Winning the Battle of Expectations vs. Reality in today's service desk

This webinar, conducted by SupportIndustry.com and presented by industry experts Pete McGarahan and Stephen Fenter, Director, Best Practices, SupportSoft, provides you with an insider's view of what is happening in the Service Desk today.

Attendees will learn how implementing best practices and taking advantage of the latest support technologies can increase productivity and improve the performance of the Service Desk.

View the webinar today!

Laptop theft exposes patients' medical data
A government laptop housing the medical information of 2,500 patients enrolled in a National Institutes of Health study was stolen, potentially exposing personal data. The computer was stolen in February from the trunk of a car driven by a lab chief of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, but officials did not notify the patients of the theft until Thursday, saying they didn't want to spread unnecessary alarm, according to The Washington Post. The laptop contained seven years worth of clinical studies on the patients, including their names, ages, medical record numbers, and MRI reports. Social Security numbers and physical addresses were not on the computer, according to the NIH. The agency said there is no indication that the thief took the computer because of its content, and it doesn't expect that the data will be misused.

Microsoft renames CRM Live to 'CRM Online'
Microsoft is changing the name of its on-demand CRM (customer relationship management) offering to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, according to a company official. Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, said in an e-mailed statement that the name change is meant to separate Microsoft's consumer lines from its offerings for businesses. More than 500 early-access customers are using CRM Online and the product will be launched broadly across the U.S. and Canada in the second quarter, according to Wilson.
Source: InfoWorld

Avid Enhances Online Customer Support Capabilities
Avid Technology, Inc. announced significant enhancements to Avid's online customer support user-interface -- a popular support destination for the company's professional film and video customers. The redesigned Web tool dramatically improves the types of technical resources and information available to Avid support customers, allowing users to seek more accurate and personalized answers to important product and service queries, 24/7. Prior to launching the new site, Avid technical experts reviewed and updated more than 10,000 pieces of content with the goal of making it easier for customers to search for relevant information and effectively resolve technical issues.

Services Industry Summit - eService Strategies and Challenges
April 21-23, 2008

Join us for the Services Industry Summit - eService Strategies and Challenges, April 21-23, 2008 in historic Charleston, SC. Industry luminaries from leading organizations will share their insights and discuss the latest issues and trends in the areas of eservices, knowledge management and others!

Register today!

Software Spending by Retailers in China, India, and Russia will top $1.57B in 2010
According to an AMR Research report released today, software spending by retailers in China, India, and Russia will top $1.57B in 2010 -- an increase of 45% over 2007. In addition, these retailers will increase their IT budgets an average of 25% between 2007 and 2010. Aggressive first-time spending for store technology over the next few years, especially in China, will see retailer budgets in these emerging economies far outpace those of their peers in more established countries.

According to the report, the most common business priorities for retailers in these regions included increasing their understanding of consumer demand (22% cited it as their top priority) and improving the overall shopping experience (18%) in 2007. Priorities will expand in 2010, with an increased focus on consumer-centric merchandising and the strategic software investments that support this effort.

Of the 232 retailers in emerging markets surveyed, the majority will seek alternative relationships with their technology providers over the next few years. Between 2007 and 2010, acquiring software via the traditional licensed approach will diminish by 20%. Retailers in emerging areas of the world will shift toward software-as-a-service (increasing 56%), business process outsourcing (21%), and open source (69%).

More...

Email Black Hole Causing Customer Service Crisis
Email is officially the UK's worst channel for customer service, according to research from eService provider Transversal. Transversal's third annual Multi-channel Customer Service Study has uncovered a growing crisis in email response: emailing customer service staff is markedly less effective at yielding a satisfactory answer than using an automated online system or phoning a contact centre. Less than half (46 per cent) of the routine customer service questions emailed to 100 leading organizations were answered adequately.

Additionally, the average time to respond to email was nearly 4 days (46 hours), with 28 per cent of organisations not even replying at all. However proving that fast, accurate responses by email are possible, some companies responded with useful answers within 10 minutes. Overall these figures show a major deterioration since 2006, when email successfully answered 60 per cent of queries and kept customers waiting less time – on average 33 hours - for a reply.

Transversal's study evaluated 100 leading UK companies in the banking, telecoms, insurance, travel, consumer electronics, grocery retail, fashion retail, CD/DVD retail, consumer electronics retail and utilities sectors for their ability to answer simple routine questions, via email, their website and by phone. While websites averaged 5 out of 10 correct responses and 55 per cent of phone calls were answered within 2 minutes, email responses continue to deteriorate year on year.

