SaaS 2.0 Free Report

Now for its second act SaaS is ready to levarage its Web roots and take on the bigger challenge of integrating people, partners, business processes and data. Learn where SaaS is headed and how SaaS is changing the fundamental econmnics of the software business, and how some are integrating composite applications to build SaaS 2.0 solutions.

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LogMeIn Brings IT Support to Smartphones
LogMeIn, Inc., a provider of remote connectivity and support tools, launched LogMeIn Rescue + Mobile, a new service that enables call centers and IT administrators to troubleshoot and repair smartphones remotely In less than thirty seconds, LogMeIn Rescue + Mobile enables IT support technicians to see and access a replica of the user's smartphone on their computer screen, manipulate the phone's keypad and control the device as if it were in their own hands. In addition to remote support, LogMeIn Rescue + Mobile is ideal for training users about how to operate their phones.

Numara Software Launches New Version of Numara FootPrints
Numara Software, Inc., a provider of service desk management solutions for IT professionals, announced the release of Numara FootPrints 8, the next generation of its web-based service desk management solution. Featuring streamlined ITIL enablement tools and powerful workflow automation, along with bold usability features and advanced customization options, this release is unprecedented in its ease of implementation and configuration.

BB&T Celebrates National Customer Service Week with 'Service from the Heart' theme
BB&T said it had several activities planned for National Customer Service Week, which began October 1. BB&T plans to build on that momentum with a week of activities designed to highlight the bank's client service culture, known as the "Perfect Client Experience." BB&T's celebration for the 15th annual National Customer Service Week will center around a "Service from the Heart" theme. Employees will wear ribbons commemorating the week and can nominate fellow employees as "Service from the Heart champions" for providing stellar service to external and internal clients. Employees also will review the basic tenants of the BB&T service culture and begin each day this week with "quick start" meetings designed to reinforce the "Service from the Heart" theme. Employees also will view a true video story called "Johnny the Bagger" about a grocery store bagger who began slipping inspiring notes to customers in their grocery bags as a way to offer them more than just basic service.

Microsoft Launches Web Site to Hold Medical Records
Microsoft has launched a Web site that lets people store medical information online, moving into a consumer health care business targeted by Google and other technology players. Microsoft's HealthVault stores medical information for free in an encrypted database and provides the user with the option of what information goes into the record and who sees that information. It is being launched only in the United States. The Web site also incorporates HealthVault Search, a specialized medical search engine to tap into the growing base of consumers who are increasingly turning to the Web to find health information.

CA Announces Comprehensive Solution for IT Governance, Risk, and Compliance
CA has unveiled a comprehensive solution for empowering IT organizations to achieve their increasingly challenging and business-critical governance, risk and compliance (GRC) objectives. The solution features CA GRC Manager, an innovative product that provides portfolio management of IT risks across the enterprise, as well as CA’s IT control automation solutions. CA GRC Manager is the industry’s only visual portfolio-based solution. This helps companies effectively organize and prioritize how they will stay in compliance and be under acceptable risk thresholds for the least amount of labor. CA GRC Manager is also the only IT GRC solution that includes project management capabilities to ensure that optimal remediation plans are produced, communication barriers are eliminated and IT compliance projects are executed effectively.

Clone the best agent DNA in your contact center/support desk: A 7-Step Approach

M&As, product lifecycle compression, and outsourcing make it difficult, if not impossible, for customer service organizations to keep their agents up-to-date on best-practice interaction and service fulfillment processes, service compliance, contextual sales, and product knowledge.

How can you provide distinctive customer service and boost sales in this environment? "Cloning" the capabilities of the best customer support and helpdesk agents across the agent pool -- in-house and outsourced -- is a powerful approach that can help improve the quality and value of all interactions with customers. Starting with a unique Agent Cloning Framework that groups agents into mistakes, misfits, makeovers and models, this paper shows you how to implement a cloning program to take your customer support capabilities to new levels.

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CSurvey Reveals Top 100 U.S. Online Retailers’ Customer Service Shortfalls
With U.S. online retail sales for Q1 2007 totaling $31.5 billion, an new independent study has revealed that U.S. online retailers are failing in key areas of customer service, which has the potential to be devastating to the online retail market which is forecasted to reach $329 billion in 2010.

In a mystery shopper exercise conducted from April to June 2007, 34% of emails went unanswered by 100 of America’s top online retailers, with just over 50% of responses providing accurate and complete information. The findings of the audit are highlighted in a report published by Customer Interaction Management (CIM) software solution provider Talisma Corporation.

Talisma asked the leading U.S. online retailers the following questions:

• What credit/debit cards can I use to make payment?
• What are your shipment charges?

Talisma’s audit awarded each online retailer a score out of 100, based on a range of customer service criteria, including speed of response, accuracy, completeness of information provided, and the personalization of interactions. Although 93% of companies audited responded to phone queries within 30 seconds, only 5% were able to communicate with personalized content – by referring to caller ID or a customer profile. Personalization is increasingly being recognized as a critical factor in delivering customer service excellence. In fact, customers are beginning to expect to be acknowledged and treated as “special” on return visits across all channels of communication.

