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Winning the Service Trifecta! Happy Customers, Lower Cost and Improved Visibility
Many service organizations are required to quickly 'triage' a customer's issue, request or question and either resolve it on first contact or escalate it blindly to back-office resources. By focusing on what's important to your customer, such as speed and accuracy, you can drive operational efficiencies and increase customer satisfaction. This SupportIndustry.com webinar presents the business case for creating a customer-centric service delivery model. Attend this webinar to:
- Learn how you can optimize and automate your service delivery
capabilities, best practices and business processes. - Realize the benefits for a dynamic workload distribution intelligently routing any issue or request to the most qualified, available resource.
- Learn how with greater visibility you can now balance daily workload, resource allocation and SLA performance relative to established targets.
Aspect Customer Looks to Improve Customer Experience With Quality Management in the Contact Center
Aspect, a provider of unified communications (UC) and collaboration services and software, announced NV Energy, an electric company, is deploying Aspect's quality management capabilities in two contact centers in Northern and Southern Nevada. PerformanceEdge(R) Quality Management replaces the company's existing quality management systems, enabling them to reduce regulation compliance overhead costs. Following deployment, NV Energy will complete a multisite deployment that allows them to maintain the individual requirements at each contact center site with a centralized administrative capability enabling them to maintain the recordings in one location.
SAP StreamWork Helps Companies of All Sizes Transform the Way People Work
SAP StreamWork -- the new on-demand, collaborative decision-making software from SAP AG -- is the company's latest product aimed at transforming the way people work. SAP StreamWork brings together people, information and proven business methodologies to help teams naturally and fluidly work toward goals and outcomes. Teams can assess situations together, develop strategies and make clear decisions, with a full record of what transpired.
Acqueon Technologies Launches New CIM Solution
Acqueon Technologies, a Customer Interaction Management (CIM) product specialist unveiled its latest offering -- Acqueon iQ, an end-to-end Contact Center application suite with comprehensive functionalities. Acqueon iQ is a 'Contact Center in a Box' solution designed on the premise that the purpose of interaction is to relate. As a result, Acqueon iQ bridges the gap between an interaction (CIM) and a relationship (CRM).
Whitepaper: Service and Support, Made to Measure - Using Analytics to build a Roadmap to Success
Traditionally, measuring support operations has been straightforward. Shorter hold times are better; higher abandonment rates are worse.
Adding knowledge management to case management makes service and support harder to measure. For example, how many articles should be written? As anyone who has waded through an overgrown, under-maintained knowledgebase can tell you, more content is not better, unless each article is a high quality, unique, findable, usable solution that answers a question users really ask. It's difficult to know what the right amount of content is in advance.
There's no simple trick to using metrics to optimize today's increasingly complex service and support operations. But, in conjunction with our customers, we've developed five measurement principles that lead to success.
Typical IT Pro In 2010: No Raise, And $81,000 Salary
In 2010, for the first time in the last 11 years of InformationWeek's annual U.S. IT Salary Survey, the median raise for IT professionals is 0%, according to the 20,492 IT pros who responded between November and January. That flat pay holds true for IT managers and staffers, for both their base salaries and total compensation, which includes bonuses. It holds true for IT consultants and contractors, too. If stock options were the sign of the economic times at the start of the last decade, the salary freeze is the symbol for the start of this one.
The fallout of a long, deep recession is obvious in the data:
- 40% of IT pros report a pay freeze, compared with 26% in 2009.
- 15% have had their pay cut, compared with 6% in 2009.
- 29% have had their benefits scaled back, up from 17% in 2009.
- Only 23% say the economy has not impacted them professionally, compared with 34% in 2009.
IT remains a well-paying profession. For managers, median base salary is $103,000 and total compensation is $111,000. For staffers, median base salary is $81,000 and total compensation is $85,000. There continues to be huge pay differences by skill and industry. In fact, the survey has some positive signs for the most highly skilled IT pros. This year, 10 IT staff job functions earn $90,000 or more in median total compensation, up from seven last year. Ten IT management job functions earn $120,000 or more in median total compensation, up from two last year.
