CUSTOMER MAGAZINE – Jan/Feb 2016

HCM Shifts to an Employee-First Stance

It's said that happy employees make for happy customers. If that's true, new human capital management solutions should be a boon for businesses, especially as more people from the Millenial and younger generations - who tend to be very comfortable with technology and using self-service platforms...Read More >>>

With Automation, Scalability, Security, and Usability, Everybody Benefits
As companies around the world allocate budgets for the year ahead, a staggering 30 percent are planning to increase their spend on benefits technology. As a result, HR departments are combing through solutions to find the platform that best meets the needs of their organizations. They may find, however, some pushback from their counterparts in IT. While HR weighs the value of flexible benefits packages and intuitive interfaces as vital, IT will be clamoring if the software doesn't easily integrate into existing virtual foundations. So how do you reconcile the wants and needs of these different yet equally important departments? - 01/21/2016

How CRM Solutions Are Expanding to Address Customer Journey & Personalization
Customer relationship management is a $23 billion-plus business, and has enabled Salesforce.com to become a software giant, generating sales of around $4.3 billion and growing at 20 percent. But despite all that, there's still much debate about what CRM actually is, and what it will become. - 01/21/2016

WebRTC - It's Everywhere, and Not Visible at All
The reality of WebRTC is that its success will, to a great degree, be totally hidden. Much as the browser hides HTML and the associated technology; while they are incredibly valuable, they are just part of the framework to most users. In the end, the webification of communications will result in the technology being hidden, resulting in an explosion of use. - 01/21/2016

Marketing Automation: What It Is, and What It Is Not
As often happens with new technologies, marketing automation/technology has become the latest buzzword within the marketing space. Products that were once sold under such names as email marketing, content curation, list management, inbound marketing platforms, and outbound marketing platforms are all being sold as marketing automation. According to chiefmartec.com, the marketing technology landscape for 2015 included 1,876 vendors represented across 43 categories. That is almost twice the number of vendors that the landscape included in 2014. - 01/21/2016

Marketing Automation
As Gartner noted in a new study released in November, digital marketing has become mainstream, blurring the lines between traditional and online marketing efforts, and making it increasingly difficult to discern between marketing and sales. That makes things more complicated in some ways, but it also has resulted in rising marketing budgets, and the expansion of marketing's responsibilities, Gartner says. - 01/21/2016