Posts Tagged ‘ Business ’
AP - Indian authorities are scheduled to meet Monday evening to decide whether to ban some BlackBerry services in India, one day ahead of a government-imposed deadline for the device's maker Research In Motion Ltd. to give security agencies access to encrypted data.
AFP - A Malaysian rapper is being investigated for sedition, police said Monday, after posting a YouTube video which drew allegations he was stirring up ethnic tensions in the multicultural nation.
AFP - North Korea accused The South Monday of blocking its people from accessing online social-networking sites launched by the secretive communist country.
AFP - China's IT giant Lenovo has said it will launch a video games console this year to vie with Nintendo's Wii, Microsoft's XBox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 in the booming motion-gaming market.
AFP - Jordan on Sunday approved a temporary law on cyber crimes after amending it to appease the fury of journalists who said the legislation was a means to control local news websites.
AP - Data storage company 3Par Inc. says its board has determined that Hewlett-Packard Co.'s $2 billion, $30-per-share takeover bid is superior to a rival offer from Dell Inc., but Dell said Saturday it was mulling over a higher bid.
AP - If you're looking for bargains on personal computers, bad news from the industry could be good for your pocketbook.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a broadly recognized, widely-implemented strategy for managing and nurturing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.[1] Customer relationship management denotes a company-wide business strategy embracing all client-facing departments and even beyond. When an implementation is effective, people, processes, and technology work in synergy to increase profitability, and reduce operational costs.[2]
These tools have been shown to help companies attain these objectives:
Many CRM vendors offer Web-based tools (cloud computing) and software as a service (SaaS), which are accessed via a secure Internet connection and displayed in a Web browser. These applications are sold as subscriptions, with customers not needing to invest in the acquisition and maintenance of IT hardware, and subscription fees are a fraction of the cost of purchasing software outright.
The three phases in which CRM can help to support the relationship between a business and its customers are, to:
Despite the benefits, many companies are still not fully leveraging these tools and services to align marketing, sales, and service to best serve the enterprise.[5]
Tools and workflows can be complex to implement, especially for large enterprises. Previously these tools were generally limited to contact management: monitoring and recording interactions and communications. Software solutions then expanded to embrace deal tracking, territories, opportunities, and at the sales pipeline itself. Next came the advent of tools for other client-facing business functions, as described below. These technologies have been, and still are, offered as on-premises software that companies purchase and run on their own IT infrastructure.
Often, implementations are fragmented; isolated initiatives by individual departments to address their own needs. Systems that start disunited usually stay that way: siloed thinking and decision processes frequently lead to separate and incompatible systems, and dysfunctional processes.
One of the primary functions of these tools is to collect information about clients, thus a company must consider the desire for privacy and data security, as well as the legislative and cultural norms. Some clients prefer assurances that their data will not be shared with third parties without their prior consent and that safeguards are in place to prevent illegal access by third parties.
This market grew by 12.5 percent in 2008, from revenue of $8.13 billion in 2007 to $9.15 billion in 2008.[6] The following table lists the top vendors in 2006-2008 (figures in millions of US dollars) published in Gartner studies.[7][8]
| Vendor | 2008 Revenue | 2008 Share (%) | 2007 Revenue | 2007 Share (%) | 2006 Revenue | 2006 Share (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SAP | 2,055 | 22.5 (-2.8) | 2,050.8 | 25.3 | 1,681.7 | 26.6 |
| Oracle | 1,475 | 16.1 | 1,319.8 | 16.3 | 1,016.8 | 15.5 |
| Salesforce.com | 965 | 10.6 | 676.5 | 8.3 | 451.7 | 6.9 |
| Microsoft | 581 | 6.4 | 332.1 | 4.1 | 176.1 | 2.7 |
| Amdocs | 451 | 4.9 | 421.0 | 5.2 | 365.9 | 5.6 |
| Others | 3,620 | 39.6 | 3,289.1 | 40.6 | 2,881.6 | 43.7 |
| Total | ,147 |
0 | ,089.3 | 0 | ,573.8 | 0 |
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
AP - Need an X-ray or stitches? Online, via text message or flashing on a billboard, some emergency rooms are advertising how long the dreaded wait for care will be, with estimates updated every few minutes.
AP - The ouster of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s CEO leaves a hole in the world's largest technology company.
