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Pitney Bowes is a global provider of physical and digital mailing products and services; the company service techs rely heavily on mobile applications to execute their jobs properly. Mobile devices help the techies get to the job sites, stay in touch with the clients, and ensure that they are carrying the correct inventory with them. Pitney has made its ERP and CRM information available to its mobile staff via the Antenna Mobile Platform (AMP) and its AMPower Service application developed by Antenna Software.

In the words of Paul Weston, Pitney’s VP of CRM systems “[Today] our guys riding around in vans, they can’t work without [the application].” “It’s how they get their days’ work. When they finish a job and want to know where they’re going next, they get that location from their mobile devices.”

Read more here.

Kapow Technologies develops enterprise mashups that intends to make business intelligence more pervasive in an enterprise setup. One such product Kapow OnDemand gathers relevant data from the net and adds it to a spreadsheet. This eliminates manual drudgery and the man hours saved can be utilized more effectively in doing more productive work.

“Today’s CRM application users are tapping half a dozen other Web resources to populate their databases and get their jobs done,” said Stefan Andreasen, founder and CTO of Kapow Technologies.

SAP and RIM have come together in order to tap into each other competencies and in the process develop mobile CRM applications that can be made available to an increasing population carrying portable devices.

Mobile professionals with the new “Crackberry” handheld device can access SAP software from anywhere in the world. SAP says that it expects its CRM application to be integrated with the device over the next few months, with more of its business applications, such as enterprise resource planning and supply chain management suites, to follow suite afterwards.

The long wait for potential Microsoft customers waiting to try its hosted CRM offering is over. From April 22, Dynamics is available as an online service. The hosted version is based on the Dynamics CRM 4 customer relationship management software. Dynamics CRM Online debuted as Dynamics CRM Live at the Worldwide Partner Conference last July. However; the company chose to stress the “Online” aspect. The hosted service will boost Microsoft’s position as a SaaS player. The company is in the process of developing datacenters around the world and make possible virtual access to data.

“[CRM Online] is not the only service that we plan from Dynamics in the software-plus-services space,” Ballmer said at the time. “You should expect to see more from us in ERP and other areas as we move into the future.”

The other side of Microsoft’s software-plus-services push is a collection of online services that the company has dubbed “Live,” which are mostly free or ad-supported services directed primarily at consumers.

Read more here and here.

Amdocs Limited has reported that for the most recent quarter that ended March 31, 2008, it achieved revenue of $774.3 million. This is almost a 10% increase over earnings in the past year for the same period.

Dov Baharav, chief executive officer of Amdocs Management Limited, said the company’s officials “recognize that there is uncertainty in the market as economic conditions have become more challenging and we believe that our forecasts for the second half of this fiscal year take this into account.”

In the second quarter Amdocs showed progress in the operational support systems area by winning a deal with a large North American service provider, according to company officials: “In Europe, Amdocs signed an important CRM deal with a large wireless carrier,” they said, noting “several wins with wireless carriers including a consulting engagement to help a service provider introduce offerings.”

Its almost halfway into 2008, so what have you done till now to get your business online? How involved is your IT department in getting you in touch with your real customers who prefer to purchase online?

Kim Nash discusses three ideas that can make a big difference to your online CRM initiatives in 2008.

CRM is supposedly on a comeback trail with a vengeance, hot on the heels of the last post I made regarding CRM’s comeback, here’s another one. This time it is from the UK and it says that faced with recession, companies are caught between trying to conserve finances and trying to get the best out of their CRM solutions in an effort to at least latch on to their existing customers if not get more customers for their customers base.

In the face of the economic slump, driving ROI is harder then ever. Paul Winters, managing director of CACI’s new customer management group, Marketing Solutions Division, says: “The world is changing in terms of acquisition, the days of mailing the Electoral Register three times is getting expensive and not working. There is now much more of an emphasis on driving value from your existing customer base.

“Retention is critical, you should do more with the customers that you already have as it’s from them that you are going to get the most from your revenue in hard economic times. It’s also tough to recruit new customers in the current climate.”

An article on the website Customer Strategy titled CRM: The comeback kid has an element of humor for me. I mean it’s becoming so regularly monotonous to hear that CRM is going strong/will make a comeback inspite of so many deployment failures. I guess if there is one technology that is making its vendors and promoters millions more on promise and less on delivery of promises, its CRM.

The enticement of a vendor pitch backed with figures, charts, graphs, promises, and maybe a success story would be too strong for a company to resist. More than that, it is the desires inherent with every business, which CRM purports to fulfill and the confidence that “we will do it right, god willing” is what drives companies to flirt with CRM. That’s my guess.

A new CMO Council study only confirms what most business owners begin to suspect after investing a few hundred dollars in CRM and not getting any results.  Marketers generally fail to make proper use of CRM data. Of the companies studied in the report, only 16 percent rated themselves as effective with CRM; the majority felt that they had some distance to go before they could get the best by leveraging and integrating customer data.

“There is a lack of focus as to how to optimize revenue from existing customers,” said Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, New York. “In a year of economic restraints, marketers should be more concerned with cross-selling and upselling.”

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Soffront has won the 2008 CRM Excellence Award given every year by the Technology Marketing Corporation Customer Interaction Solutions® magazine. The magazine has been delivering quality CRM information since 1982.

“We are pleased to receive this prestigious award for the third year in a row,” said Manu Das, Soffront president and founder. “As the leader of mid-market CRM software, we offer a comprehensive solution that helps our customers throughout their entire organization, improving productivity, enhancing customer satisfaction, and increasing profitability. When compared with other mid-market CRM solutions, we continue to lead the competition in configuration, price, and functionality.”

Read more here.