Applications | Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - News, Features, and Slideshows

Behavioral economics has proven that we're all pretty bad at making rational decisions. So what are you supposed to do about it? Make the people who want shiny new software pay for it themselves.

In broadband networking, the last-mile problem is getting from the big pipes to the end user at a reasonable cost. The last mile in CRM is getting data from users' favorite application -- email -- into the CRM system without disrupting their beloved workflows.

Implementing cloud-based ERP software wasn't exactly a nuts-and-bolts deployment for FMW Fasteners, as the software needed specific fastener manufacturing industry functionality. Experience rolling our cloud CRM helped, as did an experienced consultant. Now FMW's cloud ERP gains are boosting the firm's ecommerce prospects.

An Ernst & Young report says that text analytics and voice-recognition software can help customer-service reps solve problems instead of trying to cross-sell an unhappy caller.

Kirsten Lynch, CMO at US-based Vail Resorts, says her partnership with the CIO leads to better guest experiences.

A smart person once said, 'As long as you're asking the wrong questions, it doesn't matter what answers you come up with.' When it comes to making the business case for CRM, the CFO is likely to ask too many of the wrong questions.

If it's true that the best CRM systems are built, not bought, then which features should you be building? And how should you build them? As with riding a bike, implementing a CRM system gets much harder once you take off the training wheels--or, in this case, the out-of-the-box features.

Everybody knows data warehousing is big data. But when you want to understand what's really going on with your customers' social interactions, terabytes may seem small. It's a laborious process, but the insight it provides can reap big rewards.

Agile is the best approach for CRM projects, but what if management just won't let you go there? What does it really mean to have a fixed-price, fixed-deliverable project? You will have to put in more effort, but you can succeed in the long run.

A user interface can be too easy. Just ask any cloud administrator who learned the hard way that there's no undo feature. Here's our wish list for 10 things that would make a cloud admin's life much easier. Most are a few years in the making, though.

Winners of the 2014 "Ones to Watch" awards -- administered by the CIO Executive Council -- say they're trying to reduce the distance between corporate IT and external customers.

With PC sales lagging, Dell is changing its approach with customers. By asking a single question it is improving the company's relationships with its customers and their users. Competitors, take note.

Customer relationship management experts and seasoned users discuss how to avoid the most common mistakes, so you can get the most out of your CRM software or service with the least amount of hassle.