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White Paper: Tools and Technologies To Maximize Your Support Center's Potential
Companies understand they must deliver the best possible customer experience each time they get the opportunity and, further, leverage every opportunity to deepen customer relationships. Ultimately, delivering that experience depends on ready access to accurate customer data. It's a straightforward goal, but creating high-level customer visibility into customer data and making it accessible to relevant parties -- agents, partners, customers -- requires that support organizations surmount a number of inherent challenges.
Call Center Fined $500K for Employing Children
A Utah-based company that operates call centers in seven states has paid $500,000 in civil penalties for child-labor violations. The U.S. Department of Labor cited Orem-based Western Wats Center Inc. for employing children too young to work and allowing children to work longer hours than allowed by law. The penalty was among the highest of its kind ever assessed against a U.S. company. The company said it settled the complaint amicably and that many of the violations were technical. It said it was working to improve internal controls before it was under a government investigation a year ago.
source: CRM Daily
Get Satisfaction Connects Customer Support and the Social Web
As small and medium-sized businesses turn to Facebook to connect with customers, many struggle to use 'the Wall' as an efficient and effective channel for highly visible service and support requests. Get Satisfaction directly addresses this challenge through the release of its Customer Support Tab for Facebook Fan Pages -- a powerful community platform that invites consumer participation, cultivates a strong peer-to-peer support model, and helps small and medium-sized businesses reduce their overall support costs.
CallCopy Continues to Deliver Innovative Contact Center Solutions with cc: Discover 4.2
CallCopy, a provider of call recording and contact center solutions, announced the availability of cc: Discover 4.2, the latest version of its workforce optimization suite. Several new or enhanced features include expanded agent coaching and training, quality management enhancements and an Improved user experience.
Salesforce.com Enters into a Definitive Agreement to Acquire Jigsaw for $142 Million
Salesforce.com, an enterprise cloud computing company, announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Jigsaw, the leader in crowd-sourced data services in the cloud. Jigsaw's unique Wikipedia-style crowd-sourcing model delivers a complete, accurate and up-to-date business contact data. Since Jigsaw's offering is delivered in the cloud, companies can focus on realizing success instead of focusing on legacy enterprise data management models that require expensive integration and continuous, dedicated maintenance. The acquisition will combine the power of salesforce.com's suite of CRM applications and enterprise cloud platform with Jigsaw's cloud-based model for the automation of acquiring, completing and cleansing business contact data.
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.
Great Online Customer Service Is Worth USD $17.3 Billion per Year
According to a new Ovum survey commissioned by STELLAService, the value of great online customer service in 2010 is USD $17.3 billion. The survey derived the dollar impact of great customer service by consumer category (i.e. financial services, healthcare, utilities, brick and mortar retailers, online retailers, etc.). It determined that the total value of great customer service across all consumer categories is USD $268 billion per year. On average, the survey found that Americans are willing to spend approximately 9.7% more for great customer service.
The survey, however, paid particular attention to the way in which great service impacts the buying decisions of online consumers. It was concluded that consumers in the online retail category are willing to pay an even higher premium for great service (10.7%) than they would in most other categories. Based on the average amount spent by online consumers each year, the survey found that $17.3 billion of value can be created in 2010 by Internet retailers that offer excellent customer service. Due to the seemingly distant and remote nature of online shopping, it makes sense that consumers would pay a higher premium to have the comfort and peace of mind that they will be taken care of in the case of a serious question, concern or problem.
More...
Federal IT Market $111.9 Billion By 2015
The opportunity for IT firms that serve the federal government will reach $111.9 billion by 2015, growing 5.4% annually in the next five years, according to a forthcoming report from Input Research.
This year alone, the federal IT market is expected to be $95.4 billion, with $86 billion of that going to contracted IT services, according to the research.
Civilian agencies will spend the most on IT in the next five years -- $58.5 billion by 2015, which represents a compound annual growth rate of 5.6%, according to Input.
However, it's intelligence agencies that will see the most growth in spending -- 6.4% -- to reach $13.5 billion in IT spending in 2015. The defense sector is expected to spend $39.9 billion by 2015, representing growth of 4.8%, according to the research.
By the end of this year, civilian agencies are expected to spend $44.5 billion; defense will spend $31.6 billion; and intelligence will spend $9.9 billion, according to Input's research.
Of several types of services the federal government will look for vendors to fulfill, professional services will experience the most growth in the next five years, with a compound annual growth rate of 7.1%.
Systems integration will experience the next-highest growth rate (6.3%), followed by outsourcing (5.6%), software products (5.2%), communications and network services (4.9%), and computer equipment (3%).
