Spotlight Features

Want to extend your company's CRM presence in the mobile world easily and effortlessly? Vendors are lining up to help -- at least with the first part of that sentence. Sales, service and marketing are all categories in which vendors are actively rolling out products aimed at the mobile space. Whethe...

Buried in a recent J.D. Power and Associates 2012 U.S. Credit Card Satisfaction study -- which showed consumers' satisfaction with credit cards was at a six-year high -- was this very telling factoid: Only 7 percent of credit card customers use their mobile phones to complete transactions, up from 4...

For years, satellite communications devices like satphones and data terminals have been out of reach of the average consumer. Access to voice calls and Internet in remote locales, where mobile phone networks are unavailable, have only been possible for military, media, mining, government and other ...

It's not enough to have just a website, or just social media profiles. Businesses need to have both, and the traffic needs to flow seamlessly between them. Numerica Credit Union was looking for a way to offer customers a useful tool on its Facebook page while driving traffic from Facebook to its sit...

Just after 11 p.m. on Aug. 15, 1977, while pointing toward the constellation Sagittarius, Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope picked up a mysterious transmission that would very soon make history. For 72 seconds, the Big Ear was able to listen to that signal, which has since come to be k...

Jeff Hasen, Hipcricket's CMO, recently had what he called his "10 millionth" bad customer experience with Comcast. It's galling enough to be treated poorly by a company when you buy just about all of its services, as Hasen does with Comcast. Worse, though, is when you are a mobile CRM expert, as Ha...

A few years ago, Dave Getty and his wife went on a road trip through Texas. They didn't bring a laptop, so they relied solely on their smartphones to surf the Web. They quickly realized how important it is for sites to be mobile-friendly. "It was an eye-opening experience," said Getty, a spokesperso...

The tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 highlighted two phenomena common in disasters: Network communications tower sites were destroyed, and network traffic overwhelmed systems. Power failures cut off the Internet, and in New York, debris raining down onto ground-based i...

When Google withdrew from China, it didn't send out a press release or hold a press conference. Instead, it announced the news on its corporate blog. This move proved to be a "milestone event for corporate blogging," said Lou Hoffman, CEO of The Hoffman Agency. "Even though the Google corporate blog...

Social media sites are all about having conversations, and that's true for businesses as well as individuals. The trick for businesses is knowing how and when to engage in these conversations -- and how to keep up with them. Like any conversation, listening is important, and it's one way that busine...