PSG Latest Research

Rethinking CRM: Provide Customers the Information They Care about in a Seamless Fashion

Patricia Seybold — 8/21/2008 12:00:00 AM

What's the secret to a successful CRM strategy? Provide a seamless cross-touchpoint, cross-channel and cross-lifecycle experience. Let your customers manage their relationships with you, not the other way around. We recommend that you focus first on customer service, not on sales or marketing. Why? Customers (or prospective customers) will provide you the most information when they need help from you in selecting, evaluating, purchasing, learning, using or optimizing a product or service. They're much more likely to provide rich information about their situation and context when they're looking for help. Today, the scope of a CRM strategy extends well beyond marketing, sales and service. Successful CRM initiatives give customers visibility into all the back-end processes that may impact their experience. We've identified five customer-critical requirements that should be part of your CRM game plan.

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Online Community Platform Company and Product Update

Matthew Lees — 8/14/2008 12:00:00 AM

It was a strong first half of 2008 for the 10 companies on our watch list: Awareness, HiveLive, Jive Software, Leverage Software, Lithium Technologies, LiveWorld, Mzinga, Small World Labs, Telligent, and Webcrossing. Each company saw growth in sales, customer accounts, and/or size. Most are on track to generate at least an incremental increase in revenue from 2007 to 2008, with some expecting to double or even triple revenue year over year. The companies raised over $51 million in investment, opened four new offices, and completed two corporate acquisitions. And all but one released new product versions with significant enhancements.

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Using Lakes to Monitor the Health of the Planet

Patricia Seybold — 8/7/2008 12:00:00 AM

This case study of the PASEO project follows the story of a group of 24 biologists, engineers, and computer scientists as they teamed across two continents to model and monitor an unusually salty chain of lakes in Argentina. The PASEO team's rapid sampling and modeling approach may serve as a useful template for others who want to wrap their minds around what's going on with complex real-world systems really quickly.

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IBM WebSphere Commerce Suite 6.0

Mitchell Kramer — 7/31/2008 12:00:00 AM

IBM WebSphere Commerce is IBM’s ecommerce offering. WebSphere Commerce was introduced in 1996. It was and is one of the leading software offerings for B2C ecommerce. IBM claims that 1,500 customer organizations have implemented the product. We recommend that you consider IBM WebSphere Commerce as the software to run your B2C ecommerce site. Its packaged services and easily customizable technologies provide excellent support for the activities that your customers want to perform. IBM provides a wealth of samples and examples to simplify and speed your implementation.

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PSGroup Comparison Matrix: Ecommerce Search Solutions

Susan Aldrich — 7/24/2008 12:00:00 AM

Our detailed review of five leading ecommerce search offerings from Celebros, Endeca, Fredhopper, Mercado, and SLI Systems has produced both a side-by-side comparison across our 230 criteria, and also our ranking of the solutions based on performance against our criteria. The real bottom line is that each of these solutions is well worth considering. All five products performed very strongly. This comparison matrix is a companion piece to the “PSGroup Bull's-Eye: Ecommerce Search Solutions,” which presents our analysis of this data. The data is extracted from separate reports for each of the products, which analyze the product against the requirements of the framework.

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PSGroup Bull's-Eye: Ecommerce Search Solutions

Susan Aldrich — 7/24/2008 12:00:00 AM

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Helping Customers Find and Purchase Your Products/Services

Ronni Marshak — 7/17/2008 12:00:00 AM

Customer scenarios fall into patterns. It's valuable to know these patterns ahead of time so that you'll know what kinds of customer and operational metrics to elicit. Then you can focus on how to differentiate the experience, products, and services you offer to help customers reach their goals. This report focuses on the moments of truth and metrics in a typical select & buy.
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Customer Service KM Evaluation Framework

Mitchell Kramer — 7/10/2008 12:00:00 AM

Knowledge management-based customer service products can help you deliver answers and solutions to your customers and agents through your implementation of their content management and search facilities. We’ve developed a framework for evaluating knowledge management-based customer service products. The framework has these nine top-level evaluation criteria: cross-channel cross-lifecycle support, knowledge management, UI, search, escalation, analytic functionality, architecture, product viability, and company viability. In this report, we describe these evaluation criteria in detail. In future reports, we will offer our framework-based evaluations of specific products and services.
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Making It Easy to Buy More of Your Products

Ronni Marshak — 7/3/2008 12:00:00 AM

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HiveLive's LiveConnect Platform

Matthew Lees — 6/26/2008 12:00:00 AM

Launched in 2007, HiveLive’s LiveConnect is one of the most creatively designed and original community platforms we’ve seen. A hosted system with a building-block approach, it gives both users and administrators wide-ranging flexibility to create unique spaces for collaboration and communication inside and outside your organization. In essence, it lets you and your customers design the community together. LiveConnect’s building blocks, called “Hives,” can be configured to support conventional social applications (discussion boards, blogs, polls, etc.) as well as custom community applications, such as media archives, idea centers, file exchanges, software marketplaces, and more.

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