Customer ralationship managment today

Customer ralationship managment (CRM) consist of the processes use to organize its contacts and customers
This have any parts. One part its the Analytical CRM to storing about coustomers and about ways to approach customers value, using databases, statistical tools, data mining and reporting.
The purposes of this is designing targeted marketing, cross selling and more.
CRM behavior in order to make decisions to products and services organization stakeholders.
Customer Database indentify customer population, group based on similartities and recommended different groups. applies database marketing techniques ar customer level.
Capture customer data and interact with the customer simultaneusly.

Salesforce.com plans to announce a new application

Salesforce  create enterprise social networks where they can interact with customers and partners.
Salesforce  already offers Chatter, an application for building social networks where employees can collaborate internally. The new Communities application uses the Chatter technology to create external-facing networks.
Salesforce Communities lets you bring together customers, partners and employees into one or more communities.
These external networks can be set up for various purposes, including as customer service hubs, as marketing sites for promoting products or events, and as partner sales support communities.
A company needs to have a Salesforce.com license to set up a community, but the other participants don't need to be Salesforce customers.
Through integration with Salesforce.com's core CRM (customer-relationship-management) system, Salesforce Communities lets users capture data from the social networks and add it to existing CRM files to help generate sales leads, improve customer support and involve product development teams, for example.
While companies have set up discussion forums and online groups for their customers for years, those sites have tended to focus on customer-to-customer communications, said Denis Pombriant, an analyst with Beagle Research.
While these connections among customers can be valuable, a product like Salesforce Communities can insert company employees into the conversations who, with their product expertise and access to customer account details, can offer more detailed input and answers, he said via email.
Customer-to-customer communications can solve a lot of problems, but for many of the real deep issues or issues that relate to customer accounts, for instance, you sometimes need input not just from one vendor representative but from many.
Like all Salesforce applications, Salesforce Communities is a cloud-based service.
Salesforce Communities will be a released in  the fall of this year, and is slated for general availability in the second half of 2013 when pricing details will be announced.

Oracle CRM on Demand update focuses on industries

Oracle CRM On Demand Release 20 adds features for life sciences, financial services, insurance and automotive companies.
But the core product has gotten plenty of upgrades as well, senior vice president of cloud applications strategy.
This is a very well-balanced release. We've done a number of enhancements in things like account planning, assessment, basic customer model and the way we manage customers, as well as marketing functions.
All of the new features are available in every customer's instance of CRM on Demand, with the tools for specific industries turned on during the configuration process. Customers who may want to use features that haven't been switched on just need to go into the management console and enable them.
Life sciences companies now have capabilities for tracking product samples left at customer sites, helping them adhere to often complex and mandatory industry rules and regulations.
Improvements for automotive and financial services companies include improved analytics. For example, auto companies can now define a vehicle as an object, allowing them to run detailed reporting on all aspects of a vehicle, including ownership and transactions, in one place.
Upgrades applicable to all industries include territory realignment, address-sharing between contacts and accounts, tweaks to the user interface and better support for iPads, iPhones and BlackBerry devices.

Zendesk online software Productivity.

The new Zendesk includes a Facebook user interface that helps service agents work faster to resolve calls and customer complaints.
Speed was a primary theme, we wanted to do everything we could to make the software not get in the way.
Zendesk has more than 20,000 customers, ranging from small companies to large enterprises, he said. The latter group includes companies, which are using Zendesk on a departmental basis. But newer companies, including Groupon, are using Zendesk as their strategic help-desk platform, he said.
Some of Zendesk's customers have floors full of support people answering customer queries. If we could save them even a couple seconds on each ticket, over time and millions of tickets, it can add up.
Zendesk is now a single-page application, with an activity stream on the sidebar giving agents a view of updates to open tickets. Their main view shows tickets requiring their attention, and places the most important ones higher up. Once a ticket is resolved, the next most important one is automatically pushed to the agent.
If an agent is working on multiple tickets at once, they can be organized in tabs like a web browser would hold a series of pages, rather than spawning a potentially confusing array of new windows, Peterson said.
Zendesk has also catered to the wishes of power users: The new interface is accessible via keyboard shortcuts, with no need to touch a mouse, if desired. For our power users, this saves a lot of time and effort.
Other new features include a new framework, Zendesk Apps, that allows Zendesk users to integrate third-party applications. Zendesk has also improved the application's content search function and now offers localization in according to a statement.
The new interface comes at no additional charge to subscribers.
It's also optional, and Zendesk plans to continue supporting the earlier version for the foreseeable future, and probably for a very long time. This will allow customers to ease into the transition, perhaps by having a handful of agents work with the new version first, he added. Zendesk is also planning to hold free weekly training sessions and has for the update.

Siri when he talks about his own interest in virtual chat technology.

