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Webinar: Driving Customer Loyalty through Improved Service Performance
Thursday, February 18 at 11 AM PT/ 2 PM ET
Customer satisfaction and loyalty are two highly desirable results in a support environment. But which performance factors deliver both? Join us for an interactive Webinar to hear Dave Brown, president of Support Center University and author of Optimizing Support Center Staffing, explore the difference between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty and explain why both are critical for success.
Attend this interactive Webinar to learn:
- Which industry best practices are a must-have for your performance program
- How support performance translates into customer loyalty
- Key tactics that will ensure both customer satisfaction and loyalty
- And more...
Altitude Software Releases Monitoring Tool to Ensure Contact Center Performance 24/7
Altitude Software, a contact center solutions vendor, announces the availability of Altitude Health Monitor, a new application to keep the contact center infrastructure running by providing real time and historical data on overall system performance, over a friendly web interface and through email and SMS notifications. Altitude Health Monitor value resides on the wide scope of specific Altitude uCI, Altitude vBox and contact center infrastructure metrics such as database performance, storage occupancy, the number of agents logged, trunk status and configuration changes. IT managers can define alarms over the monitored values and be notified through email or mobile, accessing on-demand and timely information 24/7 through a myriad of media channels.
FrontRange HEAT Achieves PinkVERIFY Status
FrontRange Solutions, a developer of help desk and service management software for mid-sized and distributed enterprises, announced that its HEAT version 9.0 help desk solution has achieved PinkVERIFY status and is now compatible with Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) V3 through Pink Elephant's software certification program. As a result of the verification process, HEAT has been certified as compatible eight of the 14 processes outlined in ITIL V3, including Incident, Problem, Knowledge, Change, Service Asset & Configuration, Request Fulfillment, Event and Service Level Management.
Klein Tools Nails Down IT Asset Management Control with Numara Software
Numara Software, Inc., a provider of service desk and asset management solutions, announced that Klein Tools, Inc. has chosen its integrated IT asset management solutions to centralize and improve the company's data and processes. After struggling with a more complex solution, the Klein Tools IT team chose a number of products based upon the Numara Asset Management Platform (NAMP), in conjunction with the Numara Track-It! help desk solution, to reduce time and budget spent on IT operations. NAMP consists of eight modular software products built on a single, unified platform that eliminates the need for expensive combinations of disparate products.
Getting Your Worst Customers to Love You: True Tales from the Front Lines of Customer Support
Wednesday, February 24, 2010 11:00 am
Most customer support teams are good at handling routine transactions. But what about a customer who is threatening to sue you? Or asks to have you fired? Or an employee who got so fed up with IT support that he smashed his laptop and then ran over it?
All of these are real situations that support professionals reported in a recent survey sponsored by Supportindustry.com and Parature. This interactive webinar, teaming communications skills expert and bestselling author Rich Gallagher with Parature's VP of Marketing Gary McNeil, looks at how to handle situations like these and more. The open panel discussion format will examine the best practices, tools and technology behind handling your worst-case scenarios.
Worldwide IT Spending To Grow 4.6 Percent in 2010
A slow but steady improvement in the macroeconomic environment in 2010 should support a return to modest growth in overall IT spending, according to Gartner, Inc. Worldwide IT spending will reach $3.4 trillion in 2010, a 4.6 percent increase from 2009.
Although modest, this projected growth represents a significant improvement from 2009, when worldwide IT spending declined 4.6 percent. All major segments (computing hardware, software, IT services, telecom, and telecom services) are expected to grow in 2010.
From a regional perspective, Gartner's IT spending forecast reflects the economic situation in each region and country with the emerging regions leading the way in terms of growth both in the short and longer term. However, because of the scale of IT spending in North America and Western Europe, these regions weigh heavily in the global IT spending growth rate overall.
IT spending growth in emerging markets (with the exception of central and eastern Europe and some of the Gulf states) is expected to lead the way, with spending forecast to grow 9.3 percent in Latin America, 7.7 percent in the Middle East and Africa and 7 percent in Asia/Pacific. Recovery in Western Europe, the United States and Japan will start more slowly, with Western Europe increasing 5.2 percent, the U.S. growing 2.5 percent, and Japan increasing 1.8 percent.
