Here are several excerpts from a most interesting article by Aphrodite Brinsmead with Datamonitor, Twitter and Google as Customer Service Tools. Check out the complete source article for much more detail on this topic:
The current business environment consists of a struggling economy, in which customer acquisition is challenging, while consumers are increasingly sharing information on the web. These trends have created an opportunity for contact centers to utilize social networking websites to improve customer service at a low cost, by integrating Web 2.0 technologies with other communication technologies.
Call centers have been rebranded ‘contact centers’ because of the multiple ways in which customers can now contact customer service representatives. The traditional voice channel is rapidly being supplemented by email, SMS, interactive voice response (IVR) and instant messaging (IM). In the current economic climate, enterprises are more focused on customer retention and cost saving, and these new channels not only represent a convenient way for customers to communicate with the enterprise, but also an opportunity to save on agent costs.
Concurrent with the increased use of new channels for customer communication, enterprises are striving to understand customer issues in order to improve products and service. They are using knowledge management tools and customer analytics to understand trends. One communication channel that is still relatively untapped by enterprises is Web 2.0; the use of blogs, social networking, forums and search engines to share information. In 2009 contact center vendors and enterprises will begin to leverage these tools, as the vision of a truly multichannel contact center is realized.
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Here are several excerpts from an article by Dale Vile, Research Director for Freeform Dynamics, CRM Promise and Practicality for the Smaller Business. Be sure to also check out my commentary at the end of this post:
Most small businesses haven’t taken much notice of the whole CRM software phenomenon, dismissing it as something for the big guys and largely irrelevant to them. But is it?
Well no, actually. All organizations, regardless of their size, need to manage interactions with their customers and prospects, and are invariably doing so already in one way or another. In practice, however, most don’t think of these activities as “CRM”, they just get on with reaching out to new people during the sales process, looking after existing customers, and hopefully selling more to them over time.
The most popular tools used to support these activities are Microsoft Office based, e.g. Outlook/Exchange for day to day contact management, Excel for keeping lists, forecasting sales and analysing performance, and Word to produce everything from marketing literature, through proposals, to delivery notes. The next most popular tools are personal contact managers, made popular over the years by products such as ACT!.
Lots of small businesses run perfectly well on this basis, but it is not without its challenges, stemming mainly from the fact that the various components are typically not joined up, either between functions or users.
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Here’s an interesting post by Jessica Stillman, Is Sales a Lost Art? This post is about an article written by Grant Cardone, an entrepreneur and author of Sell to Survive, in which he argues that the recession is bringing to light a long brewing crisis in salesmanship:
Cardone, as a sales professional, has a unique take on the current economic mess; he sees it not through the lens of screw-ups in finance, but instead asks how the sales department contributed to the mess. His answer: what sales department?
According to Cardone, selling is an art form in decline.
In the 50s, 60s and 70s, virtually every company had a sales force that were required and depended on things like; prospecting- the creation of customers, product knowledge, application knowledge and selling skills. Great companies were built on great sales teams who were responsible for creating opportunities not for just selling them…. In the 90s sales teams were deemed to expensive to maintain, inefficient, difficult to manage and the responsibility for driving revenues shifted to the marketing department. The theory was that the company could create demand for products and services through advertising, promotion and gimmicks then the company could merely harvest the flood of incoming orders with call centers or order desks.
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Here are several excerpts from an article by 
