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The Perfect Agent: Tools and Technology for Coaching Your Support Team
Thursday, December 10, 2009 - 11 AM PT / 2 PM ET
How do you motivate people to deliver excellent performance, whether they are in the next cubicle or far away? Communications skills expert Rich Gallagher joins with Citrix Online to share the secrets to getting the best out of today's distributed support team. Topics this Webinar will cover include:
- The psychology of a typical agent
- Strength-based coaching techniques that create real performance change
- Managing performance problems from near and far
- Making your agents part of a team
- How technology can help improve support performance
Ellison Details 'Next-Gen' Oracle Tech Support
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, in his keynote at OracleWorld, said Oracle is planning more comprehensive, personalized, and proactive technical support for its customers through an improved, future version of Oracle Enterprise Manager. My Oracle Support will give customers the latest information on bugs and security patches, share knowledge on problems experienced by customers with similar configurations, and provide patch alerts and information on known fixes. It will give customers a discussion forum, community groups, and other collaborative support mechanisms.
Sun Microsystems slashing up to 3,000 jobs
Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to eliminate up to 3,000 jobs as it awaits a takeover by Oracle Corp., a deal that is being held up by antitrust regulators in Europe. The layoffs Sun outlined Tuesday in a regulatory filing amount to about to 10 percent of the company's 29,000 workers and will happen over the next year. Sun said in its filing that the layoffs would come from all its major regions, including North America, Europe, Asia and emerging markets.
Ballmer: Users won't be penalized for switching from premise to hosted software
Microsoft's licensing of internal versions of software vs. their online counterparts won't penalize users for buying on-premises licenses and then switching to online hosted software, according to CEO Steve Ballmer. Users have been questioning whether they can move licenses online without having to take a credit and renegotiate with Microsoft on licensing terms. But Ballmer said Microsoft will be flexible in the way the company prices cloud versus on-premises.
He said users that want to come to the cloud can buy the service and use the license they own or they can start in the cloud and buy an integrated license that pays for both the service Microsoft operates and the license.
source: NetworkWorld
Altitude Software and TelCentris Partner to Deliver Hosted Contact Center Solutions
Altitude Software, a global contact center solutions vendor, and TelCentris Inc., a telephony company and the creator of VoxOx, announced a unique partnership to deliver Altitude's multimedia contact center solutions hosted over Telcentris' Unified Communications Service Delivery Platform (SDP). The partnership is the first of its kind in North America. By combining the Altitude uCI Customer Interaction Management suite with TelCentris' state-of-the-art hosted IP-PBX services, customers get a seamlessly integrated solution that solves both inbound and outbound contact center requirements.
White Paper: Best Practices for Coaching Your Support Team to Handle Anything
This white paper provides a step-by-step game plan for solving your support agents' worst nightmares, based on the author's experience in successfully "turning around" support performance, as well as current research in the psychology of how we communicate with people. In the process, you will learn how specific, procedural skills -- both for how your agents respond to customers, and how you coach your team -- can change everything about how your interact with customers, in a way that will impact both your support metrics and your bottom line.
IT Spending to Rebound in 2010 with 3.3 Percent Growth After Worst Year Ever in 2009
The IT industry is exiting its worst year ever, as worldwide IT spending is on pace to decline 5.2 percent, according to Gartner, Inc. Worldwide enterprise IT spending will struggle more with IT spending dropping 6.9 percent. The IT industry will return to growth with 2010 IT spending forecast to total $3.3 trillion, a 3.3 percent increase from 2009.
The computing hardware market has struggled more than other segments with worldwide hardware spending forecast to total $317 billion in 2009, a 16.5 percent decline. In 2010, spending on hardware spending will be flat. Worldwide telecom spending is on pace to decline 4 percent in 2009 with revenue of nearly $1.9 trillion. In 2010, telecom spending is forecast to grow 3.2 percent. Worldwide IT services spending is expected to total $781 billion in 2009, and it is forecast to grow 4.5 percent in 2010. Worldwide software spending is forecast to decline 2.1 percent in 2009, and the segment is projected to grow 4.8 percent in 2010.
From a budget perspective, there are three important items that IT leaders must consider in 2010:
1. A Shift from Capital Expenditure to Operational Expenditure in the IT Budget -- Concepts such as cloud services will accelerate this shift. IT costs become scalable and elastic. CIOs need to model the economic impact of IT on the overall financial performance of an organization. For public companies, they must show how IT improves earnings per share (EPS).
2. Impact of the Increased Age of IT Hardware -- With delayed purchases of servers, PCs and printers likely to continue into 2010, organizations must start to assess the impact of increased equipment failure rates, and if current financial write-off periods are still appropriate. Approximately 1 million servers have had their replacement delayed by a year. That is 3 percent of the global installed base. In 2010, it will be at least 2 million.
3. IT Must Learn to Build Compelling Business Cases -- 2010 marks the year in which IT needs to demonstrate true line of sight to business objectives for every investment decision. IT leaders can no longer look at IT as a percentage of revenue. CIOs must benchmark IT according to business impact.
Gartner said three additional topics that were important in 2009 will continue to dominate IT leaders' agendas in 2010. These three topics include
- Business Intelligence -- Users will continue to expand their investments in this area with the focus moving from "in here" to "out there".
- Virtualization -- IT leaders should not just invest in the server and data center environment, but in the entire infrastructure. In 2010, users will create the cornerstone for the cloud infrastructure. They will enable the infrastructure to move from owned to shared.
- Social Media -- Organizations are starting to scale their efforts in this space. The technologies are improving and organizations realize this is not only about digital natives. It's about all client segments including the most significant: the population in the next 10 years, the above 60 year old generations.
