SAP Customers Forced to Move to Pricier Support
SAP AG announced last week that as of Jan. 1, 2009, customers will be "transitioned" to the vendor's enterprise-level support, a change that will result in increased level of service but also higher fees down the road. SAP first unveiled the enterprise support offering in May. It will replace the Standard and Premium support options, and the company said it includes "a 24/7 service-level agreement, continuous quality checks, support advisory and advanced support for implementing SAP ERP enhancement packages and support packages."
[Source: Computerworld]
YouTube Ordered To Reveal Users' Data
Dismissing privacy concerns, a federal judge overseeing a $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit against YouTube has ordered the popular online video-sharing service to disclose who watches which video clips and when. U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton authorized full access to the YouTube logs after Viacom Inc. and other copyright holders argued that they needed the data to show whether their copyright-protected videos are more heavily watched than amateur clips. The data would not be publicly released but disclosed only to the plaintiffs, and it would include less specific identifiers than a user's real name or e-mail address. Lawyers for Mountain View, Ca.-based Google Inc., which owns YouTube, said producing 12 terabytes of data would be expensive, time-consuming and a threat to users' privacy.
[Source: Associated Press]
Chordiant Launches Recommendation Advisor 6.1
Chordiant Software Inc., a provider of Customer Experience (Cx) software and services, has announced Recommendation Advisor 6.1, a real-time conversation and interaction management solution for organizations with high customer interaction volumes. Chordiant Recommendation Advisor is able to “listen” to the conversation a call center or branch agent is having with a customer and dynamically re-apply models and rules to every new input. It offers Next-Best-Action recommendations that change dynamically based on customer responses, action or inaction. This helps every contact center agent perform like a knowledgeable, seasoned professional who can ensure the best possible outcome for the customer and the company.
Bizroof Joins CRM Market
CRM is more or less a staple of the SaaS market. Now joining the market and sporting a group of features simple to operate, San Francisco-based Bizroof is constructed with four primary components in mind: the dashboard; sections for people and organizations; and events. Items can be tagged for quick search if needed. Important notes can be recorded. Files can be uploaded. And a calendar is available to pool schedules together and null any worker confusion. An RSS feed is also offered to keep track of account activity.
Aspect Software Acquires BlueNote Networks
Aspect Software Inc., a company solely focused on Unified Communications for the Contact Center, has announced it has acquired substantially all of the assets of BlueNote Networks, based in Tewksbury, Mass. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The acquisition furthers the company’s recently announced unified communications for the contact center strategy with the addition of IT-ready, software-based products that communications-enable business processes (CEBP). Leveraging the BlueNote Networks technology, Aspect Software customers will now be able to extend session initiation protocol (SIP)-based voice, video and other real-time interactive communication services to enterprise users as an integral part of a service-oriented architecture (SOA)
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| Professional Listeners: the Evolution of the Contact Center Worker
Contact center professionals have an unfair stigma attached to them for being disloyal, unmotivated, poorly trained and having a ‘couldn’t-care-less’ attitude. Independent research, commissioned by Siemens Enterprise Communications, looks beyond the technology employed in UK contact center environments and into the habits, tips, thoughts and working practices of the workers themselves, and generates a 21st Century profile of the modern day ‘Professional Listener’=.’ The research questioned over 500 contact center workers in the UK, comprising a combination of inbound and outbound workers across both the public and private sectors.
The research concludes that there is a new breed of Professional Listener emerging who is loyal, motivated and highly satisfied, all set against a backdrop of ever-increasing processes and the proliferation of IT applications needed to do the job.
Key trends in the survey provide insights into where contact center improvements could be made, and how to achieve best practice. Significantly, it highlights that Professional Listeners have the same career aspirations as any professional worker in any other industry. These career aspirations have in turn created loyal employees who stay in the same job for more than two years, on average. They crave training, want to improve and, not surprisingly, want to be paid more.
Some of the characteristics of the Professional Listener include:
- On average, 4.3 years of experience.
- 2.2 years average job tenure.
- Loyal to company – 44% who would like to progress within the department of their current job.
- Keen to work flexibly – 77% of non-home workers would like to work from home, or combine home and office working.
- Overall satisfaction is high – 53% satisfied, and 17% “very satisfied.
