“It's only very recently that the CRM ideal has been rendered realistic due to the advent of cloud-technology and the introduction of advanced CRM software,” writes The Independent, which defines CRM as “organizing interactions with customers, particularly sales transactions and client communication, using facilitating software.”

Cut those last three words off that sentence and it’s a fair definition. Adding anything about the tools one uses to interact with customers introduces a dangerous mindset that CRM is “about” the technology, not the needs and strategies which dictate the choice of technology.

You do not need software to do CRM correctly. Sure in most cases it really helps, but all software does is act as a tool to accomplish the job of CRM. It is not the CRM.

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This reporter suspects there’s quite the market for name-brand voices in the auto-attendant market -- Mel Gibson as William Wallace urging you to select one, two or three; Humphrey Bogart on a travel site would be particularly notable.

So how do the companies actually decide what voice to use? And why do they always seem to be female?

ABC News recently took a look at how Siri picked its voice. Siri isn’t an auto attendant, but the same considerations are used across all areas of voice recognition systems. And what ABC decided was that people like female voices.

And if you’ve noticed, Americans particularly fall for British-sounding women.

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Want to grow your email marketing list? Let’s rephrase that: Want to make more money?

The self-proclaimed “Marketing Sherpa” blogger, Adam T. Sutton, recently offered three ways to do just that. 

“Yeah, sounds great,” you say, “but just expanding my email marketing list, I mean, other than the fact that it’s bigger?”

There are other advantages, as Sutton says, pointing out that new subscribers are a bit friskier than your old ones, they’re still exploring what you have. It’s not how big your email list is, really, it’s how new it is. And there’s no point in dropping older customers off the list, is there? Size matters, in the respect that it means you’re adding new customers. A huge, static list isn’t the idea here.

What you want is a list that’s big because it’s constantly growing, not because it got big at some point last year.

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You might be tired of hearing about password managers, but these are truly invaluable tools.  And recently there was another high-profile password hack where this time the target was a database full of FTP passwords at Web hosting firm DreamHost. More like NightmareHost now, thanks to inadequate password management.

Password management is something that simply must be more important to many of you than it apparently is. At DreamHost, the hackers got the FTP credentials of all shared hosting accounts by accessing a legacy table “storing passwords in plain text,” according to industry observer Ericka Chickowski.

Noa Bar-Yosef, senior security strategist at Imperva, told Chickowski that the hackers got “customer credentials to the FTP server,” which means they can “use these credentials in order to impersonate customers when accessing the FTP server,” which leads to all sorts of mischief, such as accessing customer documents and the downloading and uploading of unauthorized documents.