Because Old School Retail is Dead–NetSuite Acquires Retail Anywhere
NetSuite’s acquisition of Point of Sale (POS) vendor Retail Anywhere creates a powerful offering that allows retail businesses to compete in the face of a challenging environment.
MindTouch Delivers Knowledge Base for Salesforce Customers
MindTouch is one of the early leaders in the Enterprise 2.0 space –their CEO, Aaron Fulkerson was a regular attendee on the conference circuit. Over the last couple of years however, MindTouch has gone pretty silent as market conditions and heightened competition caused them to disappear from view. I bumped into Fulkerson in San Diego [...]
Salesforce Launches Chatter Communities
Salesforce is this morning announcing a new product, Chatter Communities, that aims to take the engagement aspects of its social tool Chatter out to specific verticals within organizations. Chatter Communities allows an organization to set up a specific community quickly – as an example it could be used to create
Cloud’s Secret Sauce–Zendesk Delivers Best Practice Analytics and Customer Satisfaction Data
I’ve long said that one of the key benefits of cloud applications is the ability of vendors to aggregate and anonymize data from their users, and to offer this anonymized aggregated data back to users who can then derive insights from comparisons between themselves and other vendors. It’s an area fraught with concerns about commercial [...]
Dropping Costs While Still Providing Support–A SmartPayroll Case Study
Over the past couple of years I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time with Asantha Wijeyratne, CEO of SmartPayroll, a New Zealand Payroll provider. I’ve been interested to talk to him, partly because he’s a lovely guy with an interesting business ethic, but also because his business is growing rapidly,
Salesforce Acquires Assistly… Anyone Else See a Disconnect?
News that salesforce has acquired service desk vendor Assistly in a move that many of us had an inkling about well before DreamForce – it seems that dotting the I’s and crossing the t’s of he deal saw it closing after the event. Assistly is a young company that is squarely positioned to compete with [...]
SalesForce Makes Listening And Engaging In The Social Web Easy
Salesforce.com (see previous CloudAve coverage) today announced Service Cloud 3, their customer service software available as SaaS. This new version ties social web to the customer service portal making the interaction across social network seamless. With this tight integration organizations can closely monitor the conversations across social networks and engage with their clients seamlessly from [...]
Why customer service can’t be outsourced
After briefly participating in last night’s #custserv chat, I found myself dissatisfied with chats like these via a medium like that. I like to get definitions straightened out and agreed upon when they get “volatile” so to say. So, for future chats, please find a web page that does (and can be scanned in a [...]
Social Customer Service – proving you failed?
A great comment by Guy Letts to my previous post on Acquisition versus Retention made me write this one – the comment is only half an hour old but blew my mind: There’s another example of how ridiculous is the pursuit of NEW rather than getting the basics right. Some large companies now boast of [...]
Game Changing Customer Support Communities (Presentation)
The following was the Presentation I gave at the Gilbane Conference in Boston Self-Service support communities are beginning to replace the help desk for internal and external customer support. In fact, these communities are simultaneously reducing costs (less support calls) and increasing revenue (SEO lead generation). Follow along as I explore the history of documentation [...]
Would You Pay More for Excellent Customer Service?
A key tenant in Social CRM has always been around providing users with a better experience. In addition to delivering a great product one of the best ways to provide a better experience is through excellent service (yes there are other things). Here’s a simple personal example. In my neighborhood there are two large grocery [...]
Admit Your Frailty and People Will Respect You
So Zendesk (more on them here) had a bad day. Their Worst Day Ever. CEO Mikkel Svane’s face paints a picture: To quote from his post: …a planned hardware maintenance with our service provider exceeded the one hour service window with a whopping three hours. Monday morning we experienced unusual high email traffic, which tipped [...]
Bought a Netbook or Super-slim Notebook? The “Free” Windows 7 Upgrade May Cost You a Bunch.
It’s back-to-school time, and there are some amazing bargains if you’re looking for new laptops: following Walmart, just about all major retailers offer at least one sub $300 model – a bit underpowered, if you ask me, but for $100 more you can get fairly powerful computers, still below the $500 treshold. Netbooks are no [...]
Amazon, the World’s Default Shopping Destination (or is it Zamazon now?)
Recently I wrote about PaaS by Amazon – an no, as much as we like thinking of Amazon as the the key Cloud Computing infrastructure provider, it wasn’t about Platform as a Service. It was about Pasta as a Service. Yes, I am buying Al Dente Carba-Nada as a subscription. After all, before it become [...]
The New Lenovo: Nice Hardware, Dumb Support
Lenovo, home of the (formerly IBM) Thinkpad’s is not exactly known as a price leader: those Thinkpads have a great reputation and a matching price-tag. But times are changing, and Lenovo is becoming budget-friendly: the recently announced Ideapad U series, the G550, and the all-in-one Ideacentre are all “cool” computers with an attractive price. For [...]
