Webinar
Series - Best Practices in Customer Support
Parature's Webinar Series "Best Practices in Customer Support" continues with new presentations delivered by some of the industry's leading minds. This month Michael Buckham-White of Premier Global Services will deliver an informational session on, "The New Era in Customer Support in a Web 2.0 World. How to Enable Customer Self-Service and Reduce Calls and Emails By Up to 80%".
Gain the insight you need to help reduce costs and enable customer self-service by attending these exciting and informative webinars.
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Study Finds Lax Computer Security by IRS Employees
IRS employees ignored security rules and turned over sensitive computer information to a caller posing as a technical support person, according to a government study. Sixty-one of the 102 people who got the test calls, including managers and a contractor, complied with a request that the employee provide his or her user name and temporarily change his or her password to one the caller suggested, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, an office that does oversight of Internal Revenue Service. The caller asked for assistance to correct a computer problem. The report said that by failing to question the identity of the caller the employees were putting the IRS at risk of providing unauthorized people access to taxpayer data that could be used for identity theft and other fraudulent schemes.
Source: LA Times
SupportSoft Helps Drive ADP Dealer Services Customer Support
SupportSoft, Inc., a provider of technology problem resolution, announced
that Dealer Services Group of Automatic Data Processing, Inc., a provider
of integrated computing solutions for automotive and truck dealers, is
benefiting from SupportSoft software to provide ADP's network of nearly
25,000 dealers worldwide with superior customer service and technical
support. ADP uses SupportSoft's technical problem resolution software
to detect, diagnose and correct technical issues automatically as they
occur, sometimes before the user is even aware of it. For problems that
require assistance from a technical specialist, ADP utilizes SupportSoft's
Intelligent Assistance Suite software to gather accurate diagnostic information
so that specialists can more quickly and efficiently find the root cause
of the problem and get the user back to what they do best -- selling or
servicing vehicles.
New Release of CA's Unicenter Service Catalog Helps Enable IT Managers
to Deliver IT Services
CA, Inc. announced a new release of Unicenter Service Catalog that helps
enable IT managers to define and deliver IT services in business terms.
Poor alignment between IT services and business objectives undermines
total returns on technology investments, and contributes to end-user dissatisfaction
and lost productivity. To avoid these problems, IT organizations need
to communicate with business decision-makers in terms they can readily
understand. Unicenter Service Catalog r11.2 addresses this challenge by
providing a centralized source of information for all services-ensuring
that business users have an accurate, consistent view of all available
IT services. By keeping IT informed about who is requesting and consuming
resources-as well as the frequency with which they're doing so-Unicenter
Service Catalog r11.2 also aids in demand planning and allocation.
Amdocs and Bankinter Collaborate on Innovative
Mobile Banking Solution
Amdocs, a provider of customer experience systems, and Bankinter, S.A.,
a provider of banking innovation based in Spain, launched a joint solution
to enable banks to offer mobile banking services. The Amdocs Mobile Banking
Solution is installed at Bankinter and is based on Bankinter's mobility
solution. The Solution gives banks a new, cost-effective customer communication
channel by allowing customers to receive alerts, respond to targeted sales
offers as well as access and manage their bank account information through
a mobile device. Amdocs and Bankinter will work together to deliver the
solution and associated professional services to banks worldwide.
“Strategies
for Service Excellence”
Las Vegas, NV, November 5-7, 2007
Join us in Las Vegas for the Services Industry Summit - “Strategies for Service Excellence”, at the Paris Hotel, Las Vegas, NV, November 5-7, 2007. Network with industry leaders, who will share their strategies for delivering world-class service and support. Presentation topics include Service Excellence by Design, Mergers and Acquisitions - Strategies for Successful Integration, Strategies for Managing Staff Performance, Service Excellence and the Trusted Advisor, and more.
Don't miss this event! Click here for details.
Yankee Group Says Consumerization in the Enterprise Will Cripple IT
According to the Yankee Group, IT's steel grip on control of enterprise applications and services is slipping because of consumerization of the enterprise -- the adoption of consumer technologies in the corporate environment. Nearly 50% of employees feel more empowered than IT to control their personal IT environment. This consumerization trend will be a nightmare for IT departments because it will create major maintenance and support problems that will swiftly overwhelm IT resources.
According to the recent Yankee Group Report, Zen and the Art of Rogue Employee Management, enterprise IT that tries to ignore the adoption of these technologies in the workplace will potentially lead to a hazardous mix of secured and unsecured applications in the enterprise. Instead, IT must adopt a Zen-like approach to manage the technology and the rogue employee. Ceding control to end users via a internal customer care cooperative model reduces IT's burden while improving customer satisfaction. The Zen support model is fundamentally different than most IT organizations today because it doesn't seek to dictate policy and enforce standards, but rather set guidelines and steer users in the right direction.
