Innovation in CRM Block

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.

According to Wikipedia, speech analytics describes automated methods of analyzing speech to extract useful information about the speech content or the speaker. In the context of a call center, speech analytics gives companies insight into what customers really think about their company allowing them to react in a timely manner. This eGuide offers straight forward insight into why your company may need to use speech analytics.

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.

A reader asks: Is sending out newsletters still an effective way to increase customer loyalty? Our organization normally sends out new product notifications several times a year, but we are considering either a paper or email newsletter to go out more frequently. Is once a month a standard schedule? We are trying to strike a balance between keeping in touch and inundating customers with mail from us.

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.