More...
Study Finds Consumers Want Increased Automation in the Contact Center and have an Overwhelming Interest in Proactive Notifications
Nuance Communications, Inc. announced the findings of a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting. The study revealed that consumers rate automated telephone customer service higher than live agents for certain straightforward interactions. In five out of ten posed scenarios, consumers preferred automated telephone customer service systems over live agent interactions for tasks like prescription refills (66% rated automation highly, compared with 52% for live agent), checking the status of a flight from a cell phone (61% versus 49%), checking account balances (59% versus 36%), store information requests (55% versus 37%), and tracking shipments (53% versus 47%).
The survey also revealed that automated telephone systems are an expected and accepted customer service channel with 82% of US online adults having used an automated touchtone or speech recognition system to contact customer service in the past 12 months. That figure trails behind only live agent interactions, with which 93% of consumers have engaged.
In the survey, consumers provided their level of interest in a variety of specific proactive notification options within five different industries. The aggregated results of the industry-specific questions show that a strong majority of consumers are interested in at least one proactive notification alert via their choice of email, voice message, or text message. Consumers were most open to notifications related to the travel industry (93%), which include such things as flight status updates and confirmation of reservations for flights, hotels, and car rentals. Eighty-eight percent of consumers were interested in notification from a financial services institution, with strong interest in transaction confirmations. With regard to health care, consumers strongly favored appointment reminders — something that could be adopted in a variety of other industries as well, such as utilities or professional services.
Other key findings:
- Consumers' satisfaction with customer service leaves a lot of room for improvement. Only 49% of U.S. online adults report being satisfied, very satisfied or extremely satisfied with companies' customer service in general.
- Consumers who frequently contact customer service from a wireless phone are relatively more amenable to automated telephone customer service channels. About one-third (32%) of consumers regularly use a cell phone to contact customer service. The data indicates that in nearly all scenarios, mobile customer service users rate using automated telephone customer service systems higher than those consumers who do not regularly contact customer service using a cell phone. This is significant due to Forrester's expectation that the number of wireless-only households will continue to grow, reaching 19% of all U.S. households by 2013.
- The 24-hour 7 days a week availability of automated telephone customer service is a key attribute in consumers' minds. Seventy-seven percent of consumers pointed to 24-hour, seven days a week availability as a reason they value automated telephone customer service systems. Another 40% valued that they didn't have to wait on hold for a live agent, while 31% cited the ability to obtain information quickly.
- Consumers today are overwhelmingly interested in proactive customer notifications across a variety of industries. For each of the five industries included in the survey, consumer interest in receiving some form of proactive notification was very strong, ranging from 80% (for cable television operators and telephone companies) to 93% (for travel-related companies).
- Opt-out, accurate software and logical call flows are essential components of a "great" automated speech-enabled customer interaction. Sixty-seven percent of consumers claimed that having the ability to speak to a live agent at any time is necessary in order to consider an automated speech-enabled customer service interaction a "great experience." Systems can be enhanced by improving the accuracy of the software and employing thorough and logical call flows.
According to Forrester's study, when it comes to evaluating a great experience with automated speech recognition customer service systems, two-thirds of consumers value having the ability to speak to a live agent at any time. Forty-two percent of consumers value the ability of the speech recognition system to understand them the first time a response is spoken, and 39% of consumers prefer not to have to repeat themselves. Similarly, when asked to identify what would improve speech recognition customer service experiences, the top choice (75%) of consumers was to offer the option of speaking with a live agent throughout the interaction. Being understood the first time (63%) and improving menus to direct callers to the appropriate destination (45%) round out the top three answer choices.
More...
Survey of Nearly 1,600 CIOs Shows IT Budgets in 2010 to be at 2005 Levels
IT budgets will essentially be flat in 2010, increasing by a weighted global average of 1.3 percent in nominal terms, compared with 2009 levels where IT budgets declined 8.1 percent, according to results from the 2010 CIO survey by Gartner Executive Programs (EXP). 2009 was the most challenging year for IT since the survey began in 1999, and CIOs had faced multiple budget cuts wiping away four years of budget increases, giving CIOs basically the same level of resources as they had in 2005. While there are some signs of recovery in the 2010 projections, these will not overcome last year’s cuts.
