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01/03/12--08:08: Keeping Customer Data Safe, Mobile Customers, Auto Attendants, Save Conferencing Money (chan 2655953)

Happy New Year, y’all, here’s hoping it’s a prosperous and blessed New Year for us all, and that the Mayans were wrong.

Security is a paramount concern in cloud storage today, so woe betide the platform provider even perceived as being the least bit cavalier about security.

Box.net is covering all the bases when it comes to the security of its platform as the cloud storage provider recently announced a new set of tools and access controls for the enterprise. Company officials also announced a product integration with Intel to deliver what they characterize as “additional protections for users and increased admin capabilities for IT managers.”

Not that Box.net was any slouch when it came to security before the recent announcements; you don’t get to provide storage for 77 percent of the Fortune 500, and get 100,000 businesses using your service if you slack off on security. The company’s just ensuring that it remains state of the art.

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Amdocs, a telecommunications provider, recently noted in a blog entry by Naomi Weiser recently noted that two shoppers recently bought $100,000-plus Ferrari and “a new home via eBay subsidiary PayPal’s mobile app on Cyber Monday.”

Don’t try this at home with Mommy and Daddy’s smartphone, kids.

Most of us use smartphones to purchase more, uh, modest items. Songs on iTunes, for example. But we’re heading towards big ticket territory, Weiser writes, noting recent findings from data research and analysis firm comScore show that in September two-thirds of all smartphone owners made more substantial purchases on their phones.

British retailers Argos, ASOS and Debenhams are trying to find ways to sell their products through mobile apps. American retailers like Toys R Us, JC Penney, Lowes, and Best Buy are testing such approaches as giving store reps mobile phones to help shoppers instantly compare prices and match them when necessary, Weiser says.

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A recent white paper from lyrix.com, titled “Why Every Enterprise Needs a VoIP High Quality Speech Enabled Auto Attendant,” does a good job demonstrating why, with growing bandwidth and the ubiquity of SIP, “it is finally feasible to deliver high quality speech applications from the cloud.”

There are good business reasons to automate some or all of your call answering -- but the spelling of names on a DTMF keypad can be tricky or impossible on some smartphones and is illegal (and dangerous) while driving.

What you need is a high quality speech-enabled auto attendant, which its supporters would even describe as “prohibitively expensive and technically challenging,” involving premised-based installation of a dedicated server and expensive speech recognition licenses.

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“In these difficult times, companies everywhere are looking for unique ways to cut their costs.”

So say officials at AireSpring, a provider of IP communications services. While the company is right, aren’t all companies always looking for ways to cut costs, be times flush or thin?

Sure, products such as those offered by AireSpring might seem a bit more attractive when cutting costs is a matter of survival to a company, but well-run companies will always be in the market and on the lookout for such products.

And of course it helps to find quick, easy and relatively painless ways of cutting transportation, sales, and operations costs. Well, guess what hits the trifecta there? That’s right – conferencing. Put fewer people in the air from here to there, and not only do you save money and time, the employee probably appreciates not having to fly to St. Louis yet again for something that can be taken care of via conferencing technology.

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01/05/12--11:26: Customer Expectations Changing, Contact Center Monitoring, Call Center Homesourcing, Mobile Christmas Customers (chan 2655953)

Puneet Jetli, president and Co-CEO of the wonderfully-named company Happiest Minds, recently shared some thoughts around the subject of customer expectations and entrepreneurs.

Specifically, as he put it, “customer expectations are changing,” and entrepreneurs need to catch up. This isn’t a new message, but Jetli has some valuable insights to add to the ongoing discussion.

Disruptive technologies, as he says are always good opportunities for the industry. And whereas grizzled old-timers still sit around campfires at night talking about the Internet revolution in the late 1990s, Jetli sees a new wave around what he calls the "consumerization of IT.”

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Recently officials of Spectrum Corporation featured their call/contact center monitoring software aids in Contact Center Activity Monitoring (CCAM), a subset of Unified Contact Center Reporting (UCCR).

“CCAM,” company officials explained, “is the process of collecting data from the call center applications. The challenge for many contact centers is not the data that is generated but getting access to the data and being able to do something with it.”

Sure -- after all, generating data is useless unless you’re accessing all your data and you know what to do with it once you do. Of course that’s where the challenge comes in -- few companies have that completely mastered.

Spectrum officials explain how their process uses different methods to extract data from siloed systems and warehouses. There are many benefits to this, primary amongst them the fact that it allows users to monitor many call center applications and extract data from these siloed systems. Custom built applications and spreadsheets can be monitored and data extracted so unique data can be used, and investments made in custom built applications are not lost.

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According to a news article, in the Rochester, New York Democrat-Chronicle, the popular notion of call center jobs always going to places like India or The Philippines isn’t telling the whole story.

In 2012, the Democrat-Chronicle reports, “DialAmerica plans to move to larger space on Brighton-Henrietta Townline Road and add to its staff by as much as 40 percent.” Verizon Wireless' Henrietta call center employs about 1,200 people, up from 900 five years ago and 100 in 2000, the article points out, adding that “Pioneer Credit Recovery employs some 1,000 at its Wyoming County operations in Perry and Arcade, about double what it did a decade ago.”

