Carenet Selects Communications-as-a-Service from Interactive Intelligence
Carenet, a health care services company, has selected the Interactive Intelligence communications-as-a-service (CaaS) offering. Carenet will use the Interactive Intelligence CaaS offering to support more than 250 employees located at its corporate office in San Antonio, in addition to remote clinical staff located throughout the United States. Carenet plans to deploy the following Interactive Intelligence hosted functionality: desktop call control, presence management, interactive voice response, multichannel routing and queuing, workforce management, automated notifications, and automated post-call satisfaction surveys.

Avaya Launches Next-Generation Customer Service and Collaboration Applications
Avaya, a provider of enterprise communications systems, software and services, announced a suite of new and enhanced product innovations and services based on Avaya Aura that redefine the economics and effectiveness of real-time, multi-media enterprise communications. New and enhanced capabilities in Avaya's suite of Contact Center (CC) and Unified Communications (UC) applications drive improvement in the quality of customer service and employee collaboration for mid- to large-sized businesses while lowering the total cost of ownership. In addition, Avaya Aura 6.0 now features increased security, scalability and flexibility, plus common management and expanded use of virtualization across the entire platform.

ShoreTel Contact Center 6 Enables Call Centers to Streamline Business Processes Through Open Interfaces
ShoreTel, a provider of IP phone systems with fully integrated unified communications (UC), released ShoreTel Contact Center 6, the latest version of its call center software. ShoreTel Contact Center 6 makes it easier than ever for organizations to integrate contact center activities with existing core business processes. New real time APIs and event feeds transform the call center into a dynamic contact center that feeds off the information to self adjust, react and reorganize to enhance the customer experience. This helps call centers improve responsiveness and improve flexibility. Increased scalability and high availability features also provide a robust foundation and flexible geographic footprint for large call centers.

Facebook Selects Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com, an enterprise cloud computing company, announced that Facebook has selected Salesforce CRM to manage its fast-growing sales operations. Facebook evaluated the pros and cons of enhancing its own system or selecting a cloud computing CRM system and went with the Sales Cloud 2 for the inherent benefits of cloud computing, particularly its quick implementation time and the ability to scale along with the company's rapid growth.

 

Webinar: Measuring and Managing First-Contact Resolution: Challenges & Techniques
Thursday, August 5 at 11 AM PDT/ 2 PM EDT

First contact resolution, or FCR, is the key to superior support and operational efficiency for an organization. Get it right, and you win with customers, but get it wrong and it wreaks havoc across the company.  So how do you effectively measure and manage this crucial metric in order to grow your success? Join industry expert Dave Brown, author of "Optimizing Support Center Staffing," and Brenda Dentinger of Citrix Online to learn why FCR should be a top priority and how to accurately assess and measure it.

Attend the Webinar to learn:

• The growing importance of FCR
• Methods for capturing and calculating FCR
• How to align your measurements with industry benchmarks
• The relationship between FCR and other performance factors

Register today!

More Than Half of Large, Downsized U.S. Businesses Plan to Rebuild Their Workforces To Pre-Recession Levels by 2012
More than half (54 percent) of large U.S. businesses that reduced staff in the past 12 months plan to rebuild their workforces to pre-recession levels within two years, according to a study released today by Accenture.

The survey confirmed that companies are shifting their focus away from cost control and returning to growth. The percentage of U.S. companies focused primarily on cost control will decrease from 41 percent in mid-2009 to 18 percent in 2011, according to the study. And the percentage of U.S. companies focused primarily on investment in growth-oriented activities, such as hiring, will increase from 24 percent today to 37 percent within the next 12 months.

However, as companies focus on growth, a shortage of high-quality skills may be cause for concern for many businesses. 15 percent of U.S. executives surveyed described the overall skill level of their workforces as industry-leading.

Companies' sales and customer service workforces are the employee groups identified as most important by executives surveyed. However, many of the executives reported significant skills challenges in both of these critical areas. Among those executives who rated sales or customer service as one of their organization's most important workforces, only 23 percent reported that their sales forces perform at a high level and 34 percent said the same about their customer service workers.

Additional Findings: 

• Nearly one-half (47 percent) of executives do not anticipate changing the size of their workforce in the next 12 months.

• Almost two-thirds (65 percent) have reduced the number of full-time employees in the past 12 months.

• When asked what criteria they used to determine which employees to let go, the top reason cited by 53 percent of executives was low-performing employees. Following closely behind, 52 percent of executives said they let go of employees whose skills were not critical to the future direction of the business. Only 11 percent said high salaries were the determining factor.

• Nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of companies added full-time equivalent employees in the past 12 months. When asked the reasons for adding employees during the downturn, 46 percent of executives cited specific needs for new staff to support the launch of new products or businesses or their entry into a new market; 45 percent cited the need for more/different skills to drive the business in the future; 45 percent said they wanted to strengthen the workforces that are most critical to the success of their businesses and 39 percent cited the opportunity to add high-quality talent who are difficult to find during more robust economic times.

