Microsoft Prices CRM Online to Undercut Rivals
Playing catch-up in the on-demand CRM market, Microsoft has announced the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online with aggressive pricing and data storage options that seek to take business away from Salesforce.com. Dynamics CRM Online is a full suite of on-demand sales, marketing and customer service applications along with business process automation and workflow automation, said Bill Patterson, Microsoft's director of product management for the online CRM package. To try to entice Salesforce.com customers to switch to Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft is undercutting Salesforce.com's prices and offering more data storage capacity.
[Source: eWeek]
Sikorsky Aircraft Selects SPSS Predictive Analytics to Improve Customer Satisfaction
Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. has selected Predictive Analytics software from SPSS Inc. to increase customer loyalty by proactively anticipating customer needs in helicopter fleets. The organization sought a software solution to help identify and predict equipment maintenance for helicopter customers, ultimately increasing customer satisfaction. Sikorsky selected SPSS Predictive Analytics text mining and data mining software and its Predictive Analytics enterprise-wide enabling platform to analyze helicopter and pilot data collected by the aircraft health and usage monitoring system and flight maintenance log records.
Kaleidico.com Announces Free Contact Management Built on Twitter
Kaleidico.com, makers of lead management technology, announced the release of SalesTwit.com. By simply connecting sales leads from any source — database, realtime Internet leads, spreadsheet, or address book — someone can effectively work their leads no matter where they are using any web, desktop, mobile or wireless tool. SalesTwit has effectively eliminated the need for a desktop application by leveraging Twitter, a social networking tool. SalesTwit allows the user to input sales lead data and have it "fed" to them at a certain interval or "request" a lead from wherever they may be.
Parature to Present Findings of 2008 Service & Support Metrics Survey
Parature and SupportIndustry.com recently conducted the 2008 Service & Support Metrics Survey. Respondents shared valuable data on metrics directly related to running their support operations, as well as providing humorous insights about some of their most challenging customer interactions. In this webinar, narrated with industry insight and analysis, Pete McGarahan of McGarahan and Associates, and Gary McNeil, VP of Marketing for Parature will deliver the results of the survey with practical advice and a recommended course of action for all support centers. Attendees will be able to benchmark their own organization's performance against what others are doing today. All participants will also receive a full copy of the survey results. Register today:
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| 2008 Should Be Inflection Point for Voice XML-based IVR
Datamonitor predicts that 2008 will be the inflection point for Voice-XML-based IVR. According to a new report by the company, the number of Voice-XML based IVR ports shipped will surpass traditional IVR ports for the first time. IVR-automated systems save businesses money and employee resources, while making routine services and inquiries available to the public 24 hours a day. Datamonitor predicts global investment in IVR licenses will increase from $475 million in 2006 to $845 million by 2012 as the business climate warms up to Voice-XML platforms. By 2009, almost 69% of IVR shipments will be Voice-XML-based platforms, says the analyst firm.
IVR is a widely used automated telephony system. It allows users to interact with a database through phone keypad or voice commands. An IVR application provides pre-recorded voice responses for appropriate situations, and, potentially, the ability to record voice input for later handling. IVR also enables enterprises to segment customers by type and value and where necessary/applicable, channel calls to appropriate customer service agents. Common IVR applications include bank and stock account balances and transfers, surveys and polls, office call routing, call center forwarding, simple order entry transactions and selective information lookup.
Businesses are re-evaluating the strategic value of IVR in the enterprise and service provider environments. Today, traditional and proprietary IVR systems are unwieldy, prohibitively expensive to operate, not flexible enough to make quick changes in the system and represent a serious drain on both human and financial resources. However, the advent of Web-based, open-standards like Voice-XML in the telephony world for IVR and next generation IVR platforms has opened up new possibilities for personalized phone self-service by simplifying the design, development and management aspects of IVR.
Voice-XML allows for the desegregation of basic IVR components. Organizations are able to utilize several off-the-shelf servers to build a distributed system that separates the otherwise stiffly joint components, improving processing power and overall performance of the platform. Moreover, it leverages the existing web architecture and enables IVR to work in a web services environment.