Analysis of responses show that too many companies simply use email to push customers to other channels rather than even attempting to provide a useful answer. The majority (63 per cent) of inadequate replies directed customers to call a contact centre, while nearly half (48 per cent) pushed customers back to the website, where they started, normally to generic web pages that didn't answer the question. Not only does this increase customer dissatisfaction but multiplies the number of contacts consumers need to make, with many having to telephone to resolve their enquiry.

The usefulness of email replies has deteriorated year on year in 80 per cent of sectors. Even though many have improved response times, this appears to be through sacrificing effectiveness of replies. For example, in 2006, utilities companies took an average of 102 hours to reply to email with 70 per cent of replies answering the question. While 2007 email response times improved to 53 hours, only 15 per cent of replies answered the question. The picture is even worse in telecoms. From 2005 to 2007, average reply time fell from 32 to 26 hours but successful answers fell from 70 per cent to 20 per cent. The pattern of improving response times at the expense of deteriorating answers is clearly evident.

Insurance companies come bottom of the survey: only one email reply successfully answered the question and 50 per cent of companies didn't respond at all. The slowest response took 27 hours -- and then asked the customer to call them! Utilities were nearly as bad, with only one answering the question successfully and one partially answering it. One utility even advised customers to visit third party comparison sites to get information on current pricing.

Proving that fast, accurate responses are possible, in contrast 80 per cent of CD/DVD retailers provided correct answers, with the quickest received within one hour. Fashion, grocery and electronics retailers as well as consumer electronics manufacturers also scored relatively highly -- but still only around 50 per cent of those surveyed responded satisfactorily. The fastest successful response was from a consumer electronics company which answered the question within 10 minutes. Showing the wide range of email handling skills a rival company in the same sector took 13 days to respond to an identical query.

More...

Application Delivery Architects and Engineers Should Be an IT Organization's Next Key Hires
As more organizations begin to deploy application delivery networks (ADNs) to mitigate limitations in business-critical applications, Gartner, Inc. says the emergence of ADNs creates a need for a new group of technical professionals.

ADNs are required for successful deployment of modern browser-based applications and emerging Web services applications. Enterprises should recognize that designing and managing this new network overlay requires unique skills and build a team of application delivery architects and engineers. These new roles will be key to the deployment of very expensive applications and protocols.

Application delivery architects work with application development, storage, security and network architects to develop an overall approach to the delivery of each application. This team determines which optimization techniques (protocol offload, caching, application firewalls, and so on) are required and where they should be implemented.

Once the approach to application delivery has been decided, an application delivery engineer leads the operational effort. He or she configures and manages the elements of the ADN. This may involve programming application delivery controllers through scripts, developing Web application firewall rules, or working with the managed service provider to optimize the ADN service. Members of this team will often be drawn from application/server and security administration. The cross-functional nature of the application delivery engineer's job requires strong people skills as well as broad, strong technical skills.

Because ADN knowledge is in short supply, Gartner says most companies will have to develop staff in-house. Although this will require investment in training and, perhaps, pay grades higher than those of network engineers, it is a necessary investment. Application delivery architects and engineers can be key to the deployment of highly expensive business-critical applications. Gartner believes that companies which employ them will realize a very positive return on investment and could achieve strategic market advantages.

More...

Confusion Surrounds 'Report Spam' Button
Q Interactive, an online marketing services provider, announced the results of its "Spam Complainers Survey" jointly conducted with marketing research firm, MarketingSherpa. The mission of the survey was to uncover consumers' perceptions of what they consider to be spam, why they report emails as spam and what they think happens when the "report spam" button is clicked.

Among the most striking findings of the study is the fact that the definition of spam has effectively changed from the permission-based regulatory definition of "unsolicited commercial email" to a perception-based definition centered on consumer dissatisfaction. Over half of the participants, 56 percent, consider marketing messages from known senders to be spam if the message is "just not interesting to me", while 50 percent of respondents consider "too frequent emails from companies I know" to be spam and 31 percent cite "emails that were once useful but aren't relevant anymore". (Respondents could select more than one answer for multiple questions in the survey.)

When it comes to utilizing the "report spam" button -- the primary tool Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide consumers to counter the problem -- nearly half of respondents (48 percent) provided a reason other than "did not sign up for email" for why they reported an email as spam. In fact, underscoring consumers' varying definitions of spam, respondents cited a variety of non-permission-based reasons for hitting the spam button, including "the email was not of interest to me" (41 percent); "I receive too much email from the sender" (25 percent); and "I receive too much email from all senders" (20 percent).

