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• Customer service vs. customer experience: What's the difference?

  Customer service is an age-old concept, but where does it fit into the customer experience? Here's how the two are different and where they intersect. Continue Reading

• AI converts consumer analytics into potent sales weapons

  Surveys, social media monitoring and loyalty cards are just some of the ways to collect customer data. Consumer analytics can help businesses analyze that data. Continue Reading

• The evolution of call centers to experience centers

  The call center has evolved over the years, moving from phone-based systems to multichannel contact centers. The next move is toward a customer experience center. Continue Reading

• What are the most effective uses of AI in marketing automation?

  AI is beneficial in many marketing automation processes. Organizations use the technology in chatbots, personalization, voice and visual search, frequency optimization and more. Continue Reading

• Multipronged digital customer experience strategy enriches CX

  The digital experience is an everyday facet of life. Learn how businesses are using tools and technologies to engage consumers and devise and manage effective CX strategies. Continue Reading

• Definitions to Get Started

  • What is contact center infrastructure?
  • What is speech recognition?
  • What is a cloud contact center?
  • What is customer profiling?

  • What is mindshare (share of mind)?
  • What is martech (marketing technology)?
  • What is customer insight (consumer insight)?
  • What is market segmentation?

  View All Definitions

• 4 steps to create a digital marketing strategy

  This four-step approach will help organizations build a digital marketing strategy designed to increase their online presence and attract new customers.Continue Reading

• 6 live chat benefits to consider in a CX strategy

  Live chat enables customers to solve problems quickly and agents to multitask, but it also can be difficult to implement well and requires synchronous communication.Continue Reading

• Prepare for California Consumer Privacy Act with these 5 questions

  At Oracle's Modern Customer Experience conference, a privacy professional shared tips on incorporating privacy into CX systems so businesses are ready for the CCPA.Continue Reading

• How to use live chat for lead generation

  Live chat can successfully generate sales leads -- if done right. Here are four steps organizations can take to boost brand loyalty and close the deal.Continue Reading

• Salesforce learning resources include free and paid options

  While Salesforce offers a number of free and paid customer success tools to users, nonusers can also benefit through the use of Trailhead and the Trailblazer Community.Continue Reading

• 7 customer segmentation methods to help connect the dots

  Customer segmentation is essential to marketing, enabling businesses to provide the right people with the right products -- and is a move away from bulk appeals.Continue Reading

• 5 things to know about Salesforce Customer 360

  Salesforce Customer 360 -- a tool that connects customer data stored in multiple silos -- is currently in beta and will be available to all users later this year.Continue Reading

• How do you determine the right point for chatbot-human handoff?

  Customer experience can be adversely affected when chatbots don't transfer the call to a live agent at the right time. Here are some guidelines and best practices for initiating that handoff.Continue Reading

• 5 crucial ways to prepare for the CXO role

  Technophiles who have experience in sales and marketing, as well as social media awareness, may be best prepared for success in the role of chief experience officer.Continue Reading

• How to improve customer experience with mystery shopping

  Mystery shopping -- among other CX management tools -- enables businesses to collect the data necessary to identify customer pain points and improve CX.Continue Reading

• Q&A: How to narrow down your CRM vendor choices

  SaaS consultancy Lunar goes over the dos and don'ts for choosing a CRM system, whether you're licensing one for the first time or migrating to a new system.Continue Reading

• Our rebrand: Customer experience strategy, platforms, best practices

  Customer experience strategy blurs lines between sales and marketing automation, customer service and e-commerce as they come together on next-generation customer experience platforms.Continue Reading

• What is the role and responsibility of a chief experience officer?

  The chief experience officer is an increasingly vital member of the C-suite who ensures that an organization's customers have positive interactions with the brand.Continue Reading

• Liferay digital experience platform helps company improve CX

  Jack Maina, group chief operations officer of Britam, talks about how the financial services group rebuilt the way it interacts with customers and partners using Liferay.Continue Reading

• Salesforce.org's CRM for education helps UVA students succeed

  The University of Virginia is one of a number of institutions using Salesforce.org's Education Cloud CRM to recruit students, track student success and manage alumni relations.Continue Reading

• Which vendors make the best CRM for small businesses?

  Choosing a CRM for small businesses can be difficult, as the most well-known CRM vendors cater to large enterprises. Others, however, create products with SMBs in mind.Continue Reading

• How does Salesforce Einstein Bot differ from other AI?