Mature markets like North America (NA) and Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) are seeing a lot of replacement / upgrade activity. According to Datamonitor they will witness a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6% and 9% respectively from 2007-2012. But it is the greenfield opportunities in the emerging markets of Asia Pacific (APAC) and the Caribbean and Latin America (CALA) that are growing at a faster rate with predicted CAGR of 18% and 14% respectively, over the same period.
In order to deliver maximum value to the customer, vendors should have a strong focus on reducing the complexity of application development, improving the management and reporting functions, improving analytics and providing better integration between interaction channels (voice, web, email, chat, fax) and between live customer service agents and self-service tasks. They should develop a comprehensive ecosystem of partners who have specialization in different vertical applications. Vendors should also look to provide more flexibility, reliability and on-demand scalability to their customers and need to constantly innovate to add value to both the enterprise and the service provider markets.
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Staffing and Training Initiatives Increase in Spite of Self-Service Technology Advances
Despite the push for customers to use self-service avenues, The Chartwell Customer Care Center Report 2008 shows full-time equivalent staffing in utility contact centers grew about 15% between 2003 and 2007 to offset the rise in call volumes. Around 61% of utilities reported an increase in calls.
The additional staffing helped utilities achieve the best ratio between customer service representatives and phone contacts of the past three Chartwell surveys.
Self-service technology, which the study also found continues to make inroads at utility companies, typically handles simple customer inquires, but some companies say handle times have risen and problem resolution decreased because more difficult calls are coming into the center. As a result, CSRs undergo 22% more in initial training and receive an additional 11% of ongoing training from three years ago, Chartwell reports.
Electronic communication also is making headway. A higher percent of CSRs now handle customer emails, and some utilities are looking to implement online chats between agents and consumers.
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Banks Set the Customer Satisfaction Standard for Online Financial Services
Customer satisfaction with online banking far surpasses other online financial services like credit cards and investment, according to a new study conducted by ForeSee Results and Forbes.com. According to the Online Financial Services Study, which employs the methodology of the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), online banking scores 82 on ACSI's 100-point scale. Credit card websites and investment websites both score 75.
In banking, the online channel (up 12% from 2003) significantly outperforms overall retail banking in terms of customer satisfaction, which scored 78 when measured by ACSI in 2007. This is the first year the study surveyed credit card and investment website customers.
Credit cards struggle to move beyond commodity status, and the low score for credit card websites indicates that credit card companies are not maximizing the value of the online channel to overall business operations. Credit card companies do not tend to have strong relationships with their customers, but the study suggests that investments in improving website performance and the site experience would improve loyalty.
For investment websites, customers are more likely to use the online channel than any other channel, so it is imperative that the website meet customer needs. Highly satisfied customers are 37% more likely to increase online transactions and 51% more likely to purchase more services than dissatisfied customers, which clearly demonstrates the value of online customer satisfaction.
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Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market To Reach $4.6 Billion By 2013
Despite a long-term future marked by commoditization, enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will surge over the next five years, growing 43 percent each year to reach $4.6 billion globally by 2013, according to a new report by Forrester Research Inc. The five-year Forrester forecast includes a breakdown of future business spending on technologies such as social networking, RSS, blogs, wikis, mashups, podcasting, and widgets, as well as an analysis of enterprise Web 2.0 spending across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
Forrester believes that Web 2.0 technologies represent a fundamentally new way to connect with customers and prospects and harness the collaborative power of employees. Large enterprises such as General Motors, McDonald’s, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance, and Wells Fargo have all made heavy use of these tools, and 56 percent of North American and European enterprises consider Web 2.0 to be a priority in 2008 according to a recent Forrester survey.
The key question for software firms is who pays for Web 2.0 in the enterprise? Three challenges face vendors: IT shops are wary of what they perceive as insecure, consumer-grade technology; ad-supported Web 2.0 tools on the consumer side have set "free" as a starting point; and Web 2.0 technologies enter a crowded space dominated by legacy software investments.
Currently, large businesses are spending more on employee collaboration tools than customer-facing Web 2.0 technologies, but Forrester expects that trend to reverse by next year. By 2013, investment in customer-facing Web 2.0 technology will dwarf spending on internal collaboration software by nearly a billion dollars.
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