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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
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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...

Call Scripting
the Caller Experience
In today's customer-centric world, the caller experience is of increasing
importance, and the free-form approach to call processing is increasingly
deficient in meeting the need. If callers aren't delighted with the process,
their treatment, and the results, they will quickly take their business
elsewhere by merely picking up the phone. In an effort to exceed customer
expectations, managers have focused on agent training, retraining, and more
training. The outcome of all this instruction, however, does not always
produce the preferred results to the extent desired. Therefore, a second
convergent tack is needed to supplement all this agent training: the application
of assisting technology.
Full Article...
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!
White Paper: Improving Customer Service Using Web-based
Support Tools
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
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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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