  Salesforce's no-code bot authoring tool competes with Google, Amazon and Microsoft, but differentiating capabilities make it potentially more useful for the Salesforce user base.Continue Reading

• How does Salesforce lead scoring benefit Sales Cloud?

  Einstein lead scoring offers a customizable workflow and strives to get better at prediction over time, and Salesforce is one of the top three vendors in the field.Continue Reading

• Salesforce Circles of Success help SMBs get up to speed

  Circles of Success participants connect with other Salesforce users to swap challenges, tips and tricks for rolling out the platform in their businesses.Continue Reading

• 8 tips for a successful Einstein artificial intelligence rollout

  You'll fail a few times before you succeed with Einstein, Salesforce customers said at Dreamforce. Once you dial it in, though, success can follow. Here are eight ways to get there.Continue Reading

• How does Salesforce Einstein Language NLP improve productivity?

  Salesforce NLP learns in a manner similar to that of the human brain, performing a variety of functions, such as semantic parsing, summarization and more.Continue Reading

• Customers buy more and more into voice shopping

  It's still early days for voice commerce and voice customer service channels. But companies are testing and investing in this new way to engage customers.Continue Reading

• Loyalty rewards program fuels convenience store's CX

  Since launching a loyalty rewards program last year, convenience store and gas station Yesway has driven 45.2% of loyalty members from the pump to the store.Continue Reading

• Dreamforce 2018 conference highlights and key takeaways

  Salesforce will reveal new features, tools and platform updates at Dreamforce 2018 in San Francisco Sept. 25-28. Use this guide to stay up to date.Continue Reading

• Albuquerque Amazon Alexa skill takes heat off call center

  Tens of thousands of Alexa skills -- voice-activated apps -- exist, with more to come. Learn how a city government's call center created one to help residents.Continue Reading

• Marketing automation platforms merge CRM and content

  Building a martech stack includes a main automation hub such as Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot or Pardot. Then comes the hard part: picking complementary applications.Continue Reading

• Virtual agents not yet ready for primetime customer service

  Chatbots may never replace humans at call centers. But they can alleviate high call volumes and route queries to humans when they're too thorny for automated responses.Continue Reading

• What do GDPR principles mean for CRM data management?

  Avoiding General Data Protection Regulation penalties means getting your CRM compliance program in order before the sweeping regulation goes into effect late this spring.Continue Reading

• Artificial intelligence technologies a boon for customer insights

  AI can help companies shrink the gap between customer data and actionable insight by feeding intelligence into CRM, marketing automation and other operational tools. Here's how.Continue Reading

• Compare top CRM systems: SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle

  The 'CRM platform wars' aren't as hot as, say, the tech battle between smartphone OS vendors. But Oracle, SAP, Salesforce and Microsoft want your business.Continue Reading

• Top five benefits of speech analytics tools for contact centers

  Learn the top benefits of speech analytics technology for contact centers, and how speech analytics tools can lead to a better customer experience.Continue Reading

• Four features of contact center evolution

  Contact center evolution is explored through four key features, identifying how contact centers have changed through the past, present and future.Continue Reading

• Salesforce Sales Cloud closes the data sharing gap

  Salespeople live and die by the close. Closing a sale can be an art form, but there's far more to sealing a deal than artistry. Purchase decisions are based increasingly more on customer experience than product and price. And as competition for ...Continue Reading

• Wave Analytics Cloud not yet at its crest

  Analytics is such a fundamental part of doing business today that even providers not known for the service are jumping into the game. That's what customer relationship management provider Salesforce did when it announced the Wave Analytics Cloud in ...Continue Reading

• Salesforce Data.com

  Data.com is the sales and lead generation component of Salesforce.com's Sales Cloud customer relationship management (CRM) platform.Continue Reading

• SalesforceIQ

  SalesforceIQ is customer relationship management (CRM) software from Salesforce.com that is designed for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB).Continue Reading

• Salesforce Community Cloud (Community Cloud)

  Community Cloud is a social platform from Salesforce.com that is designed to connect and facilitate communication among an organization's employees, partners and customers.Continue Reading

• Keep consumers close with mobile location-based services

  When stores first began setting up websites, customers suddenly had more flexibility. They could compare prices and make purchases without ever leaving the house. But the online experience didn't replace the in-store experience. And now tools like ...Continue Reading

