| [View Past Issues] | May 11, 2010 |
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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.
IBM Advances Cloud Initiatives with Acquisition of Cast Iron Systems
IBM announced it has acquired Cast Iron Systems to broaden the delivery of cloud computing services for clients. Cast Iron Systems, a privately held company based in Mountain View, CA, delivers cloud integration software, appliances and services. Financial terms were not disclosed. The acquisition expands IBM's business process and integration software portfolio, which grew more than 20 percent in the first quarter of 2010.
Parature Announces Parature for Facebook
Parature, a provider of on-demand customer service software, announced Parature for Facebook, the industry's first customer service and support application on Facebook fan pages. Parature for Facebook will enable organizations to easily be where their customers are to engage in conversations -- that are going on with or without them -- and to deliver quality support directly from their company's Facebook fan page. From the moment that Parature for Facebook is installed, organizations can monitor their Facebook wall conversations, posts and comments in real time, gaining a whole new level of customer visibility and engagement. Parature customers can enable their fans to search their knowledgebase, submit tickets and chat with customer service agents directly from Facebook using Parature Customer Service software.
Southwest Airlines Goes Live with Varolii SMS and Email for Real-Time Communications
Southwest Airlines , the nation's leading low-fare carrier, has added text messaging and email communications over smart phones to its automated flight change notification service. A Varolii client since late 2007, Southwest has dramatically increased the number of customers served via its proactive outreach--sending more than 5.5 million messages to passengers in the last 18 months to notify them of flight delays, cancellations and gate changes. By reaching more passengers with personalized notifications and enabling them to self-select new flight options or transfer to an agent if necessary, the airline has decreased the amount of time passengers spend on the phone with an agent or standing in line at airport service counters.
Siemens Enterprise Communications Contact Center Solution Now Optimized for the Data Center and Virtualized Environments
Siemens Enterprise Communications, a provider of enterprise communications solutions, announced the release of OpenScape Contact Center V8, the next generation of its contact center application which is now optimized for data center and virtualized environments. This open, reliable solution enables deployment flexibility, simplified management and cost savings through server consolidation from both the server and desktop perspective. OpenScape Contact Center V8 also features Web-based agent, supervisor and management desktops. These powerful applications require 'zero footprint', provide virtual accessibility, and are easily customized to meet the unique contact center requirements in a Web 2.0 world.
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.
SupportIndustry.com Survey Finds Most Companies Recognize the Importance of Customer Loyalty but Vary on How They Measure It
SupportIndustry.com, an online resource dedicated to enabling organizations to deliver world-class customer service and support, announced the results of a new Research Insight report on the topic of Effectively Measuring Customer Loyalty.
SupportIndustry.com surveyed its members - senior level service and support professionals - in April 2010 and nearly 50 people responded. Key findings include:
- 62% of participants reported that they do not measure customer loyalty in terms of customer profitability including revenue contribution, customer references and referrals
- 87% of respondents reporting using the Customer Satisfaction Index as a key benchmark
- 62% of participants reported they measure response and resolution time by priority
- 77% of respondents reported they are able to easily route customer requests to the best available resource who can respond immediately
Survey Reveals That the CFO Is Becoming the Top IT Decision Maker in Many Organizations
The CFO is increasingly becoming the top technology investment decision maker in many organizations, according to a joint survey conducted by Gartner, Inc. and Financial Executives Research Foundation (FERF). According to the annual study, more IT organizations report to the CFO than the CEO or any other executive. Forty-two percent of IT organizations surveyed said that they reported to the CFO, and 53 percent of CFOs said that they would like to move to this reporting arrangement.
The joint study found that 42 percent of organizations said their IT organization reports to the CFO, 33 percent to the CEO, 16 percent to the COO, 2 percent to a chief administrative officer and 7 percent to other officers. This was fairly uniform across companies of all sizes, although the percentages reporting to the CEO in large organizations were higher, though the groups still reported to the CFO in greater percentages.
In 41 percent of organizations, the senior financial executives (mostly CFOs) who responded to the survey viewed themselves as being the main decision maker for IT investments. This response occurred in most situations where IT reports to the CFO, but it also occurred in other reporting models. In another 34 percent, CFOs are among the key recommending/sponsoring executives. Thus, in 75 percent of firms, the CFO plays a vital role in determining IT investment. In addition, 20 percent of CFOs have a minor role by providing some input, and in only 5 percent of cases does the CFO not participate in IT decision making.
However, this performance is often not achieved because of poor perceptions of IT, a parochial CFO or CIO perspective, or a failure to invest in the CFO-CIO relationship. CIOs must understand the impact their CFOs have on technology decisions in their organizations and ensure that they are providing the CFO with the appropriate understanding of technology, as well as communicating the business value that can be achieved.
How to Assure 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...
Take Charge of Your Customer Dynamics
Contact center agents are generally the first point of contact with customers. There's a certain logic that pervades companies that results in blaming agents when customers decide to go elsewhere. The agent wasn't pleasant or helpful enough. The agent didn't communicate the offer correctly or follow the script. But, in reality, when a customer is ready to leave and contacts a business to do so, the outcome of that interaction usually has little to do with a specific agent's personality or level of knowledge. The key to keeping customers is understanding customer intent. But how do we truly understand and investigate customer intent? "Listening" is a great place to start.
Full Article...
Improving Agent Retention
Retaining top performers is essential to call center success. The challenge is to create a positive work culture that sustains, nurtures, and engages employees -- both as part of a team and individually. Retention is a multifaceted issue that is affected by both intrinsic factors (individual employee needs) and extrinsic factors (organizational or departmental systems that support employees). Retention strategies need to address both.
Full Article...
Putting the 'Self' in Self-Service 2.0
A successful online customer experience allows customers to self-segment and to introduce their own variations -- in language, color, font size, content, and any other element that, when you put the control in their hands, makes them feel like a more-integrated part of your company. Allow customers to co-create the total experience: Let them select and design everything from how you communicate with them to how they communicate with other customers to the features and look of the product itself. This is Self-Service 2.0 -- self-personalization. Customers are still doing some of your job, but now they're taking over the personalization aspect of the experience.
Full Article...
How to Not Go Out of Business
Maintaining relevance is essential in every industry. As long as competition thrives and technology continues its relentless march forward, companies that don't evolve are destined for extinction. The good news is that innovation doesn't always have to be radical. In fact, a steady stream of minor enhancements to a product, service, or experience can help a company maintain relevance quite nicely. Innovation is like investing -- small gains over time compound to deliver longstanding benefits.
Full Article...
Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service
by Ted Kinni
Whether they are called clients, customers, constituents, or, in Disney-speak, guests, all organizations must best serve the people who purchase their products and services or risk losing them. Now, for the first time, one critical element of the methods behind the magic that is the Walt Disney World Resort-quality service-is revealed in Be Our Guest. Even before Tom Peters and Bob Waterman profiled Walt Disney World Resort in their groundbreaking book In Search of Excellence, the most popular resort destination in the world enjoyed a reputation as a company that sets the benchmark for best business practices. Be Our Guest outlines proven Disney principles and processes for helping your organization focus its vision and align its people and infrastructure into a cohesive strategy that delivers on the promise of exceptional customer service.
View SupportIndustry.com Research Insights: First Contact Resolution and Cost per Call (Phone and E-mail)
Click here to get a full copy of the results.
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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...
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
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Carolyn Healey, Editor - chealey@supportindustry.com
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