Google takes aim at Microsoft with new Web browser
Google Inc. is releasing its own Web browser in a long-anticipated move aimed at countering the dominance of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer and ensuring easy access to its market-leading search engine. The free browser, called "Chrome," is supposed to be available for downloading Tuesday in more than 100 countries for computers running on Microsoft's Windows operating system. Google said it's still working on versions compatible with Apple Inc.'s Mac computer and the Linux operating system.

J. Crew Blames Software for Its Bad Quarter
Most retailers are blaming a slowing economy for their fiscal shortcomings. J. Crew is blaming a botched system upgrade. The new system went live on June 28, the problems began almost immediately.  Just what did he mean by issues? The site has been down periodically since June, costing the company untold sales and frustrating customers, at least the customers who post on blogs and message boards. And we’ve read reports about botched orders and returns: In one case, a man was charged $9,200 for shipping and handling for three baby-sized shirts – he had ordered men’s medium – and then couldn’t get the Web site to process his attempt to return the goods, according to the man’s blog.

J. Crew said it spent about $3 million in the just-completed quarter to fix the problem, and made numerous public apologies, but never pointed a finger at any specific softare company. Source: WSJ

Oracle to acquire ClearApp
Oracle announced plans to acquire applications management software maker ClearApp. The acquisition, which is expected to close by the end of the year, aims to enhance Oracle's lineup of Enterprise Manager products. ClearApp's technology is designed to allow customers to manage applications built on service-oriented architecture (SOA) platforms.  ClearApp's software aims to provide a greater view into a company's business services spread across all related application components. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Source: CNET

LinkedIn lands CNBC deal
CNBC has entered into an alliance with LinkedIn under which the financial news channel will air content generated by the professional networking site's 27 million members. CNBC will integrate LinkedIn's networking functionality into its website CNBC.com, enabling users to share and discuss news with their professional contacts. Community-generated content such as survey and poll results from LinkedIn will be broadcast on CNBC, while the latter will provide LinkedIn with its programming, articles and blogs, and financial data and video content.

2008 Service & Support Technology Showcase
The 2008 version of our Service & Support Technology Showcase is now available! This valuable, in-depth buyer’s guide features the latest tools and technologies in the support services industry that enable your support operation to deliver superior customer service.

Click here to find out more...

Customer and End-User Support Fueling Demand for IT Professionals

• Eleven percent of chief information officers (CIOs) surveyed for the Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Index and Skills Report expect to add staff in the fourth quarter of 2008 and 3 percent forecast personnel reductions. The net 8 percent increase compares with a net 10 percent increase projected last quarter. The majority of respondents, 83 percent, plan to maintain current staffing levels.
  
  Key Findings
• Increased customer and/or end-user support was cited as the leading reason for Information Technology (IT) hiring, replacing business growth, which had been named by CIOs as the primary driver of IT hiring in each of the past 22 quarters.

• Help desk/technical support was cited as the job area experiencing the most growth.

• Firms in the Middle Atlantic region are most optimistic about IT hiring.

• Technology executives in the transportation industry forecast the strongest hiring activity.

For the first time since the question was asked in the second quarter of 2003, increased customer service and/or end-user support (25 percent of the response) overtook business growth (23 percent) as the main reason firms are hiring IT staff. Installation or development of new enterprisewide applications came in third, with 21 percent of the response.

Skills in Demand
Network administration (LAN, WAN) is the technical skill set in strongest demand, according to 70 percent of CIOs. This was followed closely by Windows administration (Server 2000/2003) and desktop support, each at 69 percent. (Note: CIOs polled were allowed multiple responses.)

Technology executives cited help desk/technical support as the job area experiencing the most growth, with 18 percent of the response. The strong showing is consistent with research from HDI, the leading association for IT service and support professionals, which found that 45 percent of its members planned to increase help desk/technical support hiring in 2008. Networking, which has held the top spot for the past year in the Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Index and Skills Report, slipped to second at 14 percent, followed by data/database management at 11 percent.

Industry Outlook
Technology executives in the transportation sector, which also includes communications and utilities, forecast the most notable hiring gains in the fourth quarter. Seventeen percent of CIOs plan to add IT staff and 1 percent anticipate personnel reductions, for a net 16 percent increase.

