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Analysis
Finding Out What They're Saying About You Is Worth Every Penny
November 12, 2009
Social media monitoring is a new business endeavor, with relatively few companies able to boast a significant track record of achievement. In fact, according to the new Aberdeen benchmark report, "The ROI on Social Media Monitoring," only 27 percent of Best-in-Class companies have engaged in social media monitoring activities for more than two years.
8 Habits of Successful Customer Feedback Managers
November 05, 2009
Customer relationships are damaged when companies hear too late about customer concerns or issues to do anything to repair them. Even worse, many crucial concerns aren't being heard by the right people at an organization. For example, are managers aware of which customers are unhappy? Did an employee treat a customer unfairly? What are the specific factors that caused a customer to leave?

B2B TeleServices: Bring the Right Intel to the Table
October 29, 2009
In research conducted among over 200 companies in 2008 for a reported titled "B2B TeleServices and Appointment-Setting: Less Risk, Less Reward?," Aberdeen Group found that end-user sales organizations relying primarily on external appointment-setting vendors for lead generation realized dramatically lower business results if the vendor deliverable was limited to simple appointments.
Tempering the Supply Chain With Better BI
October 22, 2009
Many organizations in the consumer packaged goods industry are experiencing a trade-off between the benefit of high product volume sales coming at the expense of extreme data complexity. At the same time, these companies struggle to maintain open lines of communication with their retail customers and distributors in order to better manage the upstream flow of product.

Think, Then Measure: BI in the SMB
October 01, 2009
Suppliers and consumers have tightened their belts under current economic conditions, sending businesses scrambling for cost-cutting methods. Small and medium businesses have turned to business intelligence tools in response to these pressures.
Dialing Into Mobile Marketing
September 24, 2009
Mobile marketing has at last emerged as an important part of the marketing mix. Through a confluence of technologies and standards related to mobile devices, including 3G networks and data packages, the mobile channel can now enable large-scale marketing activities capable of engaging consumers in unprecedented ways.

CRM in 2009: Personal, Social, Mobile, Adaptable
September 14, 2009
Making sure that every customer gets the personal touch may be fairly easy for the owner of a neighborhood bakery, but in a mass market of millions, making each customer feel like an individual is a formidable challenge. In the information age, tools like customer relationship management software make it possible for companies to apply a personal touch to the mass market -- and that's golden.
Building a Leak-Proof Sales Pipeline
August 20, 2009
In November 2008, Aberdeen published a study titled, "Lead Nurturing: The Secret to Successful Lead Generation." The survey captured the challenges and strategies from 213 organizations and found that on average, 16 percent of the total leads that are deemed "sales-ready opportunities" actually close. That's a fairly alarming number.

The Appointment Principle
August 19, 2009
Beagle Research did some market research earlier this year that we are now announcing. The project aimed to understand some of the nuances involving scheduling appointments for services and walking in. What we discovered was in some cases reassuring and in others surprising, and I present some of our findings here.
The BPO Outlook: Mostly Cloudy With Patches of Sun
August 17, 2009
Five years ago, megadeals were all the rage in the business process outsourcing (BPO) world. Global players such as IBM, Accenture, ACS and CSC were racking up billion-dollar multiyear contracts, mainly for accounting, human resource and procurement functions. Now that's changing.

Distilling ERP Data Into Tasty BI Brew
August 13, 2009
Globalization, supply chain complexity, and commodity and currency volatility combine to produce mountains of business data. In the past, just being able to collect and manage the data was task enough, but now companies are looking to mine the data mountain to drive actionable value. Enterprise resource planning systems provide much-needed capabilities.
IBM Capitalizes the 'I' in IT
August 04, 2009
Last week, IBM announced the new Smart Analytics System, a fine-tuned solution for analyzing both structured information in databases and unstructured, often incompatible data from sources such as blogs, emails, information archives, podcasts, videos, Web sites and wikis. In a separate announcement, IBM said it had entered into a definitive merger agreement to acquire SPSS.

Analysis: Veramark's Performance Advisor for Telecom and IT Expenses
June 25, 2009
This article draws on two discrete data sets: BI deployments of over 270 respondents in an Aberdeen Group April 2009 benchmark report; and the telecom lifecycle management solutions of 140 respondents in a March 2009 benchmark report. This data will be used to contextualize the value of integrated business intelligence functionalities and their ability to drive additional cost savings.
Getting a Grip on Business Intelligence TCO
June 18, 2009
IT and business management are increasingly expressing alarm at rising costs associated with business intelligence implementations. The fear of hidden costs has kept many companies from making an investment, and many adopters have found that the costs related to ongoing support and maintenance of an ever-changing set of analytical and reporting requirements inhibits user penetration.

IBM Launches All-Seeing, All-Knowing, Real-Time Data Cruncher
May 14, 2009
As the pace of business increases, business intelligence technologies have been forced to speed up so they can crunch more data and do it faster. On Thursday, IBM unveiled InfoSphere Streams, a high-performance computing system designed to, in essence, provide business intelligence capabilities on steroids.
What Is Marketing Automation and Why Should You Care?
May 14, 2009
The term "marketing automation" is perhaps one of the most widely used, ill-defined and ambiguous terms in the marketing and sales technology landscape. Ask 10 different people how they define marketing automation, and you'll probably get 10 different answers. Are there marketing automation solutions? Is it a category? Is it a type of technology? Or is it just a bunch of hooey?

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