Siri when he talks about his own interest in virtual chat technology and its potential to augment customer service at his business.
"Recently, it's gotten quite good," Avakian said of virtual assistant technology, "The actual technology, the algorithms are pretty well done," he said.
But Avakian says he has to make sure that the virtual assistant has a "robust knowledge base" to tap into when it accesses the Rent.com data warehouse. The virtual assistant must also understand the types of questions customers are commonly asking, he said.
Virtual assistants, or chatbots, are powered by sophisticated algorithms that can interpret natural language and deliver answers either via online chat or voice.
Apple's Siri may be the most famous example of a chatbot today, but the technology is certain to expand, as Rent.com's plan illustrates.
Avakian said virtual assistants may help customers, especially during late night hours when his 30-member customer support team isn't working.
Rent.com was born in the dot.com boom and thrived through the bust.
The apartment listing service was acquired by eBay for $415 million in 2005. The online auction house sold Rent.com earlier this year to Primedia, which also operates rental listing sites, for an undisclosed price.
The sale is bringing some changes to Rent.com's IT, changes that allow for the addition of virtual assistants.
The company is migrating off the Kana Software enterprise CRM platform it used as a unit of eBay and is moving to Kana's software-as-a-service (SaaS) CRM that will allow it to incorporate virtual chat assistants.
Rent.com plans to use the hosted CRM offering's tools that allow customers to interact naturally, via online chat and are intended to augment staff support.
Following the sale to Primedia, Avakian considered migrating to a number of CRM vendors, but settled on Kana Express, a new version of the vendor's enterprise software that's delivered as a service.
Deciding to go with a SaaS platform was not difficult, said Avakian. "I don't have to spec out room in the data center," he said.
The service also means Rent.com doesn't have to deal with software, upgrades or the IT infrastructure, he added.
Rent.com owns its hardware but uses a Savvis data center facility.
"All the stuff that goes into launching an enterprise class solution is no longer on my lap," said Avakian.
Avakian believes virtual assistants can one day be used to handle routine queries and free customer service reps to deal with more complex problems.
James Norwood, Kana's CMO, said virtual agents use natural language technology that can detect sarcasm, or positive and negative sentiment, but their capability depends on how much knowledge they have access to.
"The longer you have them place, the more you can feed them, the more intelligent they become, and therefore the more accurate they are in their responses," said Norwood, though he added that the technology is by no means perfect.
"Interactive chat is powerful because it allows both human and automated agents to handle multiple conversations at the same time and also provide staff augmentation," said Ray Wang, principal analyst and CEO at Constellation Research.
But Wang said virtual tools may not necessarily keep a business from adding customer service reps, because the tools may encourage more engagement, business and support.

CRM emergence of cloud computing

CRM emergence of cloud computing, companies are evaluating their customer relationship management (CRM) systems. More and more businesses are adopting web based or online CRM systems instead of the traditional ones to ensure less IT investment, quick deployment; easier customization, and low maintenance  and increased customer satisfaction.

Increase your business productivity arious analytical tools and real-time dashboards provide you with a complete view of all customer interactions happening across the departments.
Automate your sales force It will provide the sales team with everything that they want at their fingertips be it a product specification, customer account, contacts, new opportunities, quotes, customer history, and much more that will make their sales process quick, transparent, and easy.
So most businesses cross-sell or up-sell to their current customers. With Online CRM, customer data such as their behavior, taste, buying potential and other details are just a click away from the sales personnel, thus helping them understand their customer.
CRM Online has enhanced business intelligence tools in place which provide multiple views of your valuable data. Real-time insight into required marketing, sales or customer-related data that too on-time means decreased.
This will help the workforce to respond to customer issues, doubts, so on and so forth on time without testing the patience of the customer. Thus, Online CRM helps reduce customer churn.
 Online CRM hosting you can have a familiar sales, marketing and service experience with the help of a next-generation native Microsoft Outlook client, mobile and web-based access, role customized design, and superior user personalization, which improves user adoption and give simple access to data for quick work process.You can customize the Online CRM software to meet your business needs. You just have to drag and drop configuration, tailor it depending upon the role, and set user-level personalization.
Online CRM gives you insightful experience by providing you with process dialogs guidance, inline business intelligence for goal and performance management, and real-time dashboards that provides the most latest data significant to enable sales, service and marketing professionals to do their work efficiently
Dynamics CRM gives a connected experience through flexible cloud development, Microsoft SharePoint capabilities, allowing customers and partners to configure and adapt Microsoft Dynamics CRM to meet particular business requirements.

What is Cloud CRM?

Cloud CRM stands for “cloud customer relationship management” which essentially refers to any cloud-based technology that streamlines and harnesses a company’s customer data for improved customer service and overall revenue.
Customer relationship management is a term that refers to the system through which businesses market, sell, and deliver services to clients. Various CRM solutions are available from different providers that can be tailored to the needs of the business, whether it is a small to mid-sized business or an enterprise organization.
Enabling companies of any size to capture customer information and analyze the data to achieve better product deliverance and ultimate customer service, CRM solutions used to only be stored in central databases consisting of hardware and network infrastructure. Now, with the advancement of cloud technologies, many companies are drifting away from the hard locations of data and moving to Internet-based solutions.
Cloud based  simply means that the technology does not live in an IT  environment such as a hard database, accessible through desktop only. Cloud CRM can now be delivered through the Internet which means that agents, supervisors, and executives can all access the same information in real time.
As long as a user has an Internet connection, he or she may access the cloud CRM applications and software, making customer interactions more timely and less costly. Putting CRM in the cloud means businesses do not have to purchase expensive hardware or software, and the solutions are much less time-consuming to maintain. Retrieving support is fairly easy, since providers of cloud CRM have the same access to the software from wherever their headquarters are located.
Ultimately, the cloud is a growing trend amongst businesses hoping to take advantage of the ability to host technology without having to maintain the cumbersome database, and the CRM industry is steadily coming into play in the cloud arena.