As increasing digitization overtakes commerce (and virtually all industries), companies need to adjust with new technologies and new approaches.

Customers want to be able to research and make purchases on various devices and platforms (from online to in store). Companies are enlisting mobile devices, social platforms, live chat capabilities, communities, location-based technologies and e-commerce applications to create new capabilities in this digital commerce era. Creating an anytime, anywhere, omnichannel strategy has become critical for the e-commerce market.

Cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) and the e-commerce market have been converging for some time. Although Amazon hasn’t explicitly stated that it intends to use its new Amazon Go retail service as the vehicle to offer its own CRM solution, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to envision the company finally entering the market.

Click here to read why THINKstrategies believes Amazon may be getting ready to move into … Read More »

As the Cloud continues to gather steam as the go-to model for many companies, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings are also gaining credence.

PaaS allows companies greater flexibility once they are in the cloud. PaaS enables customers to develop new applications and services on their existing portfolios of technology to enable new capabilities. With PaaS, companies can develop new mobile applications quickly, automate processes or streamline operations.

For software companies like SAP, PaaS can also unlock new doorways of modernization as well. At the SAP TechEd conference in Barcelona, the company repositioned some core products to reflect its PaaS-oriented strategy. Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives about SAP’s latest PaaS offerings and strategies in SearchCRM.

SAP’s Beyond CRM initiative and Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud are going after customer data silos and trying to create a truly omnichannel picture. While most companies know they need to bring data silos together to improve customer experience, they are struggling with how to do so.

In response, some of the largest technology vendors are creating technologies that can bring together disparate pockets of customer data and give companies a more holistic view of their customers.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ views in SearchCRM about the escalating e-commerce battle that is reshaping the CRM marketplace and how marketing units operate.

While cloud-based CRM tools are making inroads in bridging data silos, CRM systems on their own can’t bridge the gap and meet the challenge of pulling all the pieces together from various data sources to create a 360-degree view of the customer.

Despite the promise of cloud-based CRM tools, maximizing their value in an increasingly fragmented market has become a daunting task. A new generation of niche tools are becoming more necessary to solve data management challenges.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives in SearchCRM regarding these issues and learn how Azuqua is positioning itself to be the latest company to attack this problem.

THINKstrategies is pleased to now be contributing its industry perspectives to TechTarget’s SearchCRM website.

Our first guest blogpost examines Salesforce’s foray into IoT extends personalized CRM, and our second commentary discusses how SAP’s customer engagement strategy could trump CRM.

I hope you find these columns valuable and welcome your feedback.