Part of the repatriation is due to local government giving tax breaks to business process outsourcing companies to relocate to their areas. Part of it is due to companies deciding to give genuine American English-speaking customer assistance to customers tired of trying to decipher thick foreign accents. And part of it is simply the expansion of the call center industry.

The Democrat-Chronicle reports that “between 4 percent and 5 percent of the workforce in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecticut works in call centers,” citing industry research firm Contact Babel's 2011 U.S. Contact Center Decision-Makers' Guide.

…

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01/10/12--06:28: Call Center Predictive Dialer, Expense Report Software, Email Segmenting Customers, Eliminating Roaming Charges (chan 2655953)

If you enjoy paying for dialer maintenance, if you think that’s a great way to spend money, then you’re not going to be interested in this, and you can skip over to the sports page now.

Okay, for the rest of us, we’re aware, as LiveVox officials say, that contact centers are by and large milking the most out of aging systems. Bad economy and all, don’tcha know.

No funding this year for new systems. Keep the old ones together with spit and duct tape. Hey at least we’re not dropping our support and maintenance contracts like those guys eating the seed corn over there.

Before you do anything as drastic as dropping support and maintenance altogether, bear in mind that in so doing, you may be violating client SLAs or business continuity-disaster recovery mandates. But yes, we agree that paying a large premium for talking to tech support sounds increasingly ridiculous, what with the consumerization of IT.

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Expense report software is becoming a more crucial part of business operations, and there are many options out there. You might want to consider SutiExpense, powered by SutiSoft as you select which one will best fit the needs of your company.

Company officials say that by leveraging the company’s solution, expense reports can be created and submitted as frequently as needed. “Build your expense report throughout the month and submit anytime,” they say.

In essence, the way it works is that expense items are added from different categories of expense types. Once you have added your expense items, the expense report can be submitted for approval, so in this way, the expense follows the company's defined expense approval flow.

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Good advice from industry journal Practical ECommerce: “When ecommerce marketers make their New Year's resolutions, they should include improved email segmentation and personalization.”

They should also forget the “lose weight,” “make up with my ex” and “start exercising” ones while they’re at it. “Drink more good red wine” would be a fine example of a New Year’s resolution one is more likely to keep. And hey, we all want doable resolutions, don’t we?

Email segmentation, they explain, is simply the idea of organizing email-marketing lists so each group of recipients receives a relevant, even personalized, marketing message. Of course to do this, as they note, you need to first learn something about customer preferences, demographics, desires, and even devices.

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Hey, what’s the worst thing about business communications on the road? That’s right, roaming charges on our mobile devices.

Cloud Roam, based in Coventry, England, understands where we’re coming from. The telecom company sells to international travelers so they hear it, too. Its CEO and founder, Sotiris Anagnostis, is establishing a cooperation network between dozens of countries and his enterprise with the goal of saving up to 85 percent of what company officials call “exorbitant roaming charges ordinarily imposed on mobile calls” while traveling abroad.

To accomplish this, Cloud Roam offers pre-paid SIM cards -- no, no calling cards -- and that great telecom money saver, Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP.

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01/12/12--07:07: Mobile Banking For Customers, snom VoIP Phones, Customer Speech Analytics, Data Center Networks (chan 2655953)

Smartphones are growing just as rapidly in Britain as anywhere else... well, maybe not as rapidly as South Korea, but pretty rapidly. They’re ahead of Germany but not quite up to France.

And there’s a market for mobile banking via smartphone, although Brits aren’t the most gung-ho when it comes to banking via mobile. Nevertheless, Halifax and the Royal Bank of Scotland see opportunities there, as each have launched mobile banking apps to help customers manage their accounts on-the-go.

More than a third of the people in the UK use a smartphone, but as TMC noted a couple weeks ago, mobile banking is less popular in the UK than elsewhere, with only 27 percent of Brits surveyed reporting that yes, they had used some form of mobile banking in the past six months. For comparison purposes, globally 52 percent of people have.

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Just before the New Year snom officials announced that its endpoints passed a battery of interoperability tests with ZyXEL Communications’ Ethernet switches, “adding a new partner and combining the efforts of both companies to offer end-to-end Ethernet IP solutions for SMBs.”

The way company officials explain it, ZyXEL’s Power-over-Ethernet-enabled Ethernet switches are well-regarded in the industry for their “stable and consistent” data transmission for such apps as voice and video.

snom officials were understandably pleased by the results. One remarked that when combined with snom’s product portfolio, including the snom 3xx series, the touchscreen snom 870 and the standards-based SIP phones qualified by Microsoft for use with Microsoft Lync 2010 -- the snom 300 UC edition and the snom 821 UC edition -- “the tandem of snom and ZyXEL provides an optimal, end-to-end VoIP for small and medium-sized businesses.”

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Speech analytics leader UTOPY offers Interaction Analytics software, noting that when combined with the UTOPY Collections Optimization offering, it can measure, monitor and improve debt collections.

“Whether you're a collections agency looking to drive results for your clients or an in-house contact center looking to reduce outstanding receivables, UTOPY can help,” say company officials. They highlight four areas of consideration:

Measuring Collections Skills with Interaction Analytics: Not all contact center collection skills are created equal. Some agent collection rates will be higher than others, and organizations that have the ability to identify the reasons for these discrepancies and reduce them with targeted agent coaching will do better, naturally. UTOPY officials say they can help since contact centers are able to measure and monitor 100 percent of their interactions and analyze them down to the individual agent and interaction level.