More...
Next Gen to Meet New Normal in the Post-Recession Economy
The global economic retrenchment over the past 18 months has been accompanied by an unprecedented contraction in the availability of capital. Faced with limited capital to fuel business operations and fund business investments, business and IT leaders have slashed expenses and limited capital purchases. With the economy now poised to begin a very modest, multiyear recovery, IDC expects these "new normal" economic operating practices will continue to shape key decisions about IT operations and investments for years to come.
At the same time as these "new normal" economic operating practices are taking hold, the IT technology and platforms seem poised for a period of significant change. After an extended period of perfecting and refining the systems, architectures, and technologies that were on the table at the end of the last recession, IDC expects the next few years will see considerable IT platform change as companies are drawn toward the benefits of next-generation datacenters, new software offerings, and off-premise computing options.
As the potential of "next generation" IT comes up against "new normal" spending practices, IDC believes five management practices will emerge at the core of IT organization initiatives.
- Cost and Funding Management: IT organizations will increasingly be forced to develop cost profiles, including the business value of solutions, to support investment decisions. This will not be an easy or pleasant task, and has been a requirement that has dogged IT organizations for years.
- Sourcing and Platform Strategies: As new options become available to achieve an IT or business objective, IT organizations will have more options to experiment, innovate, and change but will also have to justify their choices more conclusively.
- Equipment Leasing and Software Financing: Commercial organizations will return to IT leasing and financing as a means of bolstering their access to IT resources.
- Life Cycle Management: IT organizations have already extended the planned deployment of many major systems, but they still need to develop the tools and management processes to quantify the underlying cost implications of these longer asset lifecycle models.
- IT Financial Management Tools: As IT platforms and business processes increasingly move toward a mix of in-house and third-party provisioning, the need for IT financial management software, tools, and best practices to better enable IT organization operational decision-making will become apparent.
Survey Reveals Two-Thirds Of Online Consumers Want Live Voice Help And Live Text Chat
ATG (Art Technology Group, Inc.), a provider of commerce solutions, announced the results of a consumer survey that explores shoppers' perceptions of - and preferences for - live help options such as click to call and click to chat when browsing and buying products or services online.
The most striking data from the survey found that 67 percent of consumers value the option of having both a live text chat and a live voice conversation to get the help they need when making online purchases. The survey also found that live help availability on Web sites is not meeting the demand that exists among consumers -- only 21 percent and 37 percent of respondents have tried click to call and click to chat respectively, despite indicating a clear preference for live help versus other online service options, such as email inquiries.
Several other key conclusions of the survey of over 1,000 Internet users found:
- Online consumers rated the availability of live help as the third most important of seven core Web site features
- 70 percent of consumers rated click to call -- defined as a direct connection with a live voice agent without having to go through an Interactive Voice Response system (IVR) -- as "extremely useful" or "very useful"
Certain factors such as higher-priced products or services, complexity of questions, errors in the transaction process, and sensitivity of information were identified as main determinants for consumers choosing live call over live chat.
Employee-Customer-Employee: Closing the Feedback Loop
Giving customers opportunities to comment on their experiences is just one component of a top-notch customer service operation. If you fail to close the feedback loop by delivering that information back to your employees, then you'll miss a critical step toward improving customer service and nurturing loyalty.
Full Article...
Changing Tech's ROI
The metrics for calculating return on investment (ROI) in the enterprise are changing in what appears to be the first major shift in more than a decade--and one that is likely to have a significant effect on what companies buy and how frequently they do so. Technology has become measurable beyond just revenue per employee, which can be skewed by cutting every third person and having employees work longer hours, or by outsourcing some jobs to places like India or China. The metrics now include everything from what employees produce, how long it takes them to do a particular job, how long it takes them to acquire the necessary data to make decisions and how complete that data is. There also are measurements for uptime, server utilization, collaboration, customer response time and overall customer satisfaction.
Full Article...
Social Media for ITSM
Don't confuse social media with popular outlets for its expression. Social media refers to a dramatic change in the relationship between suppliers and their marketplaces, and one in which consumers now have the upper hand. IT managers should not discount social media by associating it only with marketing or outlets for its expression like Linked-In, TripAdvisor, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. IT service providers are in effect marketers selling a product to a marketplace. For most of the history of IT that marketplace has been captive, communications largely one sided, and there have been few alternatives. That situation has changed. To survive, IT managers need to embrace the concepts of social media to empower their customers and users, too..
Full Article...
10 Great Google Apps Add-Ons for the Enterprise
Over the past six months, dozens of developers have built apps to make Google's office wares (Apps, Docs, Gmail, Calendar) more appealing for the enterprise. The following is a selection of these apps. They range from the practical (backups) to the creative (a freebie VPN replacement based on Google Talk).
Full Article...
The New Calculus of Offshoring
In first-generation outsourcing, contracts tended to be long-term; in fact, 10 years was common. The argument? Lock in the savings. Now, the watchword for every company is flexibility. Circumstances change fast, as companies have painfully learned, and companies now place a renewed emphasis on being able to change any and all aspects of the agreement in response to whatever the economy is throwing at them. As a result, the fixed-price, fixed-term contract has become old-school, particularly in more-commoditized areas like IT and call centers.
Full Article...
Adventures of an IT Leader
by Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan, Shannon O'Donnell
Becoming an effective IT manager presents a host of challenges--from anticipating emerging technology to managing relationships with vendors, employees, and other managers. A good IT manager must also be a strong business leader.
This book invites you to accompany new CIO Jim Barton to better understand the role of IT in your organization. You'll see Jim struggle through a challenging first year, handling (and fumbling) situations that, although fictional, are based on true events.
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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.
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