Kevin Scott, senior analyst of marketing strategies at AMR Research in Boston, says e-mail marketing is a viable component to an enterprise's marketing strategy. But to truly succeed, companies must monitor campaigns, track responses, target and test. That's exactly what Scott and other analysts say companies are now turning their attention toward after a lack of funding blocked e-mail investments last year.

CRM was born from a frustration that sales managers had with knowing what their people were really doing. That drove the emergence, if not the popularity, of sales force automation (SFA). SFA was an attempt to corral the freewheeling activities of salespeople as much as it was an attempt to capture and make sense of the reams of sales data they produced.

As more customers head to the Web to review products, make purchases and find information, forward-thinking companies need to learn how to leverage Web 2.0 to stay competitive. Here are a few ways you can use Web 2.0 technologies to improve your customer service, marketing and sales efforts in a Web 2.0 world.

Customer service chat skills transfer better to Twitter than email, but for companies running customer service on Twitter, it typically leads to an escalation to the phone channel. In some ways, social network marketing has become easier than email marketing. When it comes to the tools to support these efforts, however, it's still a fragmented market, and it will be for a while.

Companies all over the world have realized that contact centers are more than just for answering customer queries. The role of the contact center has become increasingly crucial in customer retention and, thus, future revenue. This shift is now forcing companies in Asia to re-evaluate the significance of the contact center.

At its Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft described the new features of its forthcoming CRM update, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. Barney Beal, News Director at SearchCRM.com takes a closer look at what the upgrade means.

As a call center source Malaysia's multi-cultural heritage puts it in a unique position of being able to offer outsourcing services in at least four languages. Nirinder Singh Johl, President 2010-2012 of the CRM & Contact Centre Association of Malaysia offers his insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the industry (this is part 1 of a 2 part series).

Sumeet Vaid is founder and managing director of Ffreedom Financial Planners, a financial advisory services firm in India that focuses on helping clients build solid financial positions for the long-term. Sumeet believes that to achieve its goals the company must be agile, scalable and totally client-centric. In this video, he talks about how Saas through Salesforce.com is helping Ffreedom realize its goals of being client-centric by focusing on the customer instead of the technology.

Google is much more than a search engine these days. It’s in the mobile phone business (I recently broke down and got myself a Droid Incredible). It’s in the TV business. It has its own browser and its own collaboration platform. Now, its going into CRM.

Some corporate customer relationship management (CRM) platforms contain useful information on less than 25% of contacts in a customer database. Accessing the “missing” 75% of actionable information is vital from a competitive and business survival perspective, and so organizations must consider the option of information discovery tools alongside traditional enterprise search solutions.