Business services should also see solid IT hiring activity. Fourteen percent of CIOs surveyed plan to add employees and 1 percent foresee staff cutbacks, for a net 13 percent increase. CIOs in the retail and professional services sectors also forecast staffing activity above the national average, with a net 10 percent increase forecast for both industries.
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Study Reveals North American Contact Centers Tap Low Efficiency Potential of Their Workforce Management Practices
The recently published study “Workforce Management Practices in Contact Centers” provided results on numerous topics including Performance Metrics, workforce management resources utilized, investments, processes, tools, and satisfaction with all of the topics for contact centers in North America. The study is sponsored by InVision Software.

The workforce management processes analyzed in the study comprise forecasting of contact volumes, converting the forecasts to required agents, scheduling of agents, intraday forecasts and schedule adjustment, managing the agents’ schedule change requests, staff planning and budgeting as well as real time adherence monitoring and performance results reporting, and satisfaction with WFM practices and tools. From the data collected in the survey it becomes obvious that although workforce management takes on greater significance in all sized contact centers companies only tap the low efficiency potential of their workforce management tools and techniques.

The increase of importance of workforce management (WFM) and the related investment in WFM is reflected in the number of dedicated employees being responsible for the many operations within the whole workforce management process. Contact centers with more than 500 agents raised their full time WFM positions from 17 to 24 between 2006 and 2008 which represents an increase of 41 percent. Also medium-sized contact centers have extended their WFM staff in the last two years and even contact centers with less than 100 agents have 2.5 dedicated WFM positions on average. The number of forecasters and intraday managers increased since 2006: In 2008, 69 percent of all respondents included forecasters (2006: 60 percent) and 68 percent included intraday managers (2006: 58 percent) in their WFM staff.

Focusing on the applied tools and techniques, it is remarkable that adherence monitoring is one of the two main WFM processes that is fulfilled with licensed software by the majority of contact centers. About 90 and more percent of the call centers, except those with less than 100 agents (70 percent), use third party solutions for adherence monitoring. Scheduling is the second operation where licensed solutions are most commonly used. On the other side of the coin, the study reveals that manual approaches and spreadsheets are still very popular among contact center managers. 38 percent use these tools for forecasting, especially in small contact centers (55 percent), and 22 percent use them in terms of performance reporting. It is absolutely worth noting that one third of big call centers also use manual tools or spreadsheets for performance reporting as well as for their forecasts and for converting the forecasts to agents. In total, only 13 percent of all respondents use licensed software solutions for the forecasting.
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Life Is Tough for Midsize Tech Departments
Information-technology leaders at midsize companies say they could compete with bigger companies, if only they had more money. And staff. And the freedom to focus on long-term projects. Instead they’re fighting to keep up. That’s according to a survey of 200 tech leaders at businesses with 500 to 3,000 employees by Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions. 

The tech leaders surveyed are trying to get by on limited resources. For example, when asked who they rely on for advice, the top response was–no surprise–internal staffers (59% of respondents). But that was followed by cut-rate alternatives: Forty percent said they relied on Internet research; 31% said peers at other companies; and 30% said magazines and journals.

So it’s not a shock that tech leaders at these midsize businesses aren’t wholly satisfied with the job they’re doing. Only 19% said they’re very satisfied with how their business addresses IT (71% are somewhat satisfied) and only 20% are very satisfied with how they’re going about cutting costs, which is far and away the top priority for these businesses. Only 65% of tech leaders said their businesses are keeping pace with technology, while 21% said they’re behind the times.

One bright spot: The slumping economy doesn’t seem to have too much of an impact on midsize companies – perhaps because they’re already bootstrapping it. A plurality said the economy has just made their jobs more stressful (43%) while 34% say it’s had no impact at all. And 61% anticipate being able to spend more on IT next year.source: WSJ
http://www.wsj.com

Enterprises Must Anticipate How Societal Trends Will Impact Their Business and Customers
As IT-based devices and technologies become more personal in scope and application, social issues will become increasingly important to product success, according to Gartner, Inc. In order to identify and react to major societal shifts and trends, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2010, 15 percent of U.S. and European businesses will have formalized societal trend watching as a corporate discipline.

Adding technology to the natural human desire to communicate enables individuals to participate in more, richer, faster and denser social networks. Some are enabled by basic Internet infrastructure, such as e-mail and instant messaging, while others by more specialist tools or sites, such as FriendFeed, Twitter, Ryze or Orkut. Such networks form an increasing proportion of the trusted information sources that individuals use to make decisions.

