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Elevate Your Service Levels: Support More Users on More Devices
Mobile devices are no longer used solely by top executives -- road warriors, field service professionals and "corridor warriors" also rely on smartphones.
With LogMeIn Rescue, you can help elevate your service levels by remotely resolving issues and training users on their BlackBerry® smartphones.
And did we mention it works on PCs, Macs and Windows Mobile® and Symbian™ devices, too? Try it free for 14 days and see how easy it is to support more devices across your entire organization.
Knoa Delivers Global End-User Monitoring Solution Offering
Knoa Software, a provider of end-user experience and performance management software, announced the general availability of Knoa Global End-User Monitor (GEM). Knoa Global End-User Monitor enables organizations to monitor end-user experience and interaction for all desktop and web-based applications running on users' desktops. The product collects comprehensive, global metrics on software utilization, application health, application response times, user behavior, user experience and desktop performance. Knoa GEM is unique because of its ability to collect a broad range of metrics across all applications that a company runs without any configuration, instrumentation, scripting, templates or cartridges -- simply download, install and immediately begin collecting metrics for all applications executed by end users.
Crucial.com Enhances Customer Experience with Online Community
Crucial.com and Lithium Technologies have announced the global Crucial.com online community to complement existing site features that make buying computer memory upgrades an easy and engaging experience. Crucial.com is an online destination of Lexar Media, a global provider of memory products for digital media; Lithium Technologies is a provider of on-demand customer community and Social CRM solutions for the enterprise. Crucial.com's Lithium-powered community is positively impacting customer satisfaction in two ways. First, the community gives customers access to their peers, who are a highly trusted source for information and support. Second, the community is easing the burden on existing support channels.
iWave Software Acquires Buildwave Technlogies
iWave Software, a provider of IT process integration and automation software, announced the purchase of Buildwave Technologies, Inc. Buildwave provides software and technology to help enterprise IT organizations identify, track, monitor and analyze data contained in IT Service Management (ITSM) event logs. iWave plans to incorporate Buildwave's technology into iWave Automator, its enterprise-class IT process integration and automation platform (run book automation).
Newcastle Building Society Boosts Customer Service with Nortel
Newcastle Building Society has selected Nortel to provide a new virtual contact center to enhance communications between office locations and improve customer satisfaction. By connecting the new site with the central offices, the Nortel solution ensures customers experience the same quality of service no matter which office they are contacting. The solution also improves the call waiting times for many customers because if all lines are busy in the contact center, the customer call is answered at society's central branch. In addition, customers can take advantage of a call back service allowing them to elect to be called back at their preferred time instead of waiting to speak to an agent.
How to Tell Anyone Anything: Coaching Your Service Team to Success
Wednesday, August 26 at 11:00am /2:00 pm
If you manage people, the single biggest factor in your morale, turnover, and customer satisfaction levels is your ability to give feedback that really changes performance, without getting people defensive. Based on recent principles from strength-based psychology, this webinar will teach you a new, step-by-step process for truly effective coaching and feedback, based on the speaker's new nationally-published book How to Tell Anyone Anything: Breakthrough Techniques for Handling Difficult Conversations at Work.
IT Market Compensation Study Shows That Organizations Are Focusing on Containing Workforce Costs
In today's economy, it is imperative that CIOs understand what resources they have and may need in the short and long term and avoid making deep staff cuts without first considering their effects on the organization's ability to attract and retain talent. However, a recent survey by Gartner, Inc. showed that nearly 66 percent of respondents do not currently have a formal IT workforce planning process that will enable them to leverage the opportunities presented by this downturn.
According to a survey of 325 U.S.-based organizations in March of 2009, 64.1 percent of survey respondents indicated that they will put hiring on hold for the next 12 months (March 1, 2009 to February 28, 2010). In contrast, a total of 35.9 percent of respondents projected an increase in IT head count. Although some geographic markets, such as the Northeast, were seriously affected by hiring freezes and layoffs, survey respondents continue to have difficulty in finding skilled enterprise architects, database administrators, ERP programmers/analysts, project managers, Internet/Web architects and Web application programmers.
In a financial crisis, companies can't reward everyone in the same way as in good times and one of the first items to be cut is the annual salary increase budget. Results from this year's survey shows there will be an across-the-board reduction (IT and non-IT) in salary increase budgets for 2009 and 2010. The median IT salary increase budget (including 0s) for 2009 is 3 percent, a half point drop from the 2008 figure of 3.5 percent, and it will remain at 3 percent for 2010. The median 2009 salary increase budget for all other departments outside of IT dropped to 2.8 percent and is expected to move up to 3 percent in 2010.
More...
Despite Fiscal Crisis, Growth Forecast In State and Local Information Technology Spending
INPUT, a leading authority on government business, announced the release of its research report, State and Local IT Market Forecast FY 2009-2014, which analyzes trends that will impact state and local government IT spending. The report notes that demand for vendor-furnished information systems and services by state and local governments will increase from $49.6 billion in 2009 to $60.1 billion in 2014, growing the market by $10.5 billion at an annual growth rate of 3.9 percent.
