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Webinar: Getting Your Worst Customers to Love You: True Tales from the Front Lines of Customer Support
Wednesday, February 24 at 11 AM PT/ 2 PM ET
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.
Central Hudson Brings New Customer Service Desktop Online
Jacada Ltd., a provider of customer experience management and process optimization solutions, and Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corporation, announced the implementation of the Unified Service Desktop, a solution based on the Jacada WorkSpace unified desktop platform. The rollout of the new desktop represents the culmination of an in-depth business process optimization project, which leverages the existing data structure while simplifying some of the desktop complexity. In addition, Central Hudson expects to see an improvement in call handle times.
Convergys Launches Intervoice Voice Portal 6.5
Convergys Corporation, a provider of relationship management solutions, announced the immediate availability of version 6.5 of its Intervoice [R] Voice Portal and the next generation of its Interaction Composer development environment to further enhance the Convergys suite of intelligent interaction solutions. Within the Intelligent Self-Service solution, Intervoice Voice Portal from Convergys helps contact centers determine their customers’ needs and preferences in order to provide them with personalized, convenient, and consistent interactions, while helping to reduce operational costs.
EMC Enhances Atmos to Accelerate Cloud Adoption
EMC Corporation, a provider of information infrastructure solutions, unveiled its EMC Atmos cloud infrastructure solution. EMC Atmos is an internal, on-premises cloud storage platform designed to help customers automatically manage and optimize the distribution of rich, unstructured information across geographically dispersed locations. With the introduction of GeoProtect functionality in the latest version of Atmos, EMC continues to advance the flexibility, resiliency and content protection levels that enterprises desire when architecting a large-scale, globally distributed cloud infrastructure solution.
Best Practice Case Study Series: Support Center Solutions
Get a complete case study on your company's product or service straight into the hands of SupportIndustry.com's senior level service and support executives. Each case study will tell a compelling story on how your offerings help support executives meet the challenges they face today. You will receive full publishing rights to your final piece, making it a valuable marketing tool you can use over and over. The final piece will have a brief intro with each sponsor having their own section.
2010 Software Spending Devoted To Existing Systems More Than Emerging Technologies
More than half of IT software budgets in 2010 will go toward ongoing operations and maintenance of existing applications as opposed to implementing new software solutions, according to a recent survey by Forrester Research, Inc.
According to Forrester's Enterprise And SMB Software Survey, North America And Europe, Q4 2009, the poor economic environment created a backlog of business application software upgrade activities for firms, and many plan to address the issue this year. Forty-one percent of enterprises and 21 percent of SMBs plan to upgrade existing finance and accounting software, 48 percent of enterprises and 19 percent of SMBs plan to upgrade their customer relationship management (CRM) applications, and 52 percent of enterprises and 18 percent of SMBs plan to upgrade industry-specific software. In addition, more than 20 percent of all SMBs have concrete plans to implement CRM or information and knowledge management (I&KM) software in 2010 or later, representing the fastest-growing SMB software markets in 2010.
While cloud computing has many enterprises interested, growth of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications is driving the market more, and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is still slow. About one-third of all enterprises have subscribed or plan to subscribe to SaaS applications in the next 12 months. However, this does not mean that one-third of all business transaction volumes are already running on SaaS applications. Rather, it reflects enterprises that use it for any application, most of which are not mission-critical today.
IT Workers Getting 1.8% Pay Bump
During two years of turmoil, the great recession of 2008-2009 brought budget cutting and layoffs across most IT organizations, large and small. But the picture is brightening for IT workers, and Computer Economics' 2010 IT Salary Report finds that IT organizations are budgeting to give the typical IT worker a 1.8% boost in pay.
By historical standards, the 1.8% median pay raise is meager. But in light of still-high unemployment rates, the finding indicates IT executives are responding to the need to retain their best workers and boost damaged morale. Computer Economics' previously published report, Outlook for IT Staffing and Spending in 2010, shows that IT organizations plan to increase operational budgets by a median 2% in 2010 and that more than one-third is planning increase staff, restoring some of the positions shed over the past two years.