Some best practices in a Zen-like approach to an IT care co-op solution include:
- Using Web 2.0 tools to create customer care cooperatives that save IT time and money while improving end-user satisfaction
- Facilitating online social networks and wikis, which allow end-user communities to manage their own IT support function
- Setting security baselines that aren't flexible for IT groups to gracefully stitch wikis and collaborative technology into their existing infrastructure
Yankee Group finds that success will not rely on technology alone. In fact, to manage consumerization, enterprises should provide employees with incentives to prevent circumvention of care co-op tools.
U.S. Consumers Lose More Than $7 Billion to Online Threats
The online threats associated with using the Internet remain high according
to Consumer Report's latest "State of the Net" survey. Consumer
Reports projects that U.S. consumers lost more than $7 billion over the
last two years to viruses, spyware, and phishing schemes.
Additionally,
the "State of the Net" survey shows that consumers face a 1
in 4 chance of succumbing to an online threat and becoming a cybervictim,
a number that has slightly decreased since last year.
The number of consumers responding to e-mail phishing scams has remained
constant at eight percent. Consumer Reports projects that one million
U.S. consumers lost billions of dollars over the past two years to such
scams.
Many underage youngsters are at risk on social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, the survey found. In households surveyed with minors online, 13 percent of the children registered on MySpace were younger than 14, the minimum age the site officially allows, and three percent were under 10. And those were just the ones the parents knew about.
Other key findings:
Spam: Consumer Reports' survey respondents have reported a lower proportion of spam reaching their Inbox than in the past, which CR believes is a result of better spam-blocking. Survey results indicate that about 650,000 consumers ordered a product or service advertised through spam in the month before the survey. Additionally, in 5 percent of the households surveyed that had children under 18, a child had inadvertently seen pornographic material as a result of spam.
Viruses: Computer virus infections held steady since last year according to CR's survey. CR notes that this is actually a mark of progress for consumers and software makers, because the threats have become more challenging. In the latest survey, 38 percent of respondents reported a computer virus-infection in the last two years. Seventeen percent of respondents didn't have antivirus software installed.
Spyware: In the past six months, 34 percent of respondents' computers were exposed to a spyware infection. CR's survey also reveals that although spyware infections have dropped, the chances of getting one are still 1 in 3, and of suffering serious damage, 1 in 11.
Phishing:
Eight percent of respondents submitted personal information in
response to conventional phishing e-mails in the past two years, a number
that has remained unchanged over the past two years. The median cost of
a phishing incident is $200. Yet scammers' tactics are improving -- e-mail
looks like it comes from a reputable business such as a bank and features
better grammar, more believable stories, and more authentic-looking Web
addresses.
More...
Wireless E-Mail Coming to the Masses
Once the preserve of the business elite, wireless e-mail is undergoing
a democratization process that will bring it to the masses, according
to Gartner. Not only is wireless e-mail spreading ever-wider across the
enterprise but consumers will increasingly access their email on mobile
devices. There are currently fewer than 20 million business users of wireless
e-mail worldwide, representing just two percent of all e-mail accounts.
Analysts predict that the progressive availability of products and services
will allow 350 million business and consumer users access to wireless
e-mail by 2010, meaning that 20 percent of all e-mail accounts will be
wireless enabled. Gartner expects wireless email to reach commodity status
by 2012.
As consumer technologies continue to infiltrate the enterprise, as a result of IT consumerization, a growing number of employees will have the ability to access corporate email and other applications from personal devices. Meanwhile, a reverse-consumerization trend is creating a new demand for mobile email outside the enterprise boundaries, from prosumers (professional consumers) and consumers. Traditional business e-mail centric devices are transforming into personal devices that span both professional and consumer life.
Whilst Gartner sees consumerization of IT as the key trend influencing the rise in popularity of wireless e-mail both inside and outside of the enterprise, there are a number of other trends and drivers influencing the phenomenon:
- Changing market dynamics -- Simpler, easier to use and less-expensive wireless email bundles are increasingly available to the consumer and careful planning can also result in cost-effective enterprise deployments.
- Technology enhancements -- A wide array of new e-mail-centric mobile devices, mobile service support for Exchange 2007 and the growing range of white label platforms available for mobile operators and service providers are all driving the adoption of wireless-e-mail.
- Evolving needs of user organizations, business users and consumers -- Balancing security and the manageability risk of wireless e-mail against the rewards mobile workers afford enterprises is a key challenge.
- Emerging and expanding service requirements - Different workers have different profiles and different technological needs. There is no one-size fits all solution and increasingly a combination of different wireless e-mail products is required.
