DoubleClick Email Study
DoubleClick announced the results of its fifth annual Consumer Email Study at the DMA Annual Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. The study reveals the continued popularity of email for consumers and an increasing acknowledgment of email as a legitimate and relied-upon marketing channel. Spam still comprises the largest proportion of email that consumers receive, however permission-based email is increasingly being welcomed by consumers as a replacement for telemarketing, direct mail, and even bills and statements. As further indication of the perceived legitimacy of email, consumers are increasingly likely to make purchases, both online and offline, as a result of receiving a permission-based email.

			Required Reading
		Gaining Taxpayer Respect    After years of dismissing CRM as a poor fit for the public sector, many government agencies are now enthusiastically embracing the technology. In fact, some analysts say the government sector is the hottest growth market for CRM. Barton Goldenberg, president of ISM Inc., a consultancy in Bethesda, Md., says he expects government spending on CRM software will grow 30% in 2004, reaching up to $2 billion in sales. (ComputerWorld) more >>
Archive of past Required Reading articles

CCH Selects Utopy SpeechMiner
Utopy announced that CCH INCORPORATED has selected Utopy SpeechMiner Enterprise Release 3.0, a speech analytics software, for its customer contact center. CCH has selected SpeechMiner as part of its ongoing customer service improvement initiatives, with the goals of enhancing customer satisfaction, improving service representative productivity and reducing service costs.

Business Objects and Teradata Expand Relationship
Business Objects announced that is has expanded its relationship with Teradata. BusinessObjects 6.5 and Crystal Version 10 have passed Teradata's Retail Decisions Benchmark, a milestone in the relationship that enables increased joint selling and co-marketing activities within the retail industry. Business Objects passed the Teradata benchmark, and demonstrated its ability to perform complex retail analyses and deliver high levels of performance on large retail Teradata databases.

ING Direct Realizes 400% ROI With E.piphany
E.piphany announced that ING DIRECT has generated more than $5 million in incremental profit over the past year using E.piphany Interaction Advisor. Implementing E.piphany Interaction Advisor in its contact centers and on its Web site has resulted in a payback period of 3 months for ING DIRECT, or 400% ROI in the first year of use.

Identify Software Continues to Grow
Identify Software announced that it has seen increased adoption of its AppSight Black Box software. Identify's customer portfolio has grown as over 50 new organizations have licensed AppSight during the past two quarters across a variety of industries including financial services, retail, healthcare, education, and telecommunications.

Tier 1 South American Operator Implements WeDo Soft
WeDo Soft announced the implementation of its Revenue Assurance product (RAID) at a Tier 1 Fixed Operator in Brazil. RAID enables the integration and automation of all Revenue Assurance control processes and is WeDo's answer to the difficulties experienced by both mature and start-up telecom operators in maintaining the coherency between their entire BSS, OSS and network systems portfolio, and identifying and controlling revenue leakage.