Overall, the federal government's role in the U.S. economy is expanding, particularly in social, regulatory, and security-related programs, according to Input. However, federal IT contractors should look at budget projections for IT spending with skepticism because they are often conservative.
source: InformationWeek
More...
Marketing Spending by High Tech and Telecom Providers Will Increase in 2010
Marketing spending among high-tech and telecom providers (HTTPs) is picking up in 2010, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc. The survey found that 44 percent of 2010 HTTP marketing budgets will be flat compared with 2009, 41 percent will increase and only 15 percent are likely to decrease. This compares favorably to 2009 when more than half of providers' marketing organizations took cuts in their budgets compared to 2008.
While there are signs of growth in IT spending in 2010, Gartner analysts have predicted a "new normal" in which IT buyers who were forced to rethink the entirety of their spending approach because of the economy may never return to their prerecession ways. This will impact how HTTPs market to end users.
The survey found that some companies making marketing budget increases plan significant rises. Thirty percent of these companies expect to increase budgets by between 1 and 15 percent, while 13 percent of respondents are planning budget increases of between 16 and 30 percent or more. For those companies planning an increase in budgets, sales programs to support the direct sales force as well as programs supporting positioning and external communications are key priorities. Following those are customer segmentation, strategic marketing, management of marketing efforts and sales programs to support indirect sales.
Even though the ratio of in-house to external spending is planned to be about 1:3 in 2010, fixed and recurring costs are expected to consume the largest portion (23 percent) of the 2010 marketing budget, according to the majority of respondents. That will be followed by sales channel marketing and programs at 17 percent, and 15 percent of respondents identified positioning and external marketing communications.
When asked how they allocated their marketing communications budget, 22 percent of respondents said that events will receive the highest percentage of spending, 16 percent of those surveyed identified advertising, and 11 percent of respondents selected direct mail.
More...
CAUTION: Superstars Can Hurt Your Contact Center
Superstars: they're great; you wish you had more. Their KPI's are at the top of the charts. You'd clone them if you could. Superstars make you look good to your boss. You fear losing any one of them. They almost always "max out" on your incentive programs. Despite this good news, a poorly designed incentive program will create a very negative effect on your non-superstars that will cost you dearly.
Full Article...
Eight Reasons Why Your Customers May Hate You
Too often, we forget that closing the business is the easy part. In reality, it's the messy job of nurturing relationships -- caring, consistency, collaboration, and communication -- that separates organizations. Want to keep your relationships profitable and civil over the long term? Avoid lapsing into these eight faults.
Full Article...
Train to Retain Top-Performing Agent
The call center agents who are most engaged in their jobs and aligned with their employers are the ones who are most committed to delivering outstanding customer care. They also know that keeping customers satisfied and loyal will help to ensure their companies' success -- and they recognize what a critical role they play in this ongoing endeavor. One of the best ways to build high levels of engagement is to provide agents with opportunities to learn, grow and advance in their jobs.
Full Article...
Leadership Practices That Drive Results
In today's fast-moving global economy, change is inevitable, and the primary responsibility of leaders is to initiate and deal effectively with change. Leaders need to be creative problem-solvers who use their imagination to re-examine the status quo, visualize new possibilities and ask, "What if?" They need to continually seek improvements in processes and procedures to maximize efficiency and effectiveness. In addition, leaders must stay ahead of the curve in managing people and their organizations through change. Trust is the essential foundation for leaders trying to energize change in their organizations and improve their bottom line.
Full Article...
Three Reasons to Add Face-to-Face Reviews to Your Customer Feedback Efforts
As technology advances, the methods available to collect customer feedback multiply. With social media sites (blogs, Facebook, and Twitter), web-based surveys, and post-transaction reviews on sites like amazon.com, customers have the opportunity to provide feedback for every purchase they make. And there is value in that feedback loop. Real-time transaction data can identify tactical issues, widely-shared customer opinions can be used to shape product strategy, and the social web can give businesses new channels to interact with some customer segments. But if you don't have a structured process to capture face-to-face feedback from your most important customers, what are you missing?
Full Article...
Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization
by Leonardo Inghilleri, Micah Solomon
Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit reveals the secrets of providing online and offline customer service so superior it nearly guarantees loyalty. Here are a few examples drawn from the wide range of practical techniques that the authors will teach you -- techniques which you can use to create unrivaled customer loyalty in your own business context:
- How to handle a service breakdown in a systematic way that actually leaves your customer more loyal than if the mishap hadn't happened in the first place.
- How to gather and use data on customer preferences in a meaningful, practical, profitable way.
- How to truly personalize the experience of your online customers -- on every page of your website, and in every step of their e-commerce encounters.
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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.
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