There is a pervasive confusion among consumers regarding what they believe will happen as a result of clicking the "report spam" button. Over half of respondents, 56 percent, reported it will "filter all email from that sender" while 21 percent believe it will notify the sender that the recipient did not find that specific email useful so the sender will "do a better job of mailing me" in the future. Even more indicative of the lack of understanding, 47 percent believe they will be unsubscribed from the list by clicking "report spam" while 53 percent do not believe the button it is a method to unsubscribe.

Not surprisingly, accompanying this confusion is the frequent misuse of the "report spam" button. The survey found a large number of consumers, 43 percent, forgo advertiser-supplied unsubscribe links in email and simply use the ISP's "report spam" button to unsubscribe from an advertiser's list -- regardless of whether or not the email fits the consumer's definition of spam. Moreover, a full one in five consumers (21 percent) use the "report spam" button to unsubscribe from email they specifically do not consider spam.

More...

Customer Focus Creates Competitive Advantage
In order to maintain customer focus, the best salespeople become facilitators, creating a partnership that extends the selling relationship within the customer's company. The motivation to achieve this should be strong -- it costs five times as much to attract and sell to a new customer as it does to an existing one.
Full Article...

Corporate employee blogs: Lawsuits waiting to happen?
Thousands of companies have embraced the idea of giving employees an unfiltered voice as a means to keep in touch with customers, suppliers, and the media. Sun Microsystems boasts a 4,000-employee-strong blog network, including its chief executive, and some corporate "spokesbloggers" like Microsoft's Robert Scoble have even rocketed to Internet stardom. However, a recent libel lawsuit filed against Cisco Systems over one of its employees' personal blogs could spur companies, many of which have encouraged workers to share their writings publicly, to reconsider how much latitude to give them.
Full Article...

How small companies can make a big impact with ITIL
ITIL is for big business, right? Not necessarily. Although larger IT organizations are more usually associated with ITIL implementations (See The Practical Value of the IT Infrastructure Library), there's growing evidence that ITIL can benefit the smaller IT shop, too.
Full Article...

Offshoring Spreads Its Wings
According to a new CFO survey, 36 percent of financial executives say their companies use offshore outsourcing. That's twice as many as in 2004. Among companies with annual revenues of more than $1 billion, the number of offshorers rises to 49 percent. Meanwhile, research firm Gartner estimated the size of the market for offshore IT and business process outsourcing at nearly $35 billion in 2006, and forecasts a market of $70 billion to $100 billion by 2011. Companies and offshore service providers alike have expanded their views on which functions can be offshored, with everything from traditional call-center work to legal research on the table. They have also learned how to better manage the outsourcing process.
Full Article...

Executing Your Strategy: How to Break It Down and Get It Done
by Mark Morgan, Raymond Elliot Levitt, William Malek

Why do businesses consistently fail to execute their competitive strategies? Because leaders don't identify and invest in the full range of projects and programs required to align the organization with its strategy. Moreover, even when strategy makers do break their plans down into doable chunks, they seldom work with project leaders to prioritize strategic investments and assure that needed resources are applied in priority order. And they often neglect to revise the strategic portfolio to fit the demands of a dynamic environment, or to stay connected to strategic projects through completion, as new products, services, skills and capabilities are transferred into operations.

In Executing Your Strategy, Mark Morgan, Raymond Levitt, and William Malek present six imperatives that enable you to do the right strategic projects--and do those projects right.

More Info...

Visit the SupportIndustry.com Blog

The SupportIndustry.com Blog is another way stay on top of the service and support industry. Our blog, updated at least once a week, is dedicated to covering the latest topics related to service and support, call center management, customer experience management, web-based support, help desks, workforce optimization and more.

Check it out today

Research Results: 2008 Trends in Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
The majority of respondents (81%) in CRMindustry.com's "2008 Trends in Customer Relationship Management (CRM)" survey are happy with the overall performance of their CRM technology vendor. The research, conducted in November - December 2007, surveyed high-level CRM executives representing a range of industries. The data gathered provides valuable insight into the issues and challenges important to those responsible for CRM in their organization.

To get a complimentary copy of the executive summary, as well as view the graphs, click here.

White Paper: Using Web-based Support Tools to Improve Customer Service
This informative white paper examines the latest trends and technologies in using Web-based support tools to improve customer service. Get your copy today!

Editorial suggestions, feedback & comments:
Carolyn Healey, Editor - chealey@supportindustry.com

Advertising Information:
adinfo@supportindustry.com

Thank you for reading SupportIndustry.com's weekly newsletter!
Copyright © 2008, supportindustry.com