CRM White Papers, Videos and other CRM Guides

This white paper examines six challenges, or imperatives, that every chief sales officer faces in the current environment, and provides recommendations on how to most effectively address and convert these obstacles into opportunities and competitive advantage. Whether it’s the challenge of driving growth in a difficult economy, increasing sales capacity with the same or fewer resources, or embarking on a sales transformation, enterprising chief sales officers can deploy proven methodologies and technologies to increase sales effectiveness and drive business success.

There are many CRM solutions available in the market today. How do you decide which one is right for your business and then continue to reap the benefits of the solution after implementation? This Oracle white paper offers five tips for helping mid-size companies determine the right solution for their business, including better ROI across the entire enterprise.

Competition in the airline industry is intensifying as low-cost carriers continue to gain market share. Today, airlines are turning their attention back toward the customer after years of focusing on cost reduction. However, CRM technology is no longer a competitive differentiator. The ability of airlines to sustain long-term revenue growth and achieve profitability hinges on moving beyond traditional CRM to implementing comprehensive and integrated loyalty management solutions that support the entire customer travel lifecycle.

When Bharti Airtel, India's largest mobile operator, discovered a manually-operated outbound calling infrastructure was limiting its ability to ensure better customer experience, the company turned to Genesys to implement a solution that integrates marketing, customer service and collection ensuring that the various departments do not overwhelm the engagement experience for customers.

As one of India's largest banking institutions, HDFC Bank has embraced sophisticated information technology to pursue its expansion from corporate banking to become a world-class provider of wholesale and retail financial services. SAS provides a broad range of analytics to help HDFC Bank make credit decisions, enhance its cross-sell and up-sell marketing, and comply with strict regulations.

In India’s recently liberalized life insurance market, fast-growing Max New York Life (MNYL), has adopted SAS technology to transform its efforts to strengthen customer retention and cross-selling to a tightly segmented customer base. With SAS as the heart of its marketing process, Max New York Life has access to the right data, the right models, and the right execution. As a result, high-margin revenue from cross-selling has tripled.

I'm looking for more information on the chief customer officer (CCO) position to bring to a meeting with company executives. What are your thoughts on this position, and do you have any examples of companies that have hired chief customer officers and seen improvements to the customer experience, customer loyalty and customer trust?

When calculating call center shrinkage, should you include time for call center representatives that are on a leave of absence (LOA), Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) or short-term disability? Lori Bocklund of Strategic Contact provides sound advice.

A reader asked: I work in customer loyalty at a circuit board manufacturing house. We do all of our business online. Recently, my company hired a new customer service/customer loyalty manager. This person has no background in customer loyalty and he is trying to measure our success with a basic ROI formula. I insist that this is not the best way to measure customer loyalty. Can you suggest any formulas we should instead be using to measure customer loyalty accurately for our online business?