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Good news: When it comes to data center design and operations, there are five areas, including data center networks, where we can expect to see significant advances in 2012, according to John Savageau, president of Pacific-Tier Communications.

Data Center Consolidation: The U.S. government is expected to close at least 800 of its data centers by 2015 due to lack of use, Savageau says, noting that “the lesson is not lost on state and local governments, private industry, or even Internet content providers,” who can see that the economics of operating a data center or server closet “are compelling enough to make even the most fervent server-hugger reconsider their religion.”

Cloud Computing: If you really secretly suspect that cloud will, sooner or later, replace all manner of server furniture, you have a like-minded soul in Savageau, who predicts that the move to cloud computing “is as certain as the move to e-mail was in the 1980s.”

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01/16/12--12:55: Call Center Agents At Home, Call Center Outsourcing, Video Conferencing B2B Customers, Protecting Customer Passwords (chan 2655953)

Always nice to meet a kindred spirit -- “I absolutely love working from home. I get more done,” writes Heather Hurst on the inContact blog, adding that it’s “no surprise that call center agents like working from home too.”

Sure, every now and then it’s fun to go to an office and work on group projects, but yes, this reporter prefers working at home.

Hurst tells of a friend of hers who was a work at home agent for seven years -- longer than the average call center agent lifespan, and that “had nothing to do with the work, it was based primarily on the location of her desk.”

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Call center outsourcing is like any other business – if it’s done where it can be done most efficiently everybody benefits – customers get the lowest prices, companies find cost savings and people can be freed up to do what their most efficient work is.

However, grandstanding American politicians with a less than robust grasp of or concern for economics are threatening to force American companies to establish call centers here in America, instead of allowing them to be outsourced to where the work can be done more efficiently.

They’re proposing to make companies that have call centers overseas ineligible for grants and guaranteed loans from the federal government. It also proposes a $10,000 a day penalty on US call centers that fail to report its relocation to an offshore location within 60 days to the Labor Department.

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A new report by Global Industry Analysts says the video conferencing market is set to grow in the coming years and will become a $14 billion global industry by 2017.

That’s from Mother Nature Network -- everybody’s networking these days, it seems -- which notes that it’s also going to bring along “improved image quality, increasing adoption among small- and medium-sized businesses, and rising demand from developing markets, such as ones in the Asia-Pacific.”

We hear them on the increased image quality. For a long time we couldn’t understand why video conferencing wasn’t wildly popular, why everybody and their brother weren’t doing it, then we were in a video conference with, uh, less than wonderful image and sound quality. It was as painful an experience as we’ve had recently, and we include watching the entire Jack & Jill trailer in that.

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An excellent, thorough white paper recently produced by Splashdata, titled “Secure and Efficient Password Administration Problem Solved by SplashID: Managing Passwords and Other Confidential Records in the Secure Enterprise,” deals with, as you might suspect, the problem of password security, critical in the modern enterprise.

Nobody argues with the notion that employees need more secure usernames and passwords, yet this increasing volume of username/ password combinations leads to major issues for IT managers.“Without the right password and information management solution, it is difficult for enterprises to simultaneously maintain employee productivity and ensure password and information security,” the paper contends, and it’s hard to disagree with that.

The SplashID paper does a good job identifying some of the major problems insecure passwords cause, with lack of compliance coming in first. There are well-known, accepted standards for creating and maintaining secure passwords, the paper says, “including specifying length, type of characters, and frequency of password changes.”

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01/20/12--09:28: Call Center New Year Resolutions, Customer Satisfaction and Call Monitoring, Call Center JIT Training, CRM and On Demand Call Centers (chan 2655953)

“With the new year comes new year's resolutions.”

For Dan Boehm, Vice President of Sales and Marketing forSpectrum Corporation, they do, anyway. Haven’t seen much in the way of a New Year’s resolution around this reporter’s house ever since our young son said “If there’s something you want to do, why do you have to wait for next year to start doing it?”

But it’s cultural, to resolve to stop smoking, lose weight or be a better person, as Boehm says. The gym is busier for the first couple weeks in January, then by about Valentine’s Day attendance is back to normal.

There might be a point to making New Year’s resolutions, though, if you manage a call center. As Boehm says, “one way you can be a better person is to review and change your metrics, thresholds and reports.” And that would make a fine New Year’s resolution. As would “Drink more red wine.” Hey we all like an easily-kept resolution now and then.

Reviewing and changing your metrics, thresholds and reports “will make you a better person,” Boehm says, “because your agents and supervisors will love you for it! Call centers are dynamic. Every year there is something new from the company that the call center must deal with. Everyone in the call center needs to adapt to these changes. Yet the agents and supervisors are still looking at the same metrics, responding to the same thresholds and seeing the same reports from last year.”

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It’s true that 3rd party remote call monitoring can be used to not only drive customer satisfaction but also dramatically increase business efficiency when used correctly. A recent study from BPA International, written by Craig Antonucci, director of Client Strategies, MBA and professor of Decision Sciences, points out some of the ways this is done.