• Only 14 percent of companies indicated that their workforce is extremely well prepared to adapt to and manage change through periods of economic uncertainty.

• About three in 10 companies said they either cut back or completely eliminated campus recruiting, recognition programs and incentive compensation in the past 12 months.

• Only one-fourth of respondents strongly agree that their company has the leadership necessary to help the enterprise navigate periods of economic uncertainty and the leadership development programs to prepare the organization's future leaders.

More...

Study: Cloud Computing Confidence Expected to Drive Economic Growth
The flexibility of cloud computing could help organizations recover from the current global economic downturn, according to 68 percent of IT and businesses decision makers who participated in an annual study commissioned by Savvis, Inc, a provider of cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises.

A lack of access to IT capacity is clearly identified as a barrier to business progress, with 76 percent of business decision makers reporting they have been prevented from developing or piloting projects due to the cost or constraints within IT. For 55 percent of respondents, this remains an issue.

Global research highlights indicate that:

• Confidence in cloud continues to grow – 96 percent of IT decision makers are as confident or more confident in cloud computing being enterprise ready now than they were in 2009.

• 70 percent of IT decision makers are using or plan to be using enterprise-class cloud within two years.

• Singapore is leading the shift to cloud, with 76 percent of responding organizations using cloud computing. The U.S. follows with 66 percent, with the U.K. at 57 percent.

• The ability to scale resources up and down in order to manage fluctuating business demand was the most cited benefit influencing cloud adoption in the U.S. (30 percent) and Singapore (42 percent). The top factor driving U.K. adoption is lower cost of total ownership (41 percent).

• Security concerns remain a key barrier to cloud adoption, with 52 percent of respondents who do not use cloud citing security of sensitive data as a concern. Yet 73 percent of all respondents want cloud providers to fully manage security or to fully manage security while allowing configuration change requests from the client.

• Seventy-nine percent of IT decision makers see cloud as a straightforward way to integrate with corporate systems.

More...

Your Next IT Budget: 6 Ways to Support Business Growth
Make sure your IT budget priorities match up with the current business focus on growth. Here, Forrester Research shares six tips for changing the infrastructure and operations portion of your IT budget to support business expansion.
Full Article...

Innovation for Call Centers
Next time you're on the phone with a call center, listen carefully to what the rep says. Chances are you'll hear your name several times, hear a tone of empathy, maybe an "I'm sorry." It would be nice to think the rep really cares -- but of course she's probably just following a script. That can be a bad idea, we've found. A  recent HBR article "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers", explored how customer service drives loyalty, including the role of managing the emotional side of customer interactions. Here's some further insight about that delicate dance.
Full Article...

Rev Up Your Call Center Training and Development Initiatives
Customer satisfaction studies indicate that first contact resolution and knowledgeable employees are high on list of elements required to build strong customer relationships. And these same elements can only be accomplished if the employee has the tools, knowledge and skills to easily and effectively respond to those customers' inquiries. So what this indicates/suggests is that the development of your employees is a wise investment. So how do you ensure you're getting the most from your investment?
Full Article...

Frontiers of Collaboration: The Evolution of Social Networking
Social networking tools such as Twitter and the emerging Google Wave web application are taking individuals and organizations to the frontiers of real-time communication and collaboration. The technology has the potential to make it easier to discover and share information, interact with others, and decide what to buy or do. But the key word is "potential": Social networking's evolution is still in its early stages.
Full Article...

Do Tech Mergers Hurt Customer Service?
Technology companies have spent more than $350 billion buying other companies worldwide over the past 3 1/2 years, with the companies making these deals saying they want to give their customers more options, better prices, and smarter service. But customers used to dealing with a specialist often get worse service after the takeover.
Full Article...

Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today's Profit and Drives Tomorrow's Growth
by Inder Sidhu

Over the past seven years, in a highly unstable global economy, Cisco doubled revenue, tripled profits, and quadrupled earnings per share. How? By Doing Both. When companies face key strategic decisions, they often take one path and abandon the other. They focus on innovation and new business at the expense of core businesses or vice versa. They stress discipline and sacrifice flexibility. They focus on customers and ignore partners. And they struggle. Cisco believes there is a better way: Doing Both.

Doing Both means approaching every decision as an opportunity to seize, not a sacrifice to endure. It means avoiding false choices, reduced expectations, and weak compromises. It means finding ways to make each option benefit and mutually reinforce the other. In this book, Cisco Senior Vice President Inder Sidhu explains why “doing both” is today’s best strategy.

Click here for more information on this book.

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2009 Service and Support Technology Showcase Now Available
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This annual Supportindustry.com survey explores the state of enterprise service and support -- technology adoption rates and deployment plans, financial challenges, workforce issues, performance metrics and other industry trends. The results reinforce previous years' findings, highlighting support organizations' continued adoption of better-integrated and responsive technologies, efforts to improve processes, and growing recognition of the strategic role of service delivery in corporate growth. Key metrics to benchmark your support operation were also captured and discussed.
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