From businesses retooling for growth, to bringing Siri to Salesforce, review our top CRM predictions for 2012.

The secret to creating an excellent customer experience isn’t so secret: segment customers by service levels, set and reinforce expectations, proactively fix problems, and practice up-selling and cross-selling.

Do your sales managers dream of creating an excellent customer experience? In this age of instantly crowdsourced consumer dissatisfaction, keeping customers happy is a mandatory step in not just retaining your customers, but being able to land new ones. So listen up, sales: you’re competing based on the customer experience. Time to do something about it.

Should organizations use scoring to promote or prioritize people in the call center queue?

Can customer service be more efficient, but still facilitate an excellent customer experience? The question is pertinent because consolidation—an old service story—is more relevant now than ever. But what’s the best way to consolidate a service or contact center?