First, determine critical activities. What activities make or break your call center? If you are a 911 dispatcher, being able to get the emergency group to the right home is the critical activity. Be sure to identify these critical activities and make them high focus, key measurements, and high penalty for failure at the agent level. If you fail to measure this, you might as well be the cook who doesn’t wash his hands.

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This reporter remembers when “just in time” was the hot, desirable practice for keeping on-hand inventories low. Turns out it’s good for call center training as well.

Harmony officials recently featured their Coach and Learn modules as ways businesses can “put knowledge in the hands of those who need it, when they need it the most.”

Sounds like something your business could do with? Read on.

These integrated contact center coaching and e-learning modules provide what KnoahSoft officials characterize as “a collaborative feedback loop between the agent and the supervisor to delivery training content and messages to agents just in time to improve their efficiency and enhance productivity.”

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Five9 officials recently touted their call center on demand products’ integration with some of the most popular CRM products available today, such as Salesforce.com, RightNow and NetSuite.

Great. But what’s the basic business case there in the first place?

Lots of companies today are moving from premise-based technologies to cloud computing platforms, and Five9 provides on-demand call center software that is pre-integrated with CRM “specifically to provide a robust and predictable migration path for companies to take advantage of the benefits that cloud computing can provide,” Five9 officials say.

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01/23/12--12:51: CRM Modules Explained, Call Centers and Voice Recognition, Hosted Contact Center Technology, Philippine Call Centers in 2011 (chan 2655953)

Soffront runs one of the more useful company blogs dealing with the CRM space, it has information that is actually quite useful even if you don’t buy their products. Shocking concept, yes, but a welcome, refreshing difference from the usual dreary “this problem can only be solved by using our Acme CRM...” approach.

Company officials note that most companies who are finding success with their CRM are using what amounts to an integrated customer relationship management approach to automate their business processes. And yes, Soffront can help you with that, but so can a lot of other companies.

A recent entry on the company blog does a good job highlighting the different basic modules you’ll want to understand. These are as basic as CRM tools get, if you’re doing CRM at all you should be familiar with them.

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Recently VoltDelta officials gave a summation of some compelling reasons why businesses interested in expanding their call center options and functionality should be looking at voice recognition, specifically VoltDelta’s OnDemand voice recognition resources.

Good products in the field combine up-to-date speech science, experienced Voice User Interface (VUI) design and technology for engaging and effective voice self-service. VoltDelta, for example, can provide “multi-channel support such as SMS messaging to confirm a speech response, call recording, and whisper on agent transfer to avoid repeating steps,” company officials say.

They point to a few specific features potential buyers of such technology should be aware of:

CrystalWAVE. This is the Crystal Weighted Average Voice Evaluation technology, using multiple, simultaneous grammar evaluation techniques with context sensitivity to improve recognition accuracy while reducing speech tuning requirements.

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Five9, a popular vendor of hosted call center tools and products, recently presented a good overview of the company’s technology using a Q&A format to reflect some of the most common questions companies have when considering a switch to such technology:

What are the basic requirements of an at-home agent?

At-home agents using the Five9 Virtual Call Center Suite only require a computer with high-speed Internet access and a USB headset.

How do you handle planned down time? Our need is for 24x7 availability.

Five9 is available 24x7, including support, with one exception. Five9 reserves a maintenance window from 9-10pm on Wednesday and Saturday nights. Though this window is not always used, if uptime is critical during this period, alternative call processing is required.

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The Philippine call center industry grew in 2011, whereas many other industries can’t say they did. Why did call center do well? Simple – people realized that if you need something you need it. And if it’s genuinely useful to business, they’ll spend the money for it.

In fact, the country’s all-important call center industry saw growth of over 20 percent in 2011, on the back of health care and finance-related services expansions, according to industry journal BusinessWorld Online.

Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) Executive Director Jojo J. Uligan told BusinessWorld that an “upbeat outlook” for 2011 and 2012 is being retained, “given opportunities in English-speaking markets beyond the United States and a move toward knowledge-intensive services.”

That’s usually the terminology for seeking to expand into more Business Process Outsourcing services instead of simple call center work.

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01/26/12--08:20: Customer Brand Loyalty, Customer Advantage With Supply Chains, Manage Employee Social Networking, Analyzing Customer Speech (chan 2655953)

Yealink UK’s managing director, Andrew Roberts, credits the generally poor European economy’s performance-price ratios with how difficult it is to get telecoms and IT managers to commit to new capital expenditure.

In fact, Robert says, these days projects which were essentially rubber-stamped with little debate a few years ago now merit evaluation and scrutiny. As he says, even issues such as longstanding brand loyalty are coming under the green eyeshade exam -- “We’re paying more for this service why, exactly?” is heard far more frequently now.

As Roberts said recently, they’re looking to see if a big brand name really does add value or if they’re perhaps instead simply paying for a costly marketing and operational overhead.

...

In these economic times a good way to stand out from the herd of vendors and suppliers is to be “all things to all people,” as a recent blog post from appliance deployment provider NEI points out. In other words, if you can lead on cost, customer service and product innovation in supply chain management, well, that’s a heck of an advantage you’d have over your competition.