- The rise of the Digital Native -- New-generation IT users will prefer web-based e-mail services to traditional corporate systems and will prefer to access e-mail on their personal multimedia 'buddy' rather than an e-mail centric business devices
Ten Things Your IT Department Won't Tell You
It seems only fair, since our home computer is typically an office away from the office. So in between typing up reports and poring over spreadsheets, we use our office PCs to keep up with our lives. We do birthday shopping, check out funny clips on YouTube and catch up with friends by email or instant message. There's only one problem with what we're doing: Our employers sometimes don't like it. Partly, they want us to work while we're at work. And partly, they're afraid that what we're doing compromises the company's computer network -- putting the company at risk in a host of ways. So they've asked their information-technology departments to block us from bringing our home to work. End of story? Not so fast. To find out whether it's possible to get around the IT departments, we asked Web experts for some advice. Specifically, we asked them to find the top 10 secrets our IT departments don't want us to know.
Full Article...
How To Optimize Your Contact Center
As today's contact centers make the transition from cost center to strategic
asset, accurate and effective matching of customer interactions to agent
skills and availability is a fundamental requirement. Routing allows companies
to match any interaction with the appropriately skilled resource at the
level of granularity that best suits business needs.
Full
Article...
Indian Call Center Lands in Ohio
It would be easy to imagine Reno, Ohio, as the type of place that would
be hit hardest by outsourcing - a small American town losing out to the
invisible hand shifting jobs to places like Bangalore and Guangzhou. Instead,
outsourcing is bringing the jobs to Reno. Across the street from an Army
Reserve center and next to a farm, a customer-service call center hums,
its 250 workers answering phones for online travel agency Expedia. The
center's owner? Indian conglomerate Tata Group. The phenomenon has a name:
"insourcing," the term experts are starting to use when foreign
multinationals open offices on U.S. soil and hire Americans, at a higher
price, to do the very jobs they once lured overseas. In this case the
center in Reno is targeted toward companies willing to pay a premium -
its workers there cost up to 40 percent more than their counterparts in
India - to give their U.S. customers a more culturally fluent, less frustrating
1-800 experience.
Full
Article...
10 Things You Should Never Put in E-Mail, and Other Communication Tips
Your colleagues form opinions about you by your e-mail writing. Check
out these practical tips on how to improve your electronic missives and
enhance your reputation as a strong communicator, even if you're a time-pressed
CIO with a BlackBerry habit.
Full
Article...
100 Best Places to Work in IT 2007
Employees in this year's 100 Best Places to Work in IT survey say they
feel vitally connected to a greater whole and can accomplish meaningful
work in an energetic environment alongside co-workers they respect and
like. In fact, working in a challenging and enjoyable environment was
the second most important aspect of their jobs for the more than 27,000
IT workers surveyed at this year's Best Places, bested only by the desire
to be fairly compensated. And for a group that's often stereotyped as
introverted, independent and even cynical, it's notable how many mention
the "f" word --family -- when describing the atmosphere at their
workplaces.
Full
Article...
Focusing on the Customer: An Interview With the
Head of Merrill Lynch's Operations and IT
In financial institutions, operations and technology units work together
to carry on the processes of the business, as well as to develop new services.
Financial-management leader Merrill Lynch has combined the two units and
put them under one leader to integrate their activities more fully. The
head of Merrill's Global Infrastructure Services, Diane L. Schueneman,
says that this integrated structure empowers the company to meet the customer's
needs more effectively.
Full
Article...
How
to Kick Your Customer Service Up a Notch: 101 Insider Tips
by Rosanne D'Ausilio, Ph.D
Hot off the press, How to Kick Your Customer Service
Up a Notch: 101 Insider Tips, Customer Service Expert, Rosanne D'Ausilio,
Ph.D., reveals the insider tips you need to know to propel your customer
service up a notch, and give your organization the edge over the competition.
White Paper: Using Web-based Support Tools to Improve Customer Service
Many service-centric organizations have already integrated their in-house service and support applications with Web interfaces, or deployed systems designed for the Web from the ground up. They’re better integrating channels through customer interaction platforms, greatly expanding self-service functionality, undertaking knowledge management initiatives, and extending their reach through remote support and maintenance tools.
This informative white paper from supportindustry.com and sponsored by LogMeInRescue and Parature, examines the latest trends and technologies in using Web-based support tools to improve customer service.
Multichannel
Service & Support Survey of Executives: Report of Findings
Supportindustry.com
and eGain Communications Corp. recently conducted a survey of contact
center, helpdesk and customer service managers and executives, focusing
on multichannel customer service and support -- its importance, the current
state of their multichannel capabilities and challenges in implementing
and managing it.
To
get a complimentary copy of the report, click here.
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suggestions, feedback & comments:
Carolyn Healey, Editor - chealey@supportindustry.com
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