customer relationship management (CRM)

COVID has upended business as we knew it, and sales organizations have felt this impact. Almost half of B2B US companies have slashed their sales teams. Sellers work from home, over digital channels, and sales managers have become much more data-driven and focused on post-sale engagement to preserve and grow revenue. There’s a much-needed increased […]

For a 30-year-old technology category, it is amazing to see the CRM (customer relationship management) industry continue to grow at a staggering rate. Why? Because CRM is at the heart of every business that wants to compete on customer experience. It enables companies to access 360-degree views of customers in real time to drive reliable, […]

The retail holiday season is in the home stretch. We expect US online holiday sales this year will top $173 billion — or fully 24% more than last year.

Find out how Salesforce plans to use the $28B buy to extend the reach of its CRM platform.

Now’s the time to make sure your customers understand whether they’ve found the right product on your site or app, know when they’ll receive their item in time, and know how to easily return the item if it isn’t quite right.

The purpose of customer service is no longer just to alleviate run-of-the-mill inconveniences; it is to provide fundamental and necessary services for consumers devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn how customer service will evolve in 2021.

Escalating tensions will influence consumer behavior in 2021 as we move beyond crisis mode and see the new patterns forged from the current crisis. Read our consumer predictions for 2021.

FeedbackNow by Forrester has launched new contactless feedback solutions so companies can measure and adjust their customer experiences in real-time throughout the pandemic.

CRM is widely used by companies both big and small. Gone are the days when it was purchased as a monolithic on-premises application. Today, it’s almost exclusively deployed in the cloud. As CRM moved to the cloud, business leaders in charge of sales, service, and marketing drove the purchase. Sales leaders only cared about how […]

Phone experiences are increasingly becoming suboptimal as more and more customer service journeys begin before customers pick up the phone. This is because most companies deploy their communication channels in silos, which means that: (1) Agents have no knowledge of the customer’s prior digital interactions and (2) they cannot easily understand a customer’s prior actions […]

To help brands navigate the historic customer service challenges posed by the current pandemic and subsequent need for mass mobilization of a remote workforce, Forrester has created a four pillar framework for a building a successful work from home contact center.

Instead of CX surveys as usual, you need to show that you aren’t tone deaf to the unprecedented situation your customers face due to COVID-19. Read how to adjust your survey methods.

Healthcare organizations (HCOs) should look to healthcare customer relationship management systems (CRMs) to enable their “digital front door” strategy and meet the growing demands of their customers for a great experience — both digitally and beyond. The recently published report, “The Forrester Wave™: Healthcare CRM Providers, Q1 2020,” identified the seven most significant players in […]

Learn how the various solutions in the CX world can and should work together.

What is CRM? It’s not SFA (sales force automation) and it’s not marketing automation — although many use CRM to reference these two technologies. Forrester defines CRM as: “The business processes and supporting technologies that support the key activities of targeting, acquiring, retaining, understanding, and collaborating with customers.” . . . that is, to support […]

AI and automation are already reshaping call centers. Get your customer service organization prepared with these talent acquisition tips.

This year, we’ve seen an uptick in client and industry interest in customer communities. Marketers want to build authentic and lasting relationships with customers who are more and more likely to experiment and less and less likely to trust traditional advertising. The concept of community management isn’t anything new — we’ve been writing about it […]