At the recent CSCMP conference in Philadelphia, NEI officials saw the 2011 Trends and Issues in Logistics and Transportation Study and gleaned three trends they see as becoming increasingly important in “customer-focused” supply chain management:

Segmented Supply Chains. No, this isn’t a new, novel concept, but NEI officials say the study shows that firms surveyed had “an average of more than three unique supply chains.” In fact, half of the 700 firms surveyed told researchers that they had “moved from a focused competitive strategy” to seeking to lead in a number of categories. And it’s probably no coincidence, as NEI officials point out, that firms adopting this approach had the highest average number of supply chains. NEI officials conclude that there’s a good chance, given the results, that “the various supply chains enable a company to focus on different strategies in different segments.”

...

Hosted VoIP company RealLinx offers services at a “low monthly price with our fully-managed SecurityLinx” product, promising that “your company will see ROI in the first month of deployment or we will gladly refund your money.”

The No. 1 feature of the product, at least as far as attractiveness goes, is that it promises to stop lost employee productivity to Facebook, Myspace, YouTube and other such sites.

It’s called “Work Internet Abuse,” company officials say, adding that it “is robbing your company of valuable time and money. An average of 25 to 30 percent of each employee's workday is spent surfing things that have nothing to do with work... When employees do not have the option to play, they work.”

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Great idea for a column from Call Center Helper: Ask six experts what the best return on investment is from implementing speech analytics in contact centers.

Reducing avoidable contact: As told by Craig Pumfrey, director of Marketing & Communications, NICE Systems EMEA, a service center project created search parameters to automatically “listen” for words and phrases in every inbound customer call that could be used during an avoidable contact, such as “parking fine” or “I called last week.” These interactions were then indexed and checked against the set parameters and wherever a match was found the call was flagged for the team to review the reason for the enquiry.

Deployment methods: According to Duncan White, managing director, horizon2, the potential of speech analytics is not being realized because the return on investment is generally not compelling enough. The main problem is that speech analytics is being promoted as a discrete technology within the contact center or customer operations environment rather than a strategic enabler at an organizational level.

Deployed in the right way, speech analytics should be used to re-engineer core processes such as quality management. Use speech analytics in a supporting role for organizational change.

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02/02/12--08:10: App Deployment and Customer Satisfaction, Recording Calls, IVR for IVR Haters, Virtualization Resolutions (chan 2655953)

It’s possible to get so fixated on the particulars of what we do in our business every day that we lose sight of the overall picture. For example, what business are you in? Hotels?
Telecommunications? Transportation? Computer applications and deployment? Voice over Internet Protocol? Selling anvils to coyotes? Mafia hit man?

Wrong. You’re in the customer satisfaction business. Appliance deployment professionals NEI know this, and a recent blog post was written to remind their industry colleagues that no matter what line of work you think you’re in, you’re in the business of pleasing customers and providing goods and services that are valued by other people enough to pay for more than once.

In the highly informative post, NEI’s President & CEO Greg Shortell wraps it all up under the headline of “The Experience.” It’s not just the product; it’s not just the service that you’re selling. A great VoIP phone system sold by rude sales people, delivered by indifferent contractors and installed by surly, uncommunicative technicians is a bad overall customer experience.

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Your faithful TMC Australasian correspondent checking in here from the TMC offices in Mangawhai, New Zealand. Turning our attention from Megaupload, another fine day in New Zealand tech history, to today’s topic:

Call Trunk lets you record any phone conversation you want. Great. Is that legal?

Writing for Gizmodo Australia industry observer Nick Broughall, who identifies himself as somebody who uses call recording on a professional basis from time to time, gives the basics of how Call Trunk works, which show why it’s such a useful little idea.

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How does one go about constructing an IVR system that can be used by people who don’t like IVR, whose needs aren’t met by IVR and who would rather talk to an actual person, preferably one with a reasonable command of the English language?

Simple: Design an IVR that knows when to gracefully bow out.

A precis on the IVR Deconstructed blog for a recent study by the University of Rochester and University of Illinois, titled “Robust Design and Control of Call Centers with Flexible IVR Systems,”
mentions that the study argues that “businesses don’t have to choose between cost savings and service quality anymore -- they can design flexible IVR systems that satisfy all customers.”

And the way to do this, it concludes, is by designing an IVR system that knows when to hand a customer off to a non-IVR system.

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Oh no, not another New Year’s Resolution guilt trip...yes, sorry, we have to do it. However, don’t worry about spending three hours in the gym every day; instead focus on this vital virtualization idea which consists of lowering energy costs with automation.

As a recent blog post from Carousel Connect shows, virtualization can help you save up to $36 per PC per year. That’s the estimated cost of each employee when they leave their computers and monitors on when leaving the office to go home for the night. With the right desktop power management, you can eliminate much, if not all of that.

Okay, 36 bucks doesn’t sound like a lot, but multiply that by the number of computers in your entire operation and it adds up to real money.

Tags: Related tags: customer satisfaction, business, system, customer, virtualization, deployment

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Sponsored by the Call Center Outsourcing Community & the Virtual Contact Center Outsourcing Community

02/02/12--08:15: IVR System Benefits, Collect Customer Info Fast, Cloud Predictive Dialers, Avoiding Customer Hell (chan 2655953)

Hey, take it from Snooozy, “The biggest benefit of the IVR system is how quickly an organization can collect information from a person.”