By title, the best-paid staffers continue to be IT architects, whose median total pay tops $100,000. Project management cracked the six-figure mark for the first time, at $105,000 median total compensation. We often hear CIOs talk about the importance of project managers, but we haven't always seen that respect reflected in paychecks. Perhaps that's changing.
Industries also matter a lot in determining IT pay. Have you heard that investment banking bonuses are back? It's true in IT as well. The securities and investments segment of financial services tops the industry pay scale for both managers and staffers, with managers earning median compensation of $156,000, including $28,000 in bonus pay. Compare that manager pay with four other sectors--local and state governments, nonprofits, and education--which make $90,000 or less, with bonuses of a few thousand dollars.
For IT leaders, stagnant pay and job security concerns raise strategic staffing issues. Do they have the right people and skills if they have to grow? Can they hold on to people once the hiring starts, or have their hiring freezes, pay cuts, and layoffs taken too big a toll on morale? If the economy shifts gears, IT leaders must be ready with a staffing and salary strategy.
Gartner Sees Shift in CEO Priorities as Organizations Focus on Customer Retention
There has been a major shift in CEO priorities from early in 2009 with top priorities switching from cutting costs to retaining customers and enhancing existing relationships, according to Gartner, Inc. Through 2015, a recession-era mentality among CEOs will ensure a policy of paying for future investments from the cost savings obtained from existing IT operations.
Gartner has identified five key issues that CEOs should be focusing on in 2010 and beyond as well as related advice for CIOs:
CEO Issue No. 1: Getting to the End of Restructuring
CEOs are in the midst of finishing off the work they started in 2009: streamlining their business operations, dumping nonperforming or nonstrategic assets, and working to ensure that they don't let their "break-even" point start to rise and thereby increase their exposure to another economic shock. While many CEOs have continued to invest in initiatives that will improve their cost structure or allow them to drive revenue as the economy recovers, they are "financing" this by taking a very hard look at not only their internal cost structures, but also the cost structures of the partners in their ecosystems.
In this environment, CIOs are advised not to expect an increase in budgets in 2010 but rather to expect to “finance” future IT projects from the cost savings obtained in other parts of operations.
CEO Issue No. 2: Integrity, Corruption and Fraud — Rebuilding Trust
The imperative for rebuilding trust is as much to regain the confidence of customers, which will allow economic growth, as it is to regain governmental trust, which translates into electoral decisions. Companies are still in the early stages of that rebuilding of trust, and while Gartner is optimistic that this can be "repaired" for many companies in 2010 and 2011, the general distrust of economic conditions seems to be slowing down the return of the consumer -- a difficult factor in the U.S., for example, where consumer spending comprises as much as 75 percent of all spending.
Accordingly, CIOs should expect to see increased interest in capabilities and technologies that help provide transparency to internal operations of the sort that increases trust. More openness will surround the financial structure of the organization, and expenses will be examined to high levels of detail. Business intelligence will see strong interest in this time frame.
CEO Issue No. 3: Planning for a Return to Growth — Playing Defense, While Playing Offense
This year is about CEOs taking a firm stand on plans for increasing shareholder value. This may be through acquisitions that are less expensive in a time of lower equity pricing or lower capital costs. It may also be about investing in initiatives that achieve a strategic goal.
CIOs need to understand that organizations are of two minds. They are investing in the innovations that will build the future, while guarding against the possibility of another economic recession or crisis in the next 36 months. For CEOs, this is one of the most difficult maneuvers to execute in business, as it must accommodate impulses that are sometimes contradictory. To this end, CIOs must ensure that they are able to segment the activities of the organization so that each part of the team can focus on what is most important: One team takes care of cost optimization activities, while another is focused on the future.
CEO Issue No. 4: Government Is the New Partner at the Table
In many advanced economies, during the past 30 years, state control and intervention in industries have been gradually rolling back. However, the tumultuous economic effects of the banking crises of 2007 and 2008 have driven swift and large-scale government interventions to bail out and save companies, and more market interventionist and state control styles of government may arise from this situation.
The resulting new regulations will require compliance by any new systems. Several areas will see new regulatory actions in the coming 24 months, including the financial services, automotive and transportation sectors. CIOs need to keep scanning the landscape of regulatory actions in federal, state and local governments, as the pace is expected to pick up in 2011.
CEO Issue No. 5: The Future of Recession-Driven Changes
One of the key issues in the boardroom is to understand the future of the changes forced by this recession. Will the growth in all industries return to the levels that were enjoyed before the downturn? Will the drive to improve process efficiencies be long-lasting, or will there be a marked return to a top-line focus in the business?
Gartner believes that IT has a significant role to play here because it needs to deliver insights for the business to enable it to effectively navigate the changes ahead. That means IT must make investments in understanding customer intent, predicting the impact of business conditions and connecting strategy to outcomes.
How to Assure Agent Schedule Adherence
Agent adherence is among the top issues that cause stress in the world of supervisors and managers. How does one match the art and science of having the right number of properly skilled people, supporting resources and committed leadership, in place at the right times, to handle an accurately forecasted workload, at service level, with quality? It’s not easy, and often keeps many of us looking for answers.
Full Article...
It's Time for IT to Drink Its Own Kool-Aid
Today, it's all about optimizing the business. IT is being charged with finding ways to simplify and automate business processes, making them both more reliable and less expensive to operate. It's a never-ending process, and as time goes on the demands get greater. Yet, while IT has largely been successful to date in helping other parts of the organization save time, money and effort, the same cannot be said for itself. In other words, while IT has been busy driving business value by eliminating repetitive, manual tasks from the rest of the enterprise, it has allowed its own department to continue to be plagued with them.
Full Article...
CEO Payday: What Tech's Top Execs Made in '09
The recession took its toll on tech CEOs' compensation in 2009, but not everyone lost. Pay for BMC CEO Robert Beauchamp more than doubled to $26.5 million, for instance, and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson enjoyed a 35% climb to $20.3 million. Read on to find out more about the salaries, bonus, stock awards and perks that tech CEOs took home last year. Our tallies -- arranged from lowest to highest paid CEO -- are based on data included in public companies' proxy statements (DEF 14A form), as filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Full Article...
5 Steps to Remedy a Failing Online Community
Not all online communities for business succeed. In fact, many fail. The failure rate for online communities has been a popular research topic over the past few years and it is estimated that over 60% of online communities fail to thrive. But all is not lost. If you have an under-performing community there are steps you can take to remedy the situation and, in some cases, recover.
Full Article...
How CEOs Must Overcome Denial
Reviewing a spectacular business failure, we often wonder why the CEO didn't see trouble coming. It was so obvious. Why didn't Digital Equipment Corp. CEO Kenneth Olsen see the PC as a threat to minicomputers? Did Coca-Cola's Roberto Goizueta really think New Coke was a good idea? Denial has always been a problem. What is different today is that the cost of denial has become so high. We are living in a less forgiving world than we once did." In this article, Richard S. Tedlow , author of a new book, Denial: Why Business Leaders Fail to Look Facts in the Face-and What to Do About It discusses how denial can cripple a company, and what can be done about it.
Full Article...
30 Reasons Employees Hate Their Managers: What Your People May Be Thinking and What You Can Do About It
by Bruce L. Katcher
Quietly seething...secretly resenting...and ultimately affecting performance, employees' negative feelings toward their managers can lurk beneath the surface of even the most pleasant-seeming work relationships. These issues, if gone unchecked, can result in organizational catastrophe. To find out what's really going on, the authors surveyed more than 50,000 employees in 65 organizations of all types and sizes, and discovered the 30 main causes of ill will. This book provides solutions for these fundamental symptoms of employee-manager discomfort.
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2010 Service and Support Technology Showcase Now Available
SupportIndustry.com has released the 2010 version of our Service & Support Technology Showcase. This in-depth buyer's guide features the latest tools and technologies in the support services industry that enable support operations to deliver superior customer service. To view the listings,click here...
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