Register Today for SupportIndustry.com's Featured Webinar:

Achieving Change Management from a Business Perspective
August 14, 2008 11:00 am PT

This SupportIndustry.com webinar, conducted by Pete McGarahan and FrontRange Solutions, examines IT and ITIL best practices for managing change across the entire IT infrastructure. In this webinar, you will learn:

-- Why the first question during a system outage should be "What Changed?"
-- Why formal and controlled IT Change Management is a high priority for the business
-- The metrics that matter most for IT and the business
-- Positioning IT Change Management on your ITSM Roadmap
-- Changing the IT Culture to adopt and adapt to this formalized process for implementing change
-- The business speaks -- real life stories regarding change gone badly!

Register Today!

SAP To Migrate Customers To More Expensive Support Service
SAP on Wednesday said it would transition its customers to its recently released -- and more expensive -- Enterprise Support service as of Jan. 1, 2009. Over the last six months, more than 350 customers have signed up for the new service, which the business application maker calls its "next generation" of support. As part of the transition, some SAP customers will be able to take advantage of some of the additional services available with Enterprise Support at no additional cost. Graduated pricing would begin in January. The new service provides a 24/7 service level agreement, continuous quality checks, advisories, and help in implementing enhancement packages for SAP software. (source: Intelligent Enterprise)

Buggy Software is Your Fault, Too
Hackers' preferred method of breaking into businesses these days is exploiting flaws in Web browsers, word-processing documents and other software. The reason these applications are vulnerable to attack: No one wants the responsibility for making sure this software is secure.The man pointing the finger at, well, everybody is Howard Schmidt, a security consultant who used to be the top-ranking cyber-security official in George W. Bush's Whitehouse. Making sure that software is secure from the ground up will become increasingly important as people store more information and install more software on mobile devices like the iPhone Schmidt was waiting to upgrade. Schmidt offers this reminder: Just because a piece of software was distributed through Apple's App Store, don't assume that it is vulnerability free. Source: WSJ

Five9 Announces Availability of New Call Center Suite
Five9, a provider of on-demand call centers, announced the general availability of its Virtual Call Center Suite 7. This software-as-a-service is available to new customers across all industry sectors and call center applications. Five9's enhanced service delivers powerful predictive dialing features, IVR self-service, advanced call routing, and enhanced reporting for inbound, outbound, and blended call center operations. With more than 30 new features incorporating feedback from customers and partners around the world, Five9's Virtual Call Center Suite 7 delivers quick, powerful solutions at an affordable price.

Text-to-Speech Technology Brings New Advances to Callbright's Broadcast Message Manager
Callbright announced a new innovation to their broadcast campaign capabilities: text-to-speech technology. Broadcast campaigns are a widely used, automated approach to reaching large audiences with targeted sales announcements, service reminders, and recall notices. Traditionally, broadcast campaign users record a message using their own voice; now, with the introduction of text-to-speech, customers have the option of typing a message that is then automatically converted to a voice recording.

Services Industry Summit
Palazzo Hotel, Las Vegas, NV: October 6-8, 2008

Hosted by Service Strategies, this industry event is your perfect opportunity to share best practices and learn how world-class companies are improving their professional service and customer support and organizations. Don't miss this unique content focused industry event. Industry luminaries will share their insights through informative presentations packed with information and ideas you can put to use right away. The event will also include pre-conference workshops and an executive discussion forum.

For more information, contact Service Strategies by phone at 858.674.4864 or 800.552.3058 - Toll Free in North America, email info@servicestrategies.com or click here for event details, pricing and registration information.

Demand for Tech Workers Holds Strong Despite Slight Dip in Overall IT Worker Confidence
The IT Employee Confidence Index, a measure of overall confidence among U.S. information technology workers, dropped 1.5 points to 45.9 in the second quarter of 2008, reaching its lowest level since measurement began in 2005, according to a recent survey commissioned by Technisource, the technology placement division of Spherion Corporation.

The survey, conducted by Harris Interactive, indicates that overall confidence levels among IT workers surveyed declined slightly in the second quarter as a result of workers' increased uncertainty in the job market and in their personal employment situation. Despite workers' doubts, 42 percent of technology workers say they are likely to look for a new job in the next year.

Results from the IT Employment Report:

• More than two-thirds (70 percent) of technology workers believe the economy is getting weaker, up one percentage point from the first quarter of 2008.
• Forty-two percent of technology workers are likely to look for a new job in the next year, compared to 39 percent from the previous quarter.
• More than half of technology workers (59 percent) believe that fewer jobs are available, an increase of four percentage points from the first quarter of 2008.

More...

Workforce Collaboration and Web 2.0 - A Powerful Combination
New research from the Aberdeen Group found overwhelmingly that Best-in-Class organizations prioritize workforce collaboration and a majority of these organizations infuse the use of Web 2.0 technologies in those efforts to achieve impressive performance gains in areas such as problem resolution, project completion, and workforce productivity, including a 34% average reduction in project completion time and a 26.7% increase in revenue per employee.

For organizations that achieved Aberdeen's Best-in-Class status (the top 20% of aggregate performance scorers) in workforce collaboration, the study shows that it starts with buy-in and support from the organization's senior executive leadership. With this buy-in, two more critical elements are institutionalized:

• Availability of workforce collaboration and/or Web 2.0 software tools are communicated to the appropriate parties
• Training on the use of these software tools is available to all applicable workers

More...