We don’t care what online handle he or she uses, that’s pretty good advice.

Snooozy has some other tidbits for you as well, in case you were wondering just what the advantages of IVR systems might be when it comes to collecting survey information. The fact that yes, it can get a boatload of information pretty quickly is up there, but there are others.

One is that, simply, it can be a critical part of a positive customer experience, and that’s old news -- way back in 2010, TMC noted a survey conducted by Alcatel-Lucent found that “three-quarters of 4,200 respondents said they would continue to business with a company with which they had a great contact center experience.”

In fact, half of all respondents told Alcatel-Lucent they’d dropped a company based on a poor contact center experience.

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Snooozy lists some other advantages of an IVR, besides the fact that it never gets sick, asks for a day off or alienates customers if it shows up to work in a sour mood.

“The biggest benefit of the IVR system is how quickly an organization can collect information from a person,” Snooozy notes, and yes, cost aside, this is the number one benefit of an IVR system for customer surveys: “Within two to five minutes after a service interaction is finished, an organization can have feedback from the clients that how their experience was with them and how they feel.”

And that quickly, an administrator can be data mining to see if there are any red flags in that conversation meriting a quick follow-up call to smooth over a problem or suggestive sell a product or service the customer sounds ready to buy.

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About a year ago TMC’s Linda Dobel wrote, “multi-site, multi-source contact centers have, at this point, come to appreciate the many benefits of transitioning to the cloud. Still, the biggest concern, and therefore the biggest hold back, is security.”

Things haven’t changed all that much between then and now. For hosted predictive dialers, that’s still a central issue; the common thinking is that, while cloud computing may be the big disruptor, if that disruption includes security concerns, count us out.

Paul Shread, editor-in-chief of the IT Business Edge Network, recently took issue with the concept that adopting cloud computing for a call center necessarily means a security tradeoff; that to get the benefits of cloud computing’s price, convenience and other goodies, you have to sacrifice your current comfort level of security.

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South Africa’s Hannes van der Merwe, Mitel product manager at Itec, recently said what most customer service professionals consider gospel truth -- customers really, really despise being abandoned to IVR and auto attendant “hell.”

"Many customers become frustrated when they get a long list of menu options to choose from when they call in to the contact center, and find themselves bounced around between an IVR and agents who can't help them," van der Merwe said. “The process of getting to the right agent should be as fast, simple and seamless as possible for the customer.”

Van der Merwe advocated ACD, or Automatic Call Distribution, as a way to offer salvation to customers yearning to find truth and meaning in their interactions with company support systems. The vast majority of customers ever have only two points of contact with a company, the product and the call center, and the vast majority of customers only ever use the call center when they have some issue with the product. Therefore, almost by definition, your call center is where your customer is either saved or eternally lost.

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02/07/12--05:26: Cloud CRM, Auto Attendant Voices, Email Customer Lists, Protecting Customer Passwords (chan 2655953)

“It's only very recently that the CRM ideal has been rendered realistic due to the advent of cloud-technology and the introduction of advanced CRM software,” writes The Independent, which defines CRM as “organizing interactions with customers, particularly sales transactions and client communication, using facilitating software.”

Cut those last three words off that sentence and it’s a fair definition. Adding anything about the tools one uses to interact with customers introduces a dangerous mindset that CRM is “about” the technology, not the needs and strategies which dictate the choice of technology.

You do not need software to do CRM correctly. Sure in most cases it really helps, but all software does is act as a tool to accomplish the job of CRM. It is not the CRM.

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This reporter suspects there’s quite the market for name-brand voices in the auto-attendant market -- Mel Gibson as William Wallace urging you to select one, two or three; Humphrey Bogart on a travel site would be particularly notable.

So how do the companies actually decide what voice to use? And why do they always seem to be female?

ABC News recently took a look at how Siri picked its voice. Siri isn’t an auto attendant, but the same considerations are used across all areas of voice recognition systems. And what ABC decided was that people like female voices.

And if you’ve noticed, Americans particularly fall for British-sounding women.

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Want to grow your email marketing list? Let’s rephrase that: Want to make more money?

The self-proclaimed “Marketing Sherpa” blogger, Adam T. Sutton, recently offered three ways to do just that.

“Yeah, sounds great,” you say, “but just expanding my email marketing list, I mean, other than the fact that it’s bigger?”

There are other advantages, as Sutton says, pointing out that new subscribers are a bit friskier than your old ones, they’re still exploring what you have. It’s not how big your email list is, really, it’s how new it is. And there’s no point in dropping older customers off the list, is there? Size matters, in the respect that it means you’re adding new customers. A huge, static list isn’t the idea here.

What you want is a list that’s big because it’s constantly growing, not because it got big at some point last year.

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You might be tired of hearing about password managers, but these are truly invaluable tools. And recently there was another high-profile password hack where this time the target was a database full of FTP passwords at Web hosting firm DreamHost. More like NightmareHost now, thanks to inadequate password management.

Password management is something that simply must be more important to many of you than it apparently is. At DreamHost, the hackers got the FTP credentials of all shared hosting accounts by accessing a legacy table “storing passwords in plain text,” according to industry observer Ericka Chickowski.