UK contact centers are responsible for employing almost 300,000 people in the UK – this equates to 1% of the UK workforce. Through automation of processes over the past decade, contact center managers have a vast array of data at their disposal to inform strategy and business decisions.
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Governments Increasing Spend on CRM Solutions
Driven by the need to improve its management of constituent relationships, a new report from Datamonitor predicts that government spending on CRM technology solutions in the US, UK, Germany and France will grow from $2.9 billion in 2008 to $4.4 billion in 2013. In today’s commercially-oriented world, it has become a trend among public sector agencies to treat constituents as customers who expect top levels of service.
CRM was initially used as a solution for private sector companies to better manage their sales, service and marketing channels. With public sector adoption of CRM, however, governments are using these features to meet their own unique needs. For example, CRM’s service function facilitates the provision of information to constituents. One of the key drivers is the surge in government contact centers for constituent inquiries, such as the numerous non-emergency contact center initiatives that have been rolled out across North America and Europe.
In today’s world, agencies are faced with the task of managing relationships with a diverse mix of constituents, whether it is providing top quality services, giving agency employees the tools they need to do their job well or attracting and retaining citizens and businesses. CRM helps manage all these relationships by making interactions more personalized and efficient. Governments are able to automate workflow and consistently track cases as they move through the system, agency to agency, in order to be resolved. For example, social services departments are using case management to improve efficiency and ensure consistency in how they track and record interactions with their clients.
Furthermore, CRM allows governments to inform constituents of relevant services and upcoming events or deadlines which might affect them. For example, sending out a reminder email about tax filing information in advance of the deadline can decrease the number of late filers. Not only does this bode well for revenue collection, it also reduces the costs of chasing after the late-filers. In some cases, innovative governments have taken this a step further, and are experimenting with Web 2.0 in CRM, through constituent surveys and interactive websites. CRM solutions also allow governments to increase efficiencies and reduce costs by tailoring message content for constituents.
In addition to the benefits it provides citizen-facing functions, CRM has a positive impact on improving operations and management decisions. By adopting a CRM strategy, government agencies can achieve a host of benefits when it comes to streamlining its business processes and analytical capabilities. With the increased emphasis on performance management in government agencies, CRM steps up to the plate by allowing government to track the nature of constituent inquiries — ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘why’, ‘where’, ‘when’, and even ‘how’; CRM solutions increasingly support multi-channel communications, including phone, email and in some cases, even text messages.
Despite the many obvious benefits to adopting CRM, implementation faces inevitable challenges which must be addressed in order for government to realize the full value of these solutions. The report notes that a key aspect of CRM as a solution is only as good as the agency that implements it. A successful CRM implementation involves buy-in from management and staff, as well as the adoption of constituent-centric business process, with the technology serving as the grand enabler in the equation.
http://www.datamonitor.com
Enterprises Must Create Separate Marketing Strategies for Generation Virtual
As community marketing continues to evolve, organizations can target “Generation Virtual” by providing socialization tools to customers and prospects depending on their purpose and the level of customer engagement, according to Gartner Inc.
Unlike previous generations, Generation Virtual (also known as Generation V) is not defined by age — or gender, social demographic or geography — but is based on demonstrated achievement, accomplishments and an increasing preference for the use of digital media channels to discover information, build knowledge and share insights. Generation V is the recognition that general behavior, attitudes and interests are starting to blend together in an online environment.
Gartner has identified four levels of engagement within Generation V, addressing both the extent to which customers will engage with other customers, as well as the level of engagement needed from businesses to enable the community. The four levels of engagement include: creators, contributors, opportunists, and lurkers.
By recognizing and accommodating these levels, companies can harness their influence for marketing purposes, and ultimately, for transactions.
- Up to 3 percent of individuals will be creators, providing original content and can be advocates that promote your product and services.
- Between 3 percent and 10 percent of individuals will be contributors, essentially followers, who add to the conversation, but don't initiate it. They can recommend products and services as customers move through a buying process, looking for purchasing advice.
- Between 10 percent and 20 percent of individuals will be opportunists, who can further contributions regarding purchasing decisions. Opportunists can "add value" to a conversation that's taking place, while walking through a considered purchase.