Research Finds Business Needs Customer Experience Management
Most businesses today have not advanced very far in how they manage their customers' experiences with them, according to newly released benchmark research from Ventana Research. The new research, "Customer Experience Management: Improving the Consistency and Quality of Customer Interactions" confirms that businesses are only beginning to advance towards managing the customer experience across the broad set of customer interactions that occur every day.

Ventana Research defines customer experience management as a focus on improving the effectiveness of the people, processes, information and technology involved in the customer interaction at every touch point in the organization. The new research evaluated the maturity of customer experience management and found that only 12 percent of organizations are truly mature in their focus on ensuring the optimal customer experience.

The research report notes that customers are one of a company's key assets, and the way they behave will have a strong impact on the success or failure of the company. If they remain loyal and continue their purchasing, the company's prospects will be good, but if the costs to support them exceed the revenues they generate, prospects will look bad. Nearly all interactions occur through a customer service agent in a call center or through the Web, and the research shows that customers are less than satisfied with the results of their calls, and only 40 percent of participants reported that issues usually are resolved during the first call. Curiously, though, only slightly more than one-third of the organizations participating in the research said they intend to upgrade the desktop technology on which agents rely in the next 12 months.

More...

Project Management Office Can Streamline IT Modernization
IT organizations will be unable to meet rapidly changing business demands simply by working harder than they have in the past, according to Gartner Inc. Instead they need to embrace IT modernization as generations of technology, skills and expectations are inevitably replaced by the next ones.

Gartner defines IT modernization as the complete overhaul of the culture of IT with the specific goal of developing a portfolio of processes that will enable the IT delivery teams to close the gap on accelerating business demands.

According to Gartner, the creation of project management offices (PMOs), combined with an investment in project and portfolio management (PPM) processes and technology, can provide enough organization, process definition and process automation to identify and address an expected increase and proliferation of IT artifacts needing retirement or replacement during the next five to seven years.

Investments in a PMO and in PPM as a work management discipline can help IT generate the visibility CIOs need to monitor network, telephony, server hardware, storage and system management portfolios, and make effective modernization decisions that funnel into strategic IT projects.

Gartner analysts said that moving the PMO outside of the IT organization promotes its independence, removes any perception of bias and encourages the planning of IT modernization efforts for the sake of the wider business and not solely for the sake of the IT organization. This positioning of an enterprise project management office (EPMO) -- which plays more of a role in oversight and monitoring, and has no direct project management responsibilities -- enables lower level managers to raise any portfolio issues related to IT modernization programs or projects with senior management.

IT modernization represents Gartner's theme for closing the gap between yesterday's IT implementations and tomorrow's IT demands in the face of the greatest shift in IT technology skills that has been seen in the history of computing. Gartner analysts said that strategic use of PMOs should ensure that IT modernization becomes an increasingly critical enabler of business change.

More...

Vendors to IT: No economic stimulus package for you
As the economy goes from bad to worse, many IT managers are seeking new terms and price breaks from vendors, and some are delaying planned hardware upgrades and application deployments. But judging from interviews with nearly a dozen IT managers, the economic problems aren't resulting in a buyer's market for IT just yet. In some cases, prices are actually going up.
Full Article...

Diffusing Management Practices within the Firm: The Role of Information Provision
Managers face a range of options to diffuse innovative practices within their organizations. This paper focuses on one such technique: providing practice-specific information through mechanisms such as internal seminars, demonstrations, knowledge management systems, and promotional brochures. In contrast to corporate mandates, this "information provision" approach empowers facility managers to decide which practices to actually implement. The authors examine how corporate managers diffused advanced environmental management practices within technology manufacturing firms in the United States..
Full Article...

How to Protect Your Network from the Threat of Rogue IT Employees
In theory, employees at any level should be granted only those privileges absolutely needed to do their job. Since this requires a separate set of privileges for everyone but the lowest ranking employees, this is usually impractical. As a result we tend to assign employees to groups with the same privilege levels, whether that specific employee needs all those specific privileges or not. The key to making this effective is granularity. For access to some critical functions -- like changing administrative privileges -- the granularity should be very fine indeed.
Full Article...

The Nine Timeless Truths of Call Center Design
Are you underestimating the value of your contact center environment? You may be surprised at what a few small improvements can do for your bottom line. If you cram your agents into tiny little boxes, they're going to feel like lab animals -- and will likely perform about as well. Managers need to take great care in designing the layout of the call center floor to keep the agents from feeling crammed in and underappreciated.
Full Article...

Can Your E-mail Get You in Trouble?
Even though most of us don't have to worry about our co-workers monitoring our every online activity, we should assume our bosses are watching closely. In fact, if you're reading or writing an e-mail or IM on the office computer, then there is a record of it, and your employer can find it. That's because the majority of employers now monitor all Internet and e-mail activity that's conducted on company-provided computer systems. Since it's their property, the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act says they can check out whatever you're doing online.
Full Article...

Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World
by Naomi S. Baron

In Always On, Naomi S. Baron reveals that online and mobile technologies--including instant messaging, cell phones, multitasking, Facebook, blogs, and wikis--are profoundly influencing how we read and write, speak and listen, but not in the ways we might suppose.

Moreover, as more and more people are "always on" one technology or another--whether communicating, working, or just surfing the web or playing games--we have to ask what kind of people do we become, as individuals and as family members or friends, if the relationships we form must increasingly compete for our attention with digital media?

Click here for more information

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!

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.
Click Here to Download...

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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