Noa Bar-Yosef, senior security strategist at Imperva, told Chickowski that the hackers got “customer credentials to the FTP server,” which means they can “use these credentials in order to impersonate customers when accessing the FTP server,” which leads to all sorts of mischief, such as accessing customer documents and the downloading and uploading of unauthorized documents.

Tags: Related tags: email marketing, password management, customers, email, password, software

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02/09/12--05:15: Cloud CRM and Forecasting, Bad Customer Silos, Videoconferencing, Email Marketing (chan 2655953)

You know, of course, that done correctly, sales forecasting can do Very Good Things for your business. But you want more than just “Oh it’ll be good, trust us.” How, exactly, does it help? After all, you’ve got a presentation to the CEO; you can’t go in with “It’ll be really cool.”

Soffront, which sells CRM, recently wrote a good blog post focusing in on just that very question -- what specific ways does sales forecasting help your business?

The basic idea behind forecasting is that it would be great to be able to see into the future. That way you’d know who wants to buy what when, and you could adjust your offerings, inventory, staffing and other factors accordingly, resulting in a minimum of waste and a maximum of profit.

Last October TMC’s Paula Bernier noted that Soffront’s CRM, in addition to being designed to help with sales forecasting, is also engineered to be less cumbersome than most CRM systems.

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A recent article posted by Enterprise Apps Today deals with a topic many companies are wrestling with these days, specifically how consumers want a consistent user experience across all channels from companies, and how that’s a real challenge for companies.

Basically what that means is that if a customer’s calls the contact center and deals with a rep there, the next e-mail they get from the company needs to reflect the fact that whoever sent the email from the company not only is aware of the phone conversation, but has acted on it.

What kills the ability to know a customer this completely is the departmental silo approach to data, as the EAT piece shows.

A customer has a problem with Acme Anvils, they go to the Facebook page, interact with someone, and assume that all of Acme Anvils is now aware of and dealing with the issue, when in fact, in far too many cases, what happens is the issue dies on the Facebook page, the Acme Anvils FB admin doesn’t kick the conversation around to the contact center or anybody else who needs to know about it.

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Why does business travel still exist when we have phones and e-mail? Because we all really, really enjoy airports and the wonderful customer service airlines give? Because everybody should experience the joys of Radisson hotels at some point in their lives? Because we just can’t stay away from all the charm that is Baltimore?

Oh that’s right -- face to face is always better. Well, except where the IT team’s involved. In that case speakerphones are your preferred option.

So if we’re talking about deals seven figures or above, or you can jump on a plane and the bean counters don’t complain too much, and the meetings in somewhere like Istanbul, and then okay, go for it. But you’d be surprised how much you can productively get done using video conferencing technology.

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Stewart Friedman has over 22 years experience in sales and marketing, so when he talks about the e-mail service provider industry, in which he’s owned and operated his own business and held several top-level positions, well, you probably want to listen.

And we’re in luck: He’s offering three golden tips on mobile e-mail marketing.

Watch your design. If you want responses from mobile e-mail, Friedman says, well; design your email for mobile viewing. All those heavy graphics look great on desktop or laptops, but mobile users detest them. Go big on the quick-loading text messages. Yeah, some graphics are okay; they’re fun in moderation and can be an integral part of the message.

But bear in mind all the hours of your life you’ve spent waiting for irrelevant graphics to load, and think to yourself “Am I delighting my customer when I inflict that on her?”

Tags: Related tags: sales forecasting, contact center, customer, forecasting, business, mobile

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02/14/12--05:48: TeleTech and Satmetrix in CEM Deal, IVR Auto Attendant, Women Car Customers, CRM at Cloud 2012 (chan 2655953)

This past week TMC’s Michelle Amodio noted that TeleTech and Sametrix, two well-known names in Customer Experience Management, have partnered to work on a beefed-up suite of CEM offerings.

As she wrote, TeleTech is now the only BPO provider using the Net Promoter approach to improve their CEM. The idea behind CEM is to take steps to both retain customers and increase profit margins associated with each customer.

"We've reached a tipping point in the customer revolution. Disruptive technologies have shifted the power to define a company's brand to the customer, therefore placing unprecedented urgency on the need for companies to update their outdated customer management strategy and technology," Amodio quoted Ken Tuchman, chairman and CEO of TeleTech as saying.

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Android has another front office assistant app, cleverly named the Front Office Assistant.

Consulting firm RIIS has announced the release of the app, which is intended to be a way for businesses to manage the auto attendant functions of their IVR system using an Android tablet, according to RIIS officials.

Describing the Android version, Godfrey Nolan, president of RIIS, said “BroadWorks’ tools help small and medium-sized businesses run more efficiently. But setting up and managing the IVR trees is a challenge for communication services administrators. The Front Office Assistant Android app combines the touch user experience and mobility of a tablet device to make deployment easier. It’s a good example of how tablet computing is moving from B-to-C use, to use in B-to-B enterprise applications.”

Company officials said the app has “simple drop-down menus and on/off controls,” useful for letting administrators provide callers with customized greetings, message options and “the ability to connect to specific people or transfer to other departments.” With the app users can set up PBX systems, company officials explained, and “create scenarios for call routing based on business hours, after hours, on weekends or holidays.”