Of the estimated 230 million U.S. Internet users, many are well versed with the use of chat, and prefer to communicate with online retailers that way. However, only 30% of the audited retailers are able to accommodate that channel preference. Even worse, for those customers who prefer to find information themselves before contacting customer service, a mere 3% of online retailers offer full-fledged Web self-service.

However, there were some bright points in the audit, including the fact that 100% of the audited companies provided access to phone-based customer service, with 95% providing it for free, and 96% provided access to email. Unfortunately, while 78% of U.S. Internet users shopped online in 2006, online retailers aren’t taking full advantage of the Internet channels. In effect, they are missing out on tremendous opportunities for both revenue growth and customer service cost savings.

Overall, the survey revealed that online retailers are failing in three key areas:

1. One-third of email queries were ignored - Email is generally accepted as one of the most efficient communication tools. This seems to have been overlooked by many online retailers as 34% didn’t reply to customer emails.
2. Lack of Self-Help Tools - 97% of online retailers had no knowledge base to help prospective buyers make an informed decision based on product features and suitability, known issues, or customer service accessibility and policies.
3. Accuracy of information provided - only 51% of emails and 72% of phone calls answered provided accurate information.

Additionally, the audit revealed that 89% of online retailers do not provide agents with a unified customer history of all customer interactions across channels.

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CEOs – Putting Customers First
According to a recent article in 1to1 Media, after years spent dealing with issues revolving around governance and regulatory changes, CEOs at public companies are focusing more on a long-overlooked aspect of their business: customers.

That's one of the main conclusions drawn from the third annual "NYSE CEO Report," compiled for NYSE Magazine by Opinion Research Corp. The survey collects data from CEOs of 240 of the New York Stock Exchange's listing companies.

For example, CEOs are planning greater investment (both budget- and time-wise) on managing customer relationships than in the past. The importance of sales growth -- driven by customers -- as a performance measure has increased by 11 percent since the prior study. And on the strategic side, brand, reputation, and investments in corporate social responsibility -- all focused on winning customers -- are increasingly important. CEOs continue to recognize the costliness of losing customers.

What's more, they're putting money where their mouths are. Almost one third of CEOs plan to spend more time on customer relations in the coming year, while more than half expect to spend more money on customer contact. The report also found a 10 percent increase in the amount of time a CEO feels he should spend on customer relationships.

Most CEOs (81 percent) believe they take sufficient action to manage their companies' reputation, and going hand-in-hand with the issue is an increased focus on social responsibility, which is an important factor not just in customer relations and retention, but in employee retention as well. Social-responsibility initiatives are seen as having a greater impact on employee retention in companies with greater than $3 billion in market capitalization (where 46 percent of respondents tagged it as an important factor in employee retention), compared with companies with $1 billion to 3 billion in market cap (16 percent) and below $1 billion (29 percent). Such initiatives range from encouraging employees to volunteer at homeless shelters to instituting and enforcing environmentally friendly ideas like recycling and tree planting.

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Home-Based Contact Center Agents Rapidly Becoming Mainstream
The home is gaining new ground when it comes to call centers and stationing of customer services personnel. According to the latest research published by Datamonitor, there will be significant growth in outsourced contact center agents based around the at-home model. The report, “The future of customer facing technology in the outsourced contact center,”highlights some of the key reasons for what is expected to be a new way customer care firms provide client facing mechanisms. Between now and 2012, Datamonitor expects the number of home-based customer service agents to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 36.4%, one of the strongest expansion levels of any outsourcing market sub-segment.

Based on extensive research across the at-home outsourcing market, Datamonitor projects that the global size of the home-based third-party customer service agents working 20 hours a week or more, currently stands at approximately 47,000. However, based on expected growth projections from pure-play and bricks-and-mortar vendors, Datamonitor expects it to rise to almost 224,000 by 2012.

Currently, the majority of home-based customer care agents are overwhelmingly based in the U.S. The prime verticals for this service are technology, healthcare, tourism and travel & insurance. This is due to the fact that all these sectors are highly specialized and in many cases, it is hard to recruit customer service agents for actual contact centers.

A further driver for many firms to look to at-home agents is the alternative it provides to sending work to offshore or nearshore locations. With lower costs and less concern about the integrity of infrastructure and public security, investors are beginning to see the home agent model as a viable alternative to moving agent positions to multiple locations globally.

However the home agent model will not impact that of offshore outsourcing massively over time. At-home agents serve a growing but specialized niche, and the need for large numbers of agents offshore with multilingual capabilities will remain a priority for outsourcing clients.

With many investors still worried over the integrity of customer data, there remain worries in the minds of many prospects over how secure the at-home agent model is. However, Datamonitor’s research has shown providers of these services have been able to address these concerns by deploying thorough background checks on prospective employees, as well as by providing real-time monitoring analytics.

Despite certain concerns surrounding the at-home outsourcing market, Datamonitor feels that this business model is certain to gain significant traction from companies interested in lowering overall costs, while keeping their customer facing services onshore. In addition, the quality that can be derived from a typical home agent is reportedly very strong, which will be another driver for companies to gain from excellent end-user interactions.