The danger that many organizations run into is trying to determine which trends to watch. Gartner recommends giving responsibility to a group to watch societal trends and to focus on the following points to maximize short-term and strategic decisions while positioning the business for the future. Other recommendations include:

• Social factors will become increasingly important in business and commercial systems. Adopt a human-centric design perspective. Watch these factors on an ongoing basis.

• Appoint staff to review systems and working practices to identify legal, ethical and social risks.

• Conduct an opportunity/threat analysis to identify product and service opportunities enabled by the connected society.

• Understand and exploit network effects in products and services.

• Explore the opportunities to use network effects and the connected society to solve business and government problems in new ways.

• Privacy is a way of life and a business strategy decision, not a technical issue. Appoint a privacy officer.

More...

Mining the Voice of the Customer to Improve Enterprise Performance and the Customer Experience
The nature of a company’s relationship with its customers has changed. The voice of the customer has a greater impact today than in the days of one-way communication. The rise of blogs and other online sources, such as You Tube and Facebook, have given customers new forums to air frustrations and overall experiences. Technological growth is a blessing to organizations that are beginning to mine the voice of the customer in order to better understand key business pains and improve everyday business decisions, surface potential escalations - before they end up on a blog or impact hundreds or thousands of other customers.
Full Article...

30 Skills Every IT Person Needs
Can you call yourself an accomplished information technology employee? Find out by reading about the 30 IT skills you should have.
Full Article...

Making ITIL Fit Your Org Chart
ITIL makes sense in concept: focus IT efforts on the support and delivery of services that meet the needs of the business. Manage risk. Improve. Rinse and Repeat. It’s really a common sense approach, and it’s hard to argue with that. The problem is that the majority of the IT organization is currently built around delivery of technology, not services. Even if everyone wants to deliver end to end service, the daily activities of the staff are focused on delivering the technology that they are responsible for.
Full Article...

Enterprise Social Software Technology
Social software applications have raised concerns in the enterprise: around privacy, security, intellectual property (IP) protection and compliance. IT managers also face more prosaic but equally important considerations of reliability, scalability and sustainability of the software and vendors alike. This article takes a close look at what constitutes social software.
Full Article...

20 Tech Habits to Improve Your Life
Technology is supposed to make life easier, but it doesn't seem that way when you're struggling to wrangle 289 new e-mail messages, dealing with a hard-drive crash, or suddenly realizing that you left an important file on the office computer. Thankfully, plenty of tools can help. We'll tell you which ones are worth trying, and we'll also suggest some practices that you can incorporate into your workday to use tech tools more effectively and efficiently.
Full Article...

The Benefits and Perils of Team Scheduling in the Support Center
By Penny Reynolds, Founding Partner, The Call Center School
Over the last ten years, more and more organizations have moved toward self-directed work teams and the support desk world is no exception. The result has been better productivity, increased employee motivation, reduced bureaucracy, and continuous improvement in the work product being delivered.  A big issue for the team concept in the call center lies in the schedule of team members. While some companies have teams where all members start, take breaks, and leave together, others may have teams where the members' schedules many have varying start times and breaks, and may even work different shifts.
Full Article...

Best Practices for Translating Customer Satisfaction into Revenue
Today’s support organizations are focused on two top-level metrics: financial results and customer satisfaction. For most, it’s easy to track financial performance, but customer satisfaction is akin to speaking a foreign language.
           
How do you quantify customer satisfaction?

Download the Best Practices for Benchmarking Customer Satisfaction to get industry research from the Association of Support Professionals (ASP) on how to measure and leverage customer satisfaction.

Click here to download the research report...

2008 Service & Support Metrics Survey Results
Supportindustry.com has announced the release of a free white paper outlining the results of the 2008 Service & Support Metrics Survey. This annual survey explores the state of enterprise service and support -- current industry trends, future plans, technology adoption, workforce issues, benchmarking strategies, metrics and other areas.
Get your free copy of the survey results today!

White Paper: Improving Customer Service Using Web-based Support Tools
In the realm of service and support, the Web has made its mark. Since a business's Web site is the first place many customers go today when they're in need of service, it's imperative that what they find there -- the search tools, the breadth and depth of content, easy escalation paths, the tools that aid in speedy resolution -- meets their needs. Each visit presents the business with the opportunity to impress and influence existing and potential customers.

Find out more! This informative white paper from SupportIndustry.com examines the latest trends and technologies in using Web-based support tools to improve customer service.
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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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