Key findings include:
--States will spend steadily through 2011 with help from the stimulus, but growth will be stifled due to lack of confidence in revenues
--Most state and local agencies will eliminate contractors to save employees
--There will be an increased demand for Software as a Service (SaaS), open source, and Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products
More...
New Central America Contact Center & BPO Report 2010 Published by Zagada Institute Shows Bilingual Agents Triple to 65,000
Zagada Institute has announced the publication of its new Central America Contact Center & BPO Report 2010: "An Expanding Bilingual Niche." The comprehensive and independent analysis on the region's seven markets indicates that the Central America Nearshore region has grown from 21,000 in 2007 to 45,000 reflecting a 115% growth. The region is on track to exceed 65,000 by 2010, sustaining an average annual growth rate that exceeds 50%.
Key highlights include:
- Costa Rica has now bypassed Panama to become the number one segment from a jobs and total end-to-end service perspective.
- Guatemala has become the number one growth market showing a 450% improvement over the last 24 months.
- Over 600,000 students are now attending the regions 206 universities and institutions with over 125,000 graduating each year.
- Avaya dominates the region and with the purchase of Nortel's
Enterprise unit has positioned itself into monopoly-like status.
An estimated 96% of existing agents and BPO workers are bilingual and continue to be a critical high-end niche in providing the customer care and back office needs of U.S. companies. The ever-expanding U.S. Hispanic American market is on track to exceed 50 million with over US$1 trillion in spending power by 2012 and U.S. customers are reporting relatively high levels of satisfaction. These twin factors are pushing demand for the region.
The Central America Nearshore market, however, also faces strategic challenges as the market expands. These include the need to further vigorously expand its bilingual-ready population to meet timely U.S. corporate buy-side demand, the importance of expanding physical contact center and BPO office capacity, and the need to strengthening its middle management core as the region's vendors grow their service delivery complexity.
More...
Time to Set End Users Free
How would you like to free up 10 percent to 20 percent of your total IT budget to spend on other things? It's not a pipe dream. But to achieve that benefit you're going to have to give up control of end-user services.
Full Article...
Amidst The Gloom, How CIOs Are Driving IT Infrastructure Innovation
Some of the most clever and innovative thinking in IT today has nothing to do with, say, software that helps grow the customer base or improve collaboration with partners. Because infrastructure innovations are all about making IT work better and more cheaply, they can gain support from business leaders in this economic climate. At the same time, some of a company's top IT stars, previously focused on growth-oriented applications, have become available to help find ways to optimize the most expensive systems and software.
Full Article...
7 Ways to Reduce Costs as the Recession Eases
Paring costs at the onset of a recession is easy compared to finding savings after months of budget cuts -- especially with the need to prepare the enterprise for future growth. "I'm alarmed by the number of IT organizations that can't justify many of their expenditures and vendor pricing," says Jeff Muscarella, a partner with spend-management firm NPI Financial. He offers these basic tactics to help "even the most time-deprived, short-staffed IT organization."
Full Article...
Locating for Growth in the Contact Center
The challenge in finding the right locations for contact centers is not so much choosing the ideal sites today -- the economic downturn leading to high unemployment have led to picks of places - but selecting those that will be viable when the economy rebounds to capitalize on growth. That means taking a hard look at the demand for contact centers, and staff for today but more importantly down the road.
Full Article...
Defining an Outrageously Delightful Customer Experience
The customer experience needs to be defined, specified, explained and communicated by companies to their employees. This makes every employee responsible for creating and delivering the experience and will have the means to deliver it and by that execute the brand promise. Merely explaining and communicating the experience to employees will not differentiate an organization from its competitors. Successful organizations need to embed the experience into the corporate culture, hiring criteria, education programs, employee objectives, compensation plans, and incentive programs.
Full Article...
Coaching Contact Center Agents
by Dr. Jon Anton, Howard Lee
This is a book focused on one of the most important and least understood jobs in a contact center, namely, coaching the front-line agent. In preparing the materials for the book, the authors interview successful coaches and spent time watching them using call evaluation reports to determine agent call handling improvements. The book is full of tips and ideas gleaned from site visits to contact centers. In addition, the authors include verbatim suggestions from contact center coaches detailing their advice on what works and what doesn't work in dealing with agent improvement initiatives.
2009 Service & Support Metrics Survey: The Results
Supportindustry.com conducts an annual survey designed to explore the state of enterprise service and support -- technology adoption rates and deployment plans, financial challenges, workforce issues, performance metrics and other industry trends. This year's survey highlights support organizations' continued adoption of better-integrated and responsive technologies, efforts to improve processes, and growing recognition of the strategic role of service delivery in corporate growth. At the same time, however, these organizations continue to battle the ongoing challenges that have come to characterize the service function. Key metrics to benchmark your support operation were also captured and discussed.
Get your copy of the results today!
2009 Service and Support Technology Showcase Now Available
SupportIndustry.com has released the 2009 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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