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Security Survey Shows Organizations Are Strong on Infrastructure, Weak on Monitoring and Enforcement
Organizations worldwide are investing in infrastructure but lagging in implementation, measurement and review of security and privacy policies according to a worldwide study by CIO magazine, CSO magazine and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The study represents responses of 7,200 IT, security and business executives in more than 119 countries across all industries.

According to the survey, the majority of organizations now have a CSO or CISO in place (60 percent in 2007 vs. 43 percent in 2006), as well as an overall information strategy (57 percent in 2007 vs. 37 percent in 2006), and results show the majority are also heavily invested in technology safeguards such as network firewalls (88 percent), data backup (82 percent), user passwords (80 percent), and spyware (80 percent). However, the investment of time in practical measures remains low. For example, sixty-three percent of respondents state they do not audit or monitor user compliance with security policies, and less than half (48 percent) measured and reviewed the effectiveness of security policies and procedures in the last year.

Survey results show the majority (65 percent) of information security budgets now come directly from the IT department, a jump from only 48 percent in 2006. Other department budgets for information security are down this year, including compliance/regulatory (9 percent in 2007 vs. 18 percent in 2006), finance (15 percent in 2007 vs. 19 percent in 2006), and other business lines (4 percent in 2007 vs. 18 percent in 2006). Additionally, security reporting and IT bounced back for the first time in four years with survey results showing more split reporting lines and security reporting to multiple departments.

Currently there are gaps in the alignment of security spending to business objectives. According to the survey, only 30 percent of respondents report their organization's information security policies are completely aligned to business objectives, and even less (22 percent) believe security spending is completely aligned. This is up only slightly from 2006 when 28 percent of respondents reported their security policies were completely aligned with business objectives.

In other survey highlights, for the first time, employees took over the number one spot as the most likely source of an information security event. The majority (69 percent) of respondents cite employees and former employees as the likeliest source of attacks, surpassing hackers at 41 percent. This is up significantly from 2005 when only 33 percent of respondents cited employees as the most likely source versus 63 percent for hackers. Email and abused valid user accounts and permissions are reported as the primary methods for such attacks yet only about half (52 percent) of respondents employ routine people-related information security safeguards. Simple safeguards such as personnel background checks (52 percent), monitoring employee use of Internet/information assets (48 percent) and dedicating human resources to employee awareness programs for internal policies and procedures (47 percent) remain uncommon. In addition, the majority of respondents (63 percent) still do not have an identity management strategy in place.

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Software As A Service Requires Diligence
Software as a service is an alluring concept to IT pros faced with endless software upgrades, patching, and license wrangling. Gartner estimates the market for enterprise applications as a service will enjoy compound annual growth of 22% through 2011. That's more than double the rate for all enterprise software. One big reason businesses turn to SaaS is cost savings. According to a total cost of ownership study conducted by Network Computing in March, CRM as a service for 105 users saved as much as $135,000 over three years compared with on-premises CRM. Savings came primarily from eliminating the need for hardware and software. However, IT pros shouldn't dismiss SaaS without articulating your reasons.
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Toward a Great Customer Experience
Too many companies still design CRM strategies to fit the limitations of their technologies or internal processes. This is a classic mistake. It's imperative that you have the qualitative and quantitative customer insight to drive your whole organization to serve the customer. CRM isn't just a technology -- it's a business philosophy.
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How Gateway's Tech Support Tortured an Editor
This article about a NetWork World’s experience with Gateway’s Tech Support department shows what not to if you want to keep your customers.
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How to be a Customer
Ninety nine percent of marketing focuses on how to sell to customers. Very little attention is paid to why and how customers should sell themselves to marketers. As a customer, do you ever think about how you can get a leg up on your competition—the other customers competing for the attention and goodwill of the seller?
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10 Tips for Combating Agent Burnout
It’s not hard to imagine how a contact center agent could burn out. The work can be repetitive, and dealing with frustrated or angry customers all day can take its toll, even on someone with the most even temperament. Interestingly, agent burnout is generally caused by the repetitive nature of the work, not the interactions with volatile customers. Fortunately, that means the cure is manageable. In fact, addressing some of the agents’ basic needs can leave them feeling energized and ready to work.
Full Article...

Dive Into Web 2.0
by Deitel & Associates, Inc.,

Dive Into Web 2.0 introduces the principles, applications, technologies, companies, business models and monetization strategies of Web 2.0. The eBook defines the characteristics of Web 2.0, why search is fundamental to Web 2.0 and how Web 2.0 empowers the individual. It discusses the importance of collective intelligence and network effects, and the significance and growth of blogging. It helps readers gain a better understanding of social networking, social media and social bookmarking, and how tagging leads to folksonomies. It also discusses how web services are enabling new applications to be quickly and easily “mashed up” from existing applications. The eBook provides an overview of Web 2.0 technologies, business models and monetization models to help readers understand the fundamentals of what comprises a Web 2.0 business.

You can read it free online, buy an electronic version or hardcopy at the following link:

More Info...

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