- Approximately 80 percent of individuals will be lurkers (and all users start as such), essentially spectators, who reap the rewards of online community input, but only absorb what is being communicated. However, they can implicitly contribute and validate indirectly reporting the value from the rest of the community.
Gartner recommends marketing organizations should:
- Plan to segment and support all four engagement levels in the community. Each has significant business value, and each approach will dictate the technology you'll use to support them.
- Establish goals and have a plan for determining return on investment (ROI). Many companies are initiating or connecting to communities without clear goals as to the value they provide to the customer or the company. What may have begun as a way to connect with customers can damage the company's brand.
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Can Traditional CRM Systems Operate in an On-Demand Delivery Model?
It's no secret that the heavyweight client/server CRM publishers, including Siebel and Oracle, initially made multiple attempts to protect their turf, chastised the on-demand business model and attempted to link on-demand CRM applications to FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). History also shows that once they figured out they couldn't beat the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, they chose to join it — at least in part.
Because of the great popularity and success of the historical client/server CRM applications, the on-demand hosting market is experiencing SaaS solutions from two platform sources; Web-native thin client CRM solutions and traditional client/server CRM systems.
In a recent survey conducted by CRM Labs, the overall conclusions of the thin-client vs. client/server CRM systems are:
- Most respondents did not feel that the two platform solutions will each have a place in the market or would live harmoniously together. Instead, there was a strong feeling that the client/server manufacturers were simply 'force fitting' their software products into a new delivery model — either to supplement their traditional revenue stream or to act as a stepping stone until they ultimately get to a more hosting-friendly technology.
- Respondents using client/server CRM systems in a hosted model cited increased hardware, software and IT labor costs as compared to thin-client CRM systems. Specifically, client/server respondents felt that to achieve acceptable hosted delivery, they were forced to procure more hardware (web server farms and database clusters), more bandwidth and complementary software products (Citrix) simply due to the non-Web-native architecture. Further, the client/server products incurred some common shortcomings, including limited performance over the Web and certain functionality deficiencies (printing problems were mentioned multiple times).
- Lastly, while respondents were fairly negative toward client/server CRM products in a hosted delivery model, they did believe that most of those software publishers would ultimately get to the SaaS model with Web-native CRM applications.
Several respondents commented that client/server solutions offered as a hosted delivery is nothing more than a marketing ploy or an attempt to get into a sales cycle and ultimately steer the prospect toward traditional client/server products.
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| Six Technologies That Make CRM Better
On its most basic level, CRM is a customer database that provides insight into clients and helps you manage relationships with them. Though the abilities of CRM are certainly advantageous, the tool is just one part of the enterprise application picture. There are many available technologies that complement CRM and boost its capabilities. Some are large enterprise-software packages, while others are smaller tools that can provide an effective way to use CRM.
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Real Estate Discovers CRM: Trying Out the Tools
As more buyers and sellers look to the Web and as other parties in the real estate value chain move to Web-enabled business software platforms, the real estate industry has begun to embrace CRM as a sales tool. While enterprise-level leaders such as Oracle and SAP AG don't have specific CRM offerings for real estate agents, they do offer real estate management tools for their clientele. Meanwhile, development and growing use of Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM solutions is beginning to change the competitive landscape, and the way real estate agencies manage their sales and work forces.
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Training, Retaining and Maintaining the Workforce Management Professional
All contact centers face significant challenges in hiring and retaining good personnel. Yet so much attention is paid to agent staffing that organizations often forget to make sufficient investments in the staff that keeps the contact center running smoothly – workforce planners. Without a clear plan to develop and retain skilled workforce planners, the center can compromise the goals of the entire organization. A comprehensive training and retention strategy for these employees can preserve continuity in the workforce planning office and, by extension, bring order to the contact center as a whole.
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'Not a Site, but a Concept': Tapping the Power of Social Networking
Mini USA, the American branch of BMW's Mini Cooper line, tracks everything being said about its brand everywhere on line — in blogs, discussion groups, forums, This is just one of the companies savvy enough to participate in the "groundswell," according to Forrester’s Charlene Li. The groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations. The more you know and understand the individuals who make up the groundswell around your brand and your company, the more you can use the new social networking phenomenon to your advantage.
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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.
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