Online Business > Personalization

Some things in life are inevitable--unfortuntely, customers are not. You have to build a strategy to get and keep customers, based on who your customers are. Different types of customers require different CRM approaches, but one thing is certain: You can't afford to ignore CRM.

Get to the basics of building a CRM architecture. Here is the bare bones framework to get you started.

Sometimes it’s not about who is right or who is wrong--sometimes it may just be asking what’s wrong.

Truly integrated, web-based, real-time personalization--now that would be a real treasure. Is Black Pearl the priceless gem that BI has been looking for, or just another faux solution?

Whatever happened to the myth of the one-to-one enterprise? It's time to revive one-to-one marketing and personalization. For the organization that actually does it properly, the benefits in customer loyalty and increased share of wallet could be tremendous.

Dot-coms look just like little gold nuggets to "clicks and mortar" corporations trying to get an edge on Wall Street. Don't be distracted by the shiny objects--you'll only lose strategic advantage.

Gathering data online is as easy as pointing and clicking your mouse, but remember that the Internet is a two-way street. While you're out collecting information online, someone is collecting information about you. You might want to think twice before you fill out another personal profile or create another password.

In today's world, most consumers have begun to use the Internet to purchase items of some sort or at least to look up information on the Web. And let's face it, people are selfish. Many times, customers will activate a search engine such as Yahoo or Lycos and look for a particular site that interests them. Other times, individuals will go directly to a site that they are familiar with. In both cases, a customer's interaction with the Internet is based on personal likes, dislikes and interests.

The latest hot spot in the fad-driven world of business intelligence is bringing business together to be more productive and more, well, intelligent.

Want customers to really stick by you? Use enterprise application integration to tie together all of your business intelligence and deliver the ultimate in customer personalization.

Personalization provides one of the most tangible examples of the increasing role dynamic content will play in comprehensive CRM strategies and successful application deployments.

Sounds like one of the Star Wars 'droids, doesn't it? Actually, we're talking about something a lot more practical, although perhaps not as exciting as a new episode from George Lucas. It's BI in the B2B world, and it's on its way to an exchange near you.

When it looks like a perfect date is ruined, digital convergence comes to the rescue.

Best practices help businesses become more efficient, effective and competitive. They provide you with insights on how leading organizations perform. Then, you can identify the performance gaps and learn ways to improve your business. This is true whether you are executing an e-commerce project or implementing minor adjustments or major reengineering in your processes.

Personalized marketing and customer data mining are being socked by privacy and data integration woes.

Singing the praises of those clever monsters who are always chasing Sigourney Weaver? Not exactly. This alien intelligence is all about making your data and technology work for you.

Have you looked at yourself? Relationships within an organization can play as big a role as customer relationships when you're building an intelligent business.

When you really want to get to know someone, one-to-one is the best way to do it. That goes for getting to know your customers, too.

A visit to the E-Business Integration Conference had this writer scratching his head over Web services.

Pervasive computing is going to be all around us, and two dimensions of business intelligence play a large role in enabling pervasive devices: learning capability and data collection. Are you ready for it?

Are you keeping BI in a box? Let it out and see where your imagination can take BI, and where that can take your company.

In the first part of this series, we looked at how e-commerce projects become CRM projects when you view system users as the clients of software development. If your users are your customers, you have to treat them with the same care as you would a client outside of the company. In this part, we'll look at refocusing your IT department to do just that.

Get recommendations. Shop at any time. Never leave the comfort of your home. Sounds like a good deal, but convenience and personalization are only part of the buying experience. Some things just can't be done virtually.

From globally distributed systems to managing a top notch staff to pleasing customers, Werner Vogels is a busy man. What else would you expect at e-commerce king Amazon.com? In this interview, the Amazon CTO talks with gantthead CEO Dave Garrett about life at the forefront of technology.

Merely tracking your customers' habits isn't building a relationship--it's stalking, and it's no more effective than following someone around town hoping to get a date. If you want any relationship to work, you need to be smart about it.

Unless you've been buried 20 feet beneath the Earth in some Antarctic scientific study, you've undoubtedly heard about the "dot-bombs" of 2001. Thousands of start-up companies capitalizing on the venture capital gold rush of the late 1990s have shut their doors forever, laying off 100,000 workers. Why has this happened? After all, how could so many companies have picked flawed business models? Has the poor economy caused these companies to fail? Well, the answer may sound simple or even stupid to most of you, but all of the "dot-bombs" failed to understand the needs of their customers.

Content alone doesn't get you very far. The right technology, however, can help you manage that content to its maximum advantage. Choosing technology options to match your content requirements can give your web business the spark it needs to really heat up.

If you aren't marketing via e-mail, you are behind the times. Of course, if you are going to break into e-mail marketing, you want to do it right. Here's how.

How to avoid making mistakes when you're planning, developing and deploying new self-service applications.

Now that digital data is available to us within the context of all of our other textual or numerical data that we've had access to, similar business intelligence and mining techniques can be utilized to analyze it. This article looks at several use cases on how digital data can be integrated into the business intelligence ecosystem.

Project leaders must shepherd initiatives in which change is a very real piece of the final deliverable. New technology, infrastructure and processes bring about updated policies, procedures and other adjustments, which often elicit resistance and fear. Here are some techniques and communication tools for managing the dynamics of change.

One-to-one marketing is often less than profitable.

The growth in e-business has spawned a new discipline in the project management field: e-business project management. It's different from traditional IT project management in how tasks are performed and the knowledge required to perform them. In order to take advantage of the benefits that this new discipline offers, you will need to have a broad understanding of several e-centric subject areas.

In today's complex business structures, maintaining relationships with partners is an important part of ulitmately serving your end users. Now it's time to talk about PRM.

I'm not talking about face-painting yahoos. This is about taking the idea of a satisfies customer to the next level. A recent seminar gave me some great insight

The Recording Industry Association of America is putting its foot down on file sharing. But is it missing the mark? By using analytics to drive profitable P2P, a win-win situation is created for both the RIAA and music consumers, who offer record companies deep knowledge about their customers that they never had. Instead, the music industry is currently languishing in an outdated model.

In conjunction with the Agile 2010 Conference in Orlando this week, our latest Cool Tools roundup highlights new releases and updates of Agile-focused solutions and services.

You're familiar with our old friend Knowledge Management, but how much do you know about Web Content Management and its servers? Hopefully a lot. The successful management of Web content is vital for the success of an e-business. Here's how to evaluate the systems you need to have in place.

Customers of sporting goods retailer Cabela's enjoy the great outdoors, from hunting to fishing. But the company wanted to put a virtual destination on their maps.

E-learning could make any company a true learning organization, and it also brings significant savings. Here's how to achieve this success.

Like many other industries, the Internet was supposed to transform the retailing industry. And to a large extent, it has--but not in the way that many wanted it to. The online retailing market that was initially flooded with pure-play Internet merchants has matured. Now it consists of only those players that have spent the time and effort to understand and master the core competencies required for the success of this business model.