Customer Service

It's widely understood that new customer service channels such as social, email, knowledge bases and the like have left the service agent with harder problems to solve. Those channels are here to stay, because when they work well, they solve problems for pennies. It can cost many dollars to resolve ...

Salesforce has released LiveMessage, a chatbot that lets enterprises users engage customers through messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, SMS or MMS directly within its Service Cloud. Service agents can respond to customers on Facebook Messenger after accessing their records, for example, and t...

Traditionally in this year-end piece, I peer into my cloudy crystal ball and forecast the year ahead in CRM. Sometimes I'm close, other times not, but either way, my predictions quickly are forgotten. This year, I've decided just to say what I want rather than what realistically might happen. Since ...

Before you sit down at your kitchen table and lose money shopping for Christmas and holiday gifts, you'd be well advised to learn the rules of the online shopping road. They can be very different from one vendor to another, so shop carefully. Some companies do a great job with customer care. Others ...

Oracle recently announced a new connection between its Service and IoT clouds. That makes total sense to me. I bet a lot of folks think of the Internet of Things as those machines that do things directed by algorithms -- and if so, they might wonder why they need to be connected to customer service,...

Enterprises have been warming to digital transformation, but it's crucial that they maintain a human element in their customer interactions, according to a study Verint published last week. Researchers surveyed more than 24,000 consumers and 1,000 businesses across 12 countries for the study. Organi...

IBM on Tuesday announced that it will incorporate its IBM Watson cognitive capabilities into the MobileFirst for iOS ecosystem to help boost the productivity of the global workforce. It was a little more than two years ago that the company entered a groundbreaking partnership with Apple to enhance t...

The massive amount of data available from connected devices creates an unprecedented opportunity for increased optimization of products and services -- and, consequently, revenue. The deep investment in big data gathering and analytics is fueled by an ability to create added value for companies base...

Dreamforce for many years has been too big for a single person to cover. While I participate in covering events like this, inevitably I am reduced to the story of the three blind people and the elephant. You can't experience enough of the elephant to describe it unless you can see it. Using your han...