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And this past week TMC’s Tracey Schelmetic wrote about the one area many women are uncomfortable as customers: buying a car. She noted that women frequently feel taken advantage of, patronized or swindled at car dealerships.

Evidently Delia Passi, former publisher of Working Woman magazine, is something of an authority when it comes to selling to women, and she’s compiled a list of, shall we say, “women-friendly” car dealerships in WomenCertified.

The listing is based on customer satisfaction surveys taken from women, Schelmetic said, adding that one commonality of highly-ranked dealerships seems to be having women on the staff at a dealership.

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Cloud computing is much more comfortable for most businesses these days, and as Susan J. Campbell noted recently, the upcoming 2012 Cloud Connect conference will emphasize working in the cloud, addressing the topic of relying on a solid cloud CRM for success.

To that end, the conference will look at, among other topics, Microsoft’s Azure cloud, which can “connect mainframe data with an integrated flight data in real time,” as Campbell wrote, using American Airlines and Cisco as examples of companies dealing with CRM offerings in the cloud.

The conference will also discuss open source code as it could relate to cloud CRM as an alternative for virtual networks.

Tags: Related tags: office assistant, company officials, cloud connect, cloud, women, customer

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02/16/12--07:09: Email Marketing Mistakes, SatuitCRM and Alpha, KeyBank Customer Satisfaction, CloudCRM (chan 2655953)

Email marketing is kind of like a souffle -- so effective and impressive when done correctly, but so easy to do wrong.

We don’t know how many ways there are to screw up a souffle, no doubt imaginative klutzes are coming up with more each day, but CustomerThink has done a good job listing five fairly common ways to lower the effectiveness of email marketing. Oh a fallen souffle is still edible, and you’ll get some response from your email marketing even if you’re committing some of these “facepalms,” as CustomerThink columnist Yo Noguchi calls them.

But you’re not using email marketing just to be passable, are you? No, we didn’t think so.

All right, then, if you’re committing any of the following sins stop immediately.

Emailing Without Permission. Goodness sakes, as long as we’ve been telling you not to do this and you’re still doing it? How often do you enjoy getting newsletters or other marketing materials you didn’t ask for? Believe it or not customers are human, too, just like you. Nobody likes it. Buying a list and hitting everybody on it is about the lowest, least-effective way of email campaigning, Noguchi recommends building a far more effective list via opt-in forms on websites, signup sheets and the like.

Read more here.

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TMC’s Jyothi Shanbhag wrote recently that Alpha Real Property Investment Advisors, a part of London based Alpha Real Capital, have deployed SatuitCRM as its single integrated business system for its new business development and marketing teams.

Russell Jarvis, Sales and Marketing Director for Alpha, said that they chose Satuit’sSaaS offering because it was designed by people from fund management backgrounds for fund management businesses.

Alpha officials pronounced themselves impressed with its ease of use, and the fact that the CRM functionality met company’s needs with little or no customization needed.

Read more here.

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TMC’s Anuradha Shukla has reported that KeyBank is tied for fifth in overall customer satisfaction in the J.D. Power and Associates 2011 Small Business Bank Satisfaction Study.

Headquartered in Cleveland, KeyBank provides deposit, lending, cash management and investment services to individuals and small businesses in 14 states. The company notes that this ranking is based on feedback from about 7,000 customers of the nation's largest financial institutions.

The study surveyed 24 financial institutions, ranking them on a range of factors including account manager, account activities, account information, fees, problem resolution, products offerings and facilities.

Read more here.

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And TMC’s Susan J. Campbell noted recently that “a majority of businesses have overcome the fear of operating daily in the cloud,” citing plans for the upcoming 2012 Cloud Connect conference which is “centered on working in the cloud, while last year’s conference was all about defining the cloud and what exactly it means.”

Businesses are now navigating their way through the challenges of building cloud-based applications and handling increased data, Campbell wrote, adding that “the ability to rely on a solid cloud CRM is crucial to success, and a number of speakers for the upcoming event plan to speak on the subject.”

Read more here.

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02/21/12--08:39: Tracking Customer Keywords, TeleTech and Satmetrix's CEM, Call Center Software Awarded (chan 2655953)

What many businesses want are completed sales. They aren’t really interested in how many clicks they get with online advertising, what they want to know is if there are any particular keywords that are leading to completed sales.

That’s where Calltracks.com sees an opportunity. As company founder and CEO, Stuart Buckley, noted recently, “measuring what converts and what does not is in my opinion the Holy Grail of call tracking, and indeed keyword tracking.”

To that end, then, Calltracks.com is offering a conversion attribution measurement software product, which company officials say can “track a phone call or keyword from first contact with a customer or client to a completed sale.”

Because this is the sort of information you really want to be able to put your hands on, isn’t it? What good are a million clicks or calls if they don’t generate sales? Buckley’s vision is to give businesses a way to more closely target their marketing spend on what are proven to be the more effective avenues in terms of closed sales, not simply vague expressions of interest.

Read more here.

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Michelle Amodio recently noted that two customer experience management sellers, TeleTech and Satmetrix, which sell BPO and CEM software respectively, reached an agreement whereby TeleTech’s CEM will include Satmetrix’s Net Promoter.

The idea behind CEