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White Paper: Communications Skills for Remote Support
Today's support transaction is a little more like meeting someone for lunch than reading scripts over a telephone, and like a powerful close-up mirror, these transactions can magnify both the strengths and weaknesses of your interpersonal skills and the quality of your support delivery. At an organizational level, these skills can in turn have a tremendous influence on your bottom line.
The good news is that specific, procedural techniques can dramatically change the effectiveness of your remote support agents, and give them the confidence to handle any support situation live on a customer's own computer.
This white paper walks you through four specific steps that will help supercharge your customer relationships in an era of remote support.
Parature Feedback Empowers Organizations to Move beyond Customer Satisfaction to Customer Loyalty
Parature, a provider of on-demand customer service software, announced how its integrated customer feedback feature is empowering organizations to not only achieve customer satisfaction, but obtain customer loyalty. Parature's customer feedback features provide organizations with the ability to create custom feedback forms and get feedback from more customers more frequently. Customer service teams can also view individual feedback history across incidents for targeted relationship management, report on account or customer health via feedback and articles, as well as view individual or aggregated customer survey results.
BoxTone Introduces New Mobile User Self-Service Software to Lower TCO for BlackBerry Enterprise Server Deployments
BoxTone, the expert in mobile user management, announced its new BoxTone User Self-Service Module for the BlackBerry wireless platform, the latest addition to a software suite that enables enterprise IT staffs to lower the cost of supporting their mobile users while ensuring a higher quality of service. Deployed via a Web portal, this software enables mobile end users to easily check the real-time status of their end-to-end mobile service from a standard browser and follow simple instructions to resolve issues and take action 7 x 24, without any IT staff involvement.
Pomeroy IT Solutions to provide desk side support services to PPL
Pomeroy IT Solutions, a provider of technology services and solutions, has secured a five-year contract from the US-based power utility PPL to provide help desk and desk side support services. The contract has an estimated value of $18 million over the initial five-year term. Under the agreement, PPL also has the option to extend the helpdesk and desk side support engagement for two consecutive one-year renewal terms, which, if exercised by PPL, would increase the aggregate estimated value of the contract to $25 million over a seven-year period.
The Voice of the Customer Conference 2009 Boston, November 3-4
How do you create self-energized customer support communities? Tap into the deep knowledge of expert users? Inspire passionate customer evangelism? Find the answers to these questions (and more) at the third annual "Voice of the Customer" conference. This highly-interactive, small-scale event will let you explore one of the most important revolutions in the technology support world with industry experts and fellow support managers. Registration, $385/day.
CIO's guide to do more with less in a downturn
Frost & Sullivan recently hosted the TechStrategies 2009 summit in which key trends and issues for a number of evolving technologies were discussed. Frost & Sullivan recommends that CIOs take the following actions over the coming six months:
1.Prepare now for the rebound -- put business plans in place to cope with increased business growth and demands on IT.
2.Prepare and plan for identifying, attracting, developing and retaining good staff at both technical and executive level.
3.Re-evaluate your technology adoption profile (TAP) and match it to your growth plans.
4.Allocate a specific team to develop and implement policies to reduce energy usage, and focus on data centers in particular.
5.Transit from 'Threat Management' to 'Risk Management -- and make security - a 'forethought' rather than 'afterthought'.
6.Evaluate vendor unified communications roadmaps thoroughly - start by meeting today's business needs (e.g. collaboration).
7.And lastly, select a process of application for testing via Cloud Computing offerings.
Security Software and Services Budgets to Increase 4 Per Cent in 2010
Security software and services spending will outpace other IT spending areas in 2010, according to a new survey by Gartner, Inc. Security software budgets are expected to grow by approximately 4 per cent in 2010, outpacing all other areas of infrastructure software. Security services budgets are projected to grow almost 3 per cent, significantly outperforming other service areas.
Specific areas of projected security-related software spending growth in 2010 includes security information and event management (SIEM), e-mail security, URL filtering, and user provisioning.
The continued, comparatively strong emphasis on security extends beyond software. The survey showed that security services spending will also outpace spending in other services areas, with budgets expected to grow 2.74 per cent in 2010. This anticipated increase is being driven in part by a growing movement towards managed security services, cloud-based e-mail/web security solutions, and third-party compliance-related consulting and vulnerability audits and scans.
The Future of Knowledge Workers
A recent study on the future of the knowledge worker was sponsored by The George Washington University (GWU) and the Institute for Knowledge and Innovation at GWU peered into trends to determine how organizations will likely try to provide a compelling work environment that attracts, retains and leverages the best of the knowledge workers of the future. Some of the main trends identified in the survey are included in the following:
Critical thinking for the future. The majority of professionals and executives who took the survey indicated that their organizations will prepare proactively for the future by building scenarios and responses to emerging trends that could impact them. A significant number of organizations, however, are heading into the future much less prepared because they have no standard or consistent approach to detect and evaluate future impacts, or, worse, will likely wait until the trend becomes a distinct disruption and requires focused recovery action.
Retirements and the loss of knowledge. The well documented, coming baby boomer retirement wave is one such important future impact facing many organizations. The overwhelming challenge organizations expect to confront is the loss of organizational knowledge through those retirements. Interestingly, the loss of critical knowledge far outweighed concern about potential operational impact, possible cultural/social disruptions or the task of mounting an aggressive recruiting program to attract replacements.
Filling knowledge worker gaps. Although knowledge loss is predicted to be a huge challenge, programs to retain retirees or delay their retirement did not score high on the action list. Instead, the professionals and executives surveyed indicated that they would likely fill future critical talent gaps by relying on an aggressive recruiting program for new employees. A significant number of organizations, however, are likely not to hire new employees at all, but will instead outsource the work, use fewer workers overall or fill the organizational needs through the use of specialized "for hire services.
Recruiting/attracting strategies. To fill those future critical talent gaps, executives and professionals indicated that they are likely to advertise and promote a range of organizational advantages (in addition to competitive compensation and benefits) to attract and recruit the necessary professional and managerial talent needed for their future work force. The survey also asked if their strategies would be different for recruiting two different age groups, those just coming into the workplace (25 years old or younger) and a more experienced worker group (26 to 40 year olds).
The top recruiting strategy picked for both age groups was an emphasis on flex telework/telecommute programs that reflect the era of the mobile work force. However, that's where the similarity ended. For the younger workers, cultural diversity/empathy was the second- most important organizational recruiting advantage, indicating a response to the next-generation worker's awareness of the benefits provided by a multicultural workplace. Additional recruiting advantages will include emphasis on opportunities for personal growth through mentor/coaching programs, advanced degree support and integrated life/work programs.
Knowledge retention strategies. Knowledge loss is anticipated to be a significant retirement issue, but it is also expected to be a continuing challenge for other employees who leave as well. The top knowledge retention strategy for younger workers (25 years or younger) who leave the organization is likely to be the education and training of replacement employment (which suggests that many organizations feel that there will not be a lot of critical knowledge to be retained).
For the 26- to 40-year-old worker, the top strategies for retaining workers’ knowledge when they leave their job will be through communities of practice and professional networks, followed by documentation processes, the education and training of replacement employment, and the capture of work process knowledge through advanced software.More...
In The Age Of Facebook, IT Problems Become CIO Nightmares
The heat is being turned up on CIOs in every industry because on top of managing complex projects and conceiving sound strategies, CIOs are increasingly being expected to do so under the rigorous public scrutiny that social media such as Twitter and Facebook have made available to tens of millions of people. For CIOs, social media might not change everything, but they sure change a lot of things -- and a lot of very important things: responsibility, performance, accountability, communication, expectations, and public perceptions.
Full Article...
Call-Center Jobs That Pay $100K a Year
Outsourcing will continue and globalization will change the world's economic landscape. But the U.S. is hardly helpless. With smart processes and the proper incentives, U.S. companies can keep jobs here in America, and do so in a way that is actually better for the company and its employees. Consider iQor, a call center and business process outsourcing company based in Columbus, Ohio, that's increased revenues at a 40% clip for the past four years. It's done this primarily by expanding its U.S. operations. IQor also gives its U.S. employees universal health insurance, and pays salaries and bonuses that are nearly 50% above industry norms.
Full Article...
The New Path to Customer-Centricity
Today, we're in such a period of transformational change, with a powerful confluence of forces driving up the power of customers in buyer-seller relationships -- and correspondingly depressing the potential for sellers to stay competitive while putting their own interests ahead of customer interests. How to effectively respond to this sea change is not only a matter for debate, but a source of great frustration for sellers. Fortunately, a growing number of companies are showing the way by proactively treating the rise in customer power as an opportunity rather than a threat -- and using an approach becoming known as "Outside-In Process" or just "Outside-In" to build bridges extending out to customers.
Full Article...
The Number One Customer Service Mistake: Lack of Collaboration
A lack of collaboration between organizations and their call centers is one of the most overlooked issues driving poor customer service today, and both parties are at fault. Minor tweaks can make a world of difference and help organizations and their call centers turn things around quickly while developing top-notch customer service.
Full Article...
Reconfiguring The Enterprise
CIOs have some of the largest budgets in any company, but they're going to be spending it far differently coming out of the recession than going into the downturn. At least part of the money will be spent on cleaning up the complexity and standardizing on new platforms, and delivering technology throughout the enterprise in different ways. And some of it will go into consolidating what's already there.
Full Article...
Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone
by Mark Goulston M.D.
The first make-or-break step in persuading anyone to do any thing is getting them to hear you out. Whether the person is a harried colleague, a stressed-out client, or an insecure spouse, things will go from bad to worse if you can't break through emotional barricades. Drawing on his experience as a psychiatrist, business consultant, and coach, and backed by the latest scientific research, author Mark Goulston shares simple but powerful techniques readers can use to really get through to people--whether they're coworkers, friends, strangers, or enemies.
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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.
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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