Groupon's Customer Fix, PatronManagerCRM, Commence CRM Adds European Head

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David Sims
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Groupon's Customer Fix, PatronManagerCRM, Commence CRM Adds European Head

According to research featured on the Retrevo blog, the phenomenon of Black Friday shoppers, those who are interested only in heavily-discounted merchandise, could be a 365-day a year reality due to Groupon.

That’s “thanks to Groupon” or “blame it on Groupon,” depending on your perspective, whether you’re out buying the merchandise or the one paying for it to clutter up your house.

And talk about finding a deal - The Wall Street Journal is reporting that while Groupon's initial public offering, scheduled to begin trading November 4 on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol GRPN, is “getting generally negative reviews from analysts,” but should find pricing “within its expected range of $16 to $18 a share.”

Retrevo cites from a recent Gadgetology study, finding what the study’s authors say is “a class of shoppers who buy lots of things through deal sites and they expect deep discounts on what they buy.”

In fact, the study profiles what it calls a “Deal Addict” -- much like the people waiting outside Kmart in their folding chairs, munching doughnuts and sipping coffee in the predawn hours before Black Friday as if it were a new Star Wars movie opening.

Read more here.

As Carolyn J. Dawson has reported, the newest version of PatronManager CRM “has been released by Patron Technology in collaboration with its partner salesforce.com.” Box office functionality is integrated with a complete customer relationship management or CRM system, Dawson wrote, by the world-class and affordable web-based system for the arts, PatronManager CRM.

It’s not your typical, run of the mill business CRM, it has a bit more interesting aim, to be used by arts organizations for ticketing, subscriptions, fundraising, e-mail marketing, and donor and contact management. Still, a customer’s a customer and client’s a client, and as Dawson said, the product’s focus is on improving clients’ collaboration with their customers by adding social media to the clients’ administrative, day-to-day operations.

“Social media information can be now placed by an organization on the contact records of customers and prospects with the social contacts enhancement. Icons for LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter will be visible to PatronManager CRM users,” she says.

Read more here.

Rahul Arora noted recently that Commence Corporation, a CRM provider, announced Noel Shannon as its new president of international operations based out of Dublin.

Larry Caretsky, CEO of Commence Corporation, released a statement saying “Noel's experience with Business Intelligence stretches back to the late '80's when he partnered with Pilot to implement the first Executive Information Systems, before teaming up with Cognos to promote their entry into the Business Intelligence Market.”

The company recently announced the availability of Commence Lead Scorer, the latest addition to its suite of award-winning CRM solutions. Commence's lead scoring feature moves beyond traditional CRM programs and enables increased sales effectiveness by targeting high potential customers, Arora wrote:

“The Lead Scorer is an automated business process that ranks and scores leads based on a set of pre-defined criteria. The criteria consist of a series of customizable questions that are used to automatically provide a score for each lead based on the responses entered into the system.”

Read more here.





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