| [View Past Issues] | April 13, 2010 |
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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.
CA to Cut 1,000 Jobs
CA Inc., which is projecting earnings for its fiscal year at the low end of its prior estimate, said it plans to cut about 1,000 positions, or 7.6% of its work force, as part of a restructuring and consolidation. Results for the maker of software for mainframe and other corporate computers have mostly held up during the recession as it has cut costs to match revenue. It has also sought to expand its sales by acquiring small and mid-sized companies and to buttress its cloud-computing products. The CEO said the majority of the actions, which also include consolidating facilities, will be finished by the end of April, and everything will be completed by the end of the fiscal second quarter.
source: WSJ
Enkata Unveils Activity Tracker, a Data Capture Breakthrough for Analytics
Enkata, a provider of analytics-powered performance management software, announced the availability of Enkata Activity Tracker. This technology innovation captures data directly from service agent desktops to support analytics-powered applications thereby eliminating the need for costly, time-intensive IT data integrations. Enkata's performance management solutions, including Automated Contact Reasoning, First Contact Resolution, Enkata Manage, and Enkata Discover, are now available with Activity Tracker.
Salesforce.com Goes Social With 'Chatter' Feature
Salesforce.com has revolutionized its platform with a new technology called Chatter. Think social networking fused with customer relationship management (CRM). Chatter is the first social enterprise collaboration that works a lot like Facebook and Twitter. With Chatter, Salesforce.com users have all of the powerful CRM tools that Salesforce.com delivers as well as profiles, real-time feeds, and status updates. This social networking feature also extends to apps and data within Salesforce.com. Chatter is touted by Salesforce.com as "private, secure and trusted." It will be built into all functions of the Salesforce.com suite, and is slated for official release sometime in the summer 2010.
Source: PCMag
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.
IT Job Growth Pauses in March
IT employment, which had been in growth mode since the start of the year, paused in March, according to TechServe Alliance, a collaboration of IT services firms, clients, consultants and suppliers.
In the first two months of 2010, IT employment grew by more than 18,000 jobs. In March, the number of IT positions dipped by 1,800, representing a 0.05 percent decrease from the February level of 3,829,100 technology jobs.
SupportIndustry.com Announces New Research Insight Report on Cost Per Contact for Phone and E-mail Support Channels
SupportIndustry.com surveyed its members - senior level service and support professionals - in March 2010 and over 50 people responded.
Key findings include:
- Nearly 70% of respondents report that the cost per for the phone channel is $24 or less at level 1.
- 54% of respondents report their cost per e-mail for Level 1 is less than $10.
- As with any support channel, escalating to Level 2 is going to be more expensive, and this rings true with both the phone and e-mail channels.
Confidence In SaaS Increases By 62% Amongst SMEs
A recent survey conducted by Really Simple Systems, the UK's largest hosted CRM vendor, has revealed that small and medium sized enterprises are embracing hosted applications at a faster rate than ever. The annual survey questions SME business owners, directors, sales, marketing and IT managers, on their views of SaaS and the reliability of the products currently available in the market.
From a sample of 466 respondents, the majority from small and medium sized organizations with less than 50 employees, 62 percent report increased confidence in hosted applications between March 2009 and March 2010. This is mirrored by the 62 percent who agreed that hosted applications had been made a more attractive proposition by the current state of the economy.
The survey confirmed that hosted CRM continues to outshine ERP, Payroll, HR and Manufacturing as the preferred SaaS offering for SMEs. ERP, Payroll, HR and Manufacturing offerings have improved their penetration in the SME market but continue to lag behind. 67 percent of respondents reported that they are confident in hosted CRM with 41 percent actively using hosted CRM applications. Hosted ERP trails behind CRM with only 13 percent of respondents using ERP SaaS applications and only 39 percent reporting confidence in hosted ERP applications.
Hosted CRM has almost completely caught up with in-house CRM for SMEs, with 41 percent of respondents now using hosted applications as opposed to 42 percent using in-house CRM.
Outsourced CRM systems continue to prove unpopular with only 2.6 percent of respondents opting for this option and the number of respondents not using any CRM system stands at 14 percent, a one percent drop from the same time last year.
The survey also revealed that almost half of respondents feel as confident about the reliability, speed, data safety, and functionality of SaaS applications as they do with in-house offerings. This is indicative of the now almost identical usage of hosted and in-house CRM.
Furthermore, the research also showed that 37% of those questioned planned to spend more on IT in the next 12 months than they had done compared with the last 12 months.
Up-Selling vs. Up-Serving Your Customers
People who pursue money often produce money, but they don't create an ongoing flow of money. Customers sense your intentions. When the money is your main focus, they know it, and they don't see any reason to cultivate a connection with you. After all, you'd only be a vendor to them, not a business friend. But when you up-serve them without requiring an added purchase, their sales resistance drops, and they will not only tend to buy more, but also seek your advice on other decisions.
Full Article...
Avoid Conflicting Call Center Objectives
Nobody purposely establishes call center objectives that are contradictory, but it's easy to do, given the many inter-related activities and processes in centers, and the nature of random call arrival and the behavior of queues. Here are some common pitfalls and tips for avoiding them.
Full Article...
What IT Can Learn From Health Care Reform
Few people from any political perspective--left, middle or right--think the new health care reform law will make the industry more efficient instantly without further changes. What has been widely under-analyzed is the relationship between falling prices for health care services and the rising system-wide costs. A closer look at this relationship reveals important lessons for IT that could solve some of the enduring problems facing our industry.
Full Article...
Five Technologies for Improving Customer Relationships
It's all about making life easier for consumers. They shouldn't have to search another Web page or call the airline to see if their flight is on time; the airline should be calling, emailing, or texting them. With the trend of personalization taking hold, it's time to focus on streamlining and personalizing the customer experience, initiating interactions about things the customer is interested in, needs, and will use. This article discusses five technologies companies should be implementing or actively investigating to create a more personalized customer experience.
Full Article...
Top Ten Survival Tips for Remote Work Teams
As companies search for more productive and more cost effective ways of getting work accomplished, there has been an explosion of virtual work and project teams. As a result, it has become imperative for people to learn how to work together across boundaries of space, time, and yes, cultures. Driven by the need to leverage expertise located in different parts of the organization, companies are increasingly reliant on geographically dispersed virtual teams to plan, make decisions, and take action on critical business issues. This article presents a "Top Ten" list of strategies that will help your virtual teams perform at the highest possible level and take full advantage of members' varying skills, knowledge and capabilities.
Full Article...
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
by Nicholas Carr
"Is Google making us stupid?" When Nicholas Carr posed that question in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net's bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet's intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. Weaving insights from philosophy, neuroscience, and history into a rich narrative, The Shallows explains how the Net is rerouting our neural pathways, replacing the subtle mind of the book reader with the distracted mind of the screen watcher. A gripping story of human transformation played out against a backdrop of technological upheaval, The Shallows will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.
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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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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
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Carolyn Healey, Editor - chealey@supportindustry.com
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