Gartner EXP's CIO survey findings show that, in the near term, business expectations and CIO strategies appear stable, with a continued focus on business process improvement, cost reduction and analytics.
Business expectations are shifting from a focus on greater cost-based efficiencies, to achieving better results based on enterprise and IT productivity. These productivity gains will come from collaborative and innovative solutions that take advantage of the new "lighter-weight" services-based and social media technologies, including virtualization, cloud computing and Web 2.0 social computing. This transition can be seen in the top 10 technology priorities for CIOs in 2010 where business intelligence, the No. 1 technology the past five years, dropped to the No. 5 priority.
These strategic, "lighter-weight" technologies are of increasing importance to the CIO. Exploiting them provides the cost, capacity and capability gains needed to define, source, create and deploy information- and process-intensive solutions that will reshape IT and its future role.
Moreover, the technologies that CIOs are prioritizing in 2010 are technologies that can be implemented quickly and without significant upfront expense, instead of investing millions of dollars to get millions in benefits, with these technologies, up front investments are measured in thousands of dollars to get those same benefits.
More...
Rebalancing Your IT Staff
The real value for IT inside a company these days isn't managing the low-level stuff. It's finding new ways to grow business units and to enable communication across an enterprise. That's a combination of salesmanship, a solid understanding of business needs and knowing how technology works. This is a different breed of IT people altogether, and they're tough to find. They're also in high demand, much pricier than a Java programmer and much harder for companies to keep--which is why so few companies are talking about it.
Full Article...
Contact Centers: Staffing for the Upturn
When contact centers are ready to hire, they need to pick the best avenues to seek out quality people. That means a careful analysis of the ones available. The new and rapidly newer routes of attractive web sites with pre-screening tools, along with job boards and online advertising, are beginning to displace traditional print ads and walk-ins.
Full Article...
Tech Support Hell: Ways to Avoid It
An enterprise IT manager who spends thousands with Oracle (or IBM pays to get prompt support from them. But that same person, too often, has a very different experience when trouble strikes products used at home. There's no excuse for rude, sub-standard service. But when looking at a low-margin system that only works when costs are ruthlessly squeezed out of every step from manufacturing to sales and support, once can see how it happens. Vendors could charge more, but consumers have been trained to look for bargains and expect computer-related devices to get cheaper and cheaper. There's no easy solution to this conundrum, but here's what you can do.
Full Article...
Five Tips for Maximizing the Effectiveness of Your Quality Monitoring Program
The need for skilled agents has never been greater. Similarly, the need for effective training, performance monitoring and immediate responsiveness to customer feedback has intensified. This flies in the face of cost-cutting measures, putting the contact center manager into a difficult position - a situation for which yesterday's quality monitoring (QM) practices are challenged to provide a solution. This article presents five tips and best practices for renewing your focus on QM and how doing so can instill customer goodwill, optimize your center and more widespread customer service operations, and support the bottom line.
Full Article...
Displays: Screening Your Calls
Display technology has come a long way, baby. These information tools are turning into agent engagement and motivation tools. And vendors continue to improve clarity and offer installation flexibility. Now, agents have to have real-time information to do their jobs: details such as average wait time for callers, longest call in queue, number of agents working, warnings about hoax calls and reminders to push particular initiatives during calls. There's even room for a little humanity, with readerboards carrying announcements for birthdays, the arrival of doughnuts in the breakroom (good ones, not day-olds), car lights left on in the parking lot, that sort of thing.
Full Article...
Customer Service: Career Success Through Customer Loyalty
by Paul R. Timm
Customer Service: Career Success through Customer Loyalty provides a systematic process for building service skills that all business people need. Presented in a friendly, conversational manner, the text is filled with examples that demonstrate the link between service skills and career achievement. This edition is reorganized so it is easy to see how key concepts fit together. New information is included on internal customers, emerging technologies, and stress-reducing techniques. Throughout the text, there is an emphasis on transforming good service intentions into a workable plan that exceeds customer expectations and creates loyalty and success.
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2009 Service & Support Metrics Survey: The Results
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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