digital signal processors. TI needed a better way to quickly provide answers to customer questions, without the customer sitting on hold with a call center, waiting for a representative who might not even have the technical expertise to answer the inquiry.