CRM - April 2008 - (Page 18)

streamlining of the estimated 7,600 varying tax rates across the country; no alleviation of the burden of tax collection, remittance, and audits; and no guarantee of fairness in terms of vendor compensation for tax collection. Typically, store owners spend an average of 15 percent to 20 percent of their time making sure they’re complying with sales tax laws of differing jurisdictions. Now, “the onus [will be] on the state,” Riehl says, and the state will have to turn to technology to define with certainty the tax rates specific to each individual consumer’s ZIP Code. While the NRF does agree that vendor compensation remains an important issue given the costliness of the system, the act will require that any state mandating tax collection also assume all costs. To be sure, different regions have different needs; that makes it politically unfeasible to require uniform tax rates. Riehl explains that, if passed, the act strives for simplicity by harmonizing the tax bases of both state and local governments. Sales tax on food, for instance, varies: Some jurisdictions choose to tax food purchased in restaurants but not groceries. At the competitive level, e-commerce retailers argue that the threat of taxation is stifling their growth while brick-andmortar store owners say it’s a matter of fairness. Tim Lyons, a spokesperson for the department-store chain JCPenney, says he can’t directly attribute any loss of business due to sales-tax collection, but he believes the real issue is about the basic numbers. “If [the consumer] is comparing a like product from two different sources—one, you’re going to get charged five to eight percent more for sales tax, and the other you’re not—it’s a pretty stark comparison.” There are different costs associated with each business model. At the simplest level, e-commerce pays for servers, brickand-mortar pays for property. Operating remotely is cheaper overall, so will a sales tax really level the playing field? To Riehl, the answer is pretty clear.“If you’re going to put yourself in the marketplace, these are the rules of the game.” —Jessica Tsai 18 destinationCRM Dashboard • Social Networking Permeates Customer Service Solutions Social networking continues to stomp directly on the heart of companies’ conventional customer service processes. More CRM vendors and firms are joining together to deliver this 21st-century utility to consumers looking for another avenue when reaching out to companies to inquire about products and services. CRM strategic consulting and systems integration services firm eVergance and technology provider Jive Software expanded their partnership recently in order to deliver Enterprise Web 2.0 social productivity to service and support environments. themselves against Forrester’s framework of 150 best practices and discovered the common thread in weak areas was failure to consider the reason for adoption. research and development, and overseas growth. “This additional funding will allow SugarCRM to accelerate its goal of moving the CRM market from a proprietary, lock-in model to an open, value-based model by delivering the most modern, open, flexible CRM platform in the industry,” said John Roberts, SugarCRM’s CEO and cofounder, in a prepared statement. • At Your Service: Where SaaS Goes from Here As the number of “-as-aservice” phrases proliferates, Web content management (WCM) software provider Clickability is up to its eyeballs (and yours) in this trend. The release of the firm’s full suite of on-demand WCM solutions includes not just software-as-a-service, but infrastructure-as-aservice, implementationand-support-as-aservice, and innovation-as-a-service. • Salesforce Turns Silver Salesforce.com delivered the 25th iteration of its on-demand business computing system with the Salesforce.com Spring ‘08 release. This latest version of the innovative software-as-a-service (SaaS) toolset adds to its CRM capabilities even as it continues the company’s expansion into areas other than CRM; notable additions this time include development tools, content management, and an expanded set of community capabilities. The announcement also adds a claim that Salesforce.com will become a multicategory and multi-application leader. “We’ve focused on getting people to adopt, use, and love these applications,” says Bruce Francis, vice president of corporate strategy. “Salesforce.com is bringing technology over from the consumer world so that it makes sense in a business context.” • CRM Best Practices Aren’t Practiced Despite a wealth of information on the topic and no shortage of professional services to ease the way, many businesses continue to struggle with adopting and using CRM capabilities. According to a Forrester Research report by William Band, vice president and principal analyst for business process and applications, many of the 260 executives polled rated their companies’ performance in 11 key areas to be poor or below average. The survey participants, members of Forrester’s CRM research panel, scored • Money and Mobility Sweeten Sugar’s Pot As one of several announcements coming out of its SugarCon 2008 global customer and developer conference, open-source CRM provider SugarCRM revealed that it had received $20 million in a second round of venture capitalization, bringing total funding to $46 million. Venture-cap firm New Enterprise Associates joined existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International to provide SugarCRM with the new funds; the company says it will use the money to fund expansion in the CRM market, (For the full stories and more news, visit www.destinationCRM.com.) CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | APRIL 2008 www.destinationCRM.com http://Salesforce.com http://Salesforce.com http://Salesforce.com http://Salesforce.com http://www.destinationCRM.com http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - April 2008

CRM - April 2008 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point A Tenancy of One’s Own The Rebirth of Taxes destinationCRM Dashboard Labor Disputes Reach The Contract Center The Plight of the Wirelines Required Reading The 2008 Service Awards The 2008 Service Leader Awards Customer Self-Service Microsoft Genesys Oracle eGain Astute Solutions The 2008 Rising Stars The 2008 Service Elite Awar Re:Tooling Scouting Report Pint of View

CRM - April 2008

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