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Showing posts from July, 2010

Customer self-service (the problem)

A lot of discussion is being done about CRM. It’s been going on for quite some time now. These days, with the blooming of social networks and the millions of users that they attract, a new discussion has been opened, about Social CRM. Don’t get me wrong, but I believe that some of the aspects of SCRM are somehow “exotic” for the average SMB. Let’s not forget that some of them don’t even know what CRM is or they have placed it low on their priorities! I know this because I have conducted my own research on the matter. Don’t get me wrong: I could go on and on about the benefits of CRM and SCRM, even for the SMB (let alone the big enterprises), as a large number of other bloggers have already done, but this is not my purpose today. If we accept the basic definition that “CRM is a tool and a methodology to help the Business create and further grow relationships with its Customers” , I would like to propose another way of doing this (building and growing). I want to tell you right from the

Personalization in web applications (part 2)

In this 2nd post which is dedicated to Personalization, I shall continue to list some features that I think are interesting and welcome by all users. I am sure that you will find “yourselves” in there (if you are web developers) or that you will see a wish-list (if you are internet users). Remember, the object of Personalization is to make the web system more attractive and more usable at the same time. After all, with all these systems and sites out there, you have to make a difference if you want the users to stick to your system, instead of the next guy’s. Save Searches All web systems provide some kind of search facility, be it a generic search engine that looks inside the web site and returns relevant documents or be it a search facility for the supported entities of that web system, such as “invoice search”, “loan search”, “customer search” etc. I would bet that a user friendly search offers a whole bunch of search criteria. I would also bet that having an exhaustive list of sea