That most IT workers will receive raises does not mean median total compensation will rise at the same rate, or at all. With persistent unemployment, organizations will be able to hire new workers at rates lower than those who were laid off during the recession. This should place downward pressure on U.S. national median salary levels over the coming months.
The annual salary study further finds that IT workers in the trenches are among those receiving the highest pay raises, while managers and IT executives, in that order, will get the lowest bumps. Those at the top will need to await a stronger recovery before total compensation levels will grow.
C-level executives and directors will be last in line to receive raises in 2010. This is partly because incentive pay makes up a larger portion of total compensation for executives and directors, but it is also an acknowledgement that the recession was harder on the rank and file. Managers, at 1.7%, will fare slightly better than executives fare but still receive below-average raises. As the economy improves, the executives and managers will no doubt see their compensation rise faster than the other groups.
At 2.1%, developers are receiving the highest pay raises. The developers group includes application programmers, data analysts, database administrators, business analysts, architects, and others involved in the development of new systems as well as the maintenance of existing systems.
Following close behind is the operations group, at 2.0%. The data center operations group includes computer operators, production control analysts, technical support representatives, and help desk representatives. We also include technical writers, trainers, and librarians in this group.
Also near the median is our final group of network and systems support personnel, who will receive an average raise of 1.9% at the median. This group includes network administrators, system administrators, storage administrators, security analysts, telecom analysts, and webmasters, among others.
Global CIO: Do CIOs Still Matter?
Amid today's broadly unsettled business environment, and with particular focus on redefining business-technology strategies to drive unprecedented levels of business value, this article presents 10 ways for CIOs to prove that not only do they still matter, but that they can be more vital and strategic than ever before.
Full Article...
The Outside-In Approach to Customer Service
Times are tough for many businesses, yet some are holding their own, even thriving. Best Buy, Cisco, Target, Starbucks, and Jones Lang LaSalle come to mind. How do they do it? According to a new book by Harvard Business School's Ranjay Gulati, it is customer-centric firms -- those with a so-called outside-in perspective -- that are most resilient during turbulent markets. An outside-in perspective means that companies aim to creatively deliver something of value to customers, rather than focus simply on products and sales. And Gulati's research, including interviews with 500 executives spanning industries and geographies, asserts that outside-in success is not confined to any one sector.
Full Article...
Call Center Supervisor Selection: The Often-Ignored Art
Many call centers have implemented a comprehensive, multi-hurdle hiring process featuring advanced screening and assessment tools to ensure that they attract and acquire the best agents possible. Few centers, however, have done the same to ensure that they have the best supervisors leading those agents.
Full Article...
Why business leaders need to ask their IT organizations about process
The IT organization is a black box to many business leaders. It consumes budget and resources and produces services that generally make the business more efficient and competitive. A discussion of how process is being implemented in IT and the sharing of experiences from a business perspective can provide a bridge for information exchange that acts as a catalyst for better alignment of IT initiatives and expenditures with the priorities of the business. This article presents specific questions to spark this conversation.
Full Article...
Create Better Employee-Training Sessions
An enthusiastic and knowledgeable training leader can create a successful employee-training session. Creating a staff training workshop that is engaging and valuable need not be difficult. However, it does take work, some creative thinking and, above all, the attitude that you are going to make it fun for yourself and your staff..
Full Article...
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
by Chip Heath, Dan Heath
Change is not inherently frightening, but our ability to alter our habits can be complicated by the disjunction between our rational and irrational minds: the self that wants to be swimsuit-season ready and the self that acquiesces to another slice of cake anyway. The trick is to find the balance between our powerful drives and our reason. Through lively examples, the Heaths speak energetically and encouragingly on how to modify our behaviors and businesses.
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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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