Customer Relationship Management is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. It's a strategy used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviours in order to develop stronger relationships with them. After all, good customer relationships are at the heart of business success. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about it as computer software with a large database populated with customer-related information. Its primary purpose is to organize, track, and automate key aspects of an organization's sales activities.

This leads to higher customer loyalty and retention, more efficient sales and marketing efforts, lower expenses, more effective call center operations, additional opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and while CRM does refer to a program to manage customer information the better CRM software does much more than that.  CRM Software not only allows the organizing of customer information, but CRM software also provides the means to track sales leads from the time they are obtained until the sales are closed.

This month, Packt Publishing began accepting nominations for its 2011 Open Source Awards. Breaking tradition, I've declined the invitation this year to be a member of the judging panel of this award (I've been a judge for the past four years). Regardless of my lack of participation as a judge, I still think this a great award and merits mention here on my blog.

Customers’ order data, pending payments, leads in the pipeline; it all boils down to the extensive data you hold. Needless to say, that your data is as good as you being able to retrieve it and use it effectively. If your data, processes and applications are disparate it creates a chaos in the company. You need to bring order out of confusion for smooth functioning of your company to handle customer queries more effectively. Integration solutions can certainly help you delight your customers’ mainly in three ways:  

As I have done each and every year in the summer, I will be taking my annual break from technology. Through the month of August, I'll be decreasing my postings and management of this site in hopes of using the time to broaden my perspective. I need to spend some time recharging my batteries and my enthusiasm for content management systems as well as information technology in general.

London, UK, 28th July 2011. Open Source Digital Asset Management vendor, Daydream have announced a major upgrade to their FocusOPEN Digital Asset Manager software. This latest edition provides a wealth of new features including: customisable metadata, new preview plug-in architecture and a dedicated JavaScript scripting engine.

DotNetNuke Corp. today announced the availability of DotNetNuke 6 which they bill as "the world’s leading Web Content Management Platform (WCM) for Microsoft .NET".  Over the years, I've been quite impressed with what DotNetNuke has to offer and I've been equally impressed with the DotNetNuke leaders I've engaged with in recent months.

How do you do more with less? Reduce your reliance on paper processes and start automating your workflow? Can you really create a paperless office? Why has this been a pipe dream until now?

Myth #1: You can scan your way to a paperless office.

REALITY: SCANNING STRATEGIES ARE MISALIGNED. THE REAL FOCUS SHOULD BE ON DATA CAPTURE, WHICH WILL OVER TIME REDUCE DEPENDENCY ON PAPER.

To really succeed in becoming “paperless,” you have to forget about trying to go paperless, for a few reasons.

This week, Joomla! 1.7 was officially released to the public. New features in this new version of the popular open source content management system include: