Expert Advice

Fast, easy and accurate -- ask any consumer to describe good customer service and that is the likely response you'll receive. Traditionally, people have reached out to call centers, confident that a well-trained customer service representative would have the knowledge to fill in the blanks. But movi...

Software development drives business innovation, but many application development teams are stymied by some common, solvable challenges that can sidetrack the success not only of their project, but also of their company. The top three: achieving effective alignment with business concerns; managing t...

Is $185,000 the right price for a single generic top-level domain? No, it's definitely not. If a gTLD is supposed to provide worldwide exclusive use of a name identity with unlimited sub-name-brand-extension-domains, this amount is insufficient for ICANN to add critical features to the same applicat...

While the purpose of this series is to talk about the future of enterprise computing and how advances and technology are moving us along a certain path to that future, if we stop for a moment and look at the recent history in enterprise computing, it's clear that we've come a long way in a few short...

As a CRM journalist, I always enjoy talking to integrators (or resellers, or VARS, or partners, or whatever term they choose to describe themselves). It's always an interesting contrast to speaking with vendors. The discussion you have with a vendor is like taking an anatomy course; the discussion y...

As customers become more digital, social and mobile, SMBs have significant opportunity to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through a differentiated customer experience, just like their enterprise competitors. However, those who are unwilling to invest in solutions that embrace the needs of ...

Not all computing tasks are created equal, and the same goes for computing systems. Corporations and other organizations will be best served by systems that are designed to perform particular jobs or are flexible enough to adapt to them -- one of the core principles of engineering. In techie jargon,...

The superstar movie rental giant Netflix rapidly graduated to movie streaming and suddenly splintered off its old-fashioned DVD-by-mail service to create "Qwikster," a separate division with a name identity inspired by the likes of "Twitter" and "Napster," etc. When the outcry of customers reached...

What's the ultimate goal of CRM? As much as I and others of my ilk might talk about the positive interactions, good feelings and peer-to-peer relationships that result when CRM is done well, they're just happy means to an end. The end is, and always will be, inflating the bottom line. While a lot of...

Let's be honest: Marketing has always been considered a little "soft" in the business world. That may be why CMOs have one of the shortest average tenures -- about two years -- of any corporate board member. Marketing's reputation comes from reporting on metrics like "impressions" and "brand awaren...