• Cloud-based CRM enters new territory for Salesforce partners

  Channel partners are pursuing increasingly sophisticated Salesforce implementation projects, helping customers integrate and optimize complex systems.Continue Reading

• CRM documentation paves way to successful release management

  As companies use a CRM system in the wild, they need to be able to make tweaks, and those changes need to be well-documented.Continue Reading

• 360-degree view of the customer quiz

  Companies constantly chase the "360-degree view of the customer," aiming to merge different data sources to provide timely, consistent service.Continue Reading

• CRM platforms alone won't give total customer picture

  Some CRM vendors have started to demonstrate the power of unified CRM platforms, enabling companies to manage customer data, analytics, financials and more from a single application and get a unified view. But many companies still struggle with ...Continue Reading

• CRM skills training essential for system management

  The right CRM training is crucial to the management and development of a CRM system. Make sure your staff has the right CRM skills to survive.Continue Reading

• The double-edged sword of location-based technologies

  Location-based technologies like personalization are yielding valuable consumer data, but companies need to be careful stewards of the information.Continue Reading

• Want to get into mobile marketing? Know your customer

  In this book excerpt, author and industry watcher Chuck Martin shows how customers' mobile behaviors should dictate companies' marketing strategies.Continue Reading

• Call center operations quiz

  Call center operations are working hard to keep up with the technology revolution. Find out why the call center is not just for telephones anymore.Continue Reading

• Salesforce AppExchange

  Salesforce AppExchange is Salesforce.com's cloud computing marketplace, through which end users can access, download and install custom software applications.Continue Reading

• CRM user interface guide

  This guide provides an at-a-glance look at Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and Salesforce.com’s user interfaces for their mobile client, Outlook integration and sales dashboards.Continue Reading

• Workforce management (WFM) software

  Workforce management (WFM) software is an umbrella term for desktop and mobile programs that help a business manage staff scheduling. The term originated in contact centers and other service businesses that employ a large number of workers who are ...Continue Reading

• workforce optimization (WFO) software

  Workforce optimization (WFO) software is a program suite that combines recording, quality management (QM) and other call center technologies into one console with the purpose of optimizing call center performance.Continue Reading

• Five call center sales tips and techniques

  In difficult economic times, ramping up sales in the call center can provide another outlet to help companies meet sales quotas and drive sales effectiveness. We've gathered these five tips for companies looking to improve call center sales and ...Continue Reading

• loyalty card program

  A loyalty card program is an incentive plan that allows a retail business to gather data about its customers. The goal of a loyalty card program is to build repeat business by offering participating customers something that isn't available to ...Continue Reading

• Call center metrics quiz answers

  With answers from the Call Center Metrics School quiz, learn about call center metrics like average handle time, occupancy and schedule adherence.Continue Reading

• Web 2.0 and CRM quiz

  This quiz on Web 2.0 and CRM was designed to test your knowledge of Web 2.0 technology and social networking and open your eyes to how this technology can help advance CRM initiatives.Continue Reading

• Web 2.0 and CRM quiz answers

  Test yourself on Web 2.0 and social networking and how this technology is impacting CRM, with the answers to SearchCRM.com's quiz.Continue Reading

• Call center interactive voice response (IVR) system quiz answers

  Find out how you did on SearchCRM.com's call center IVR system quiz with these answers.Continue Reading

• Call center interactive voice response (IVR) system quiz

  Call center interactive voice response (IVR) systems continue to expand their functionality. Find out how much you know about today's IVR technology with this quiz.Continue Reading

• Customer Loyalty and Satisfaction Learning Guide

  Find out about customer loyalty and satisfaction, marketing, metrics and advice on the best ways to retain customers. This SearchCRM.com guide will lead you through defining, measuring and maintaining customer satisfaction and loyalty. Also, learn ...Continue Reading

• Customer loyalty quiz

  Figuring out how to attract and retain happy customers is a struggle for every organization. Find out how much you know about customer loyalty with this quiz. You'll find the most common terms related to customer loyalty, as well as technology ...Continue Reading

• Customer loyalty quiz answers

  Every organization struggles with customer loyalty. Find out how much you know about customer loyalty with the answers to SearchCRM.com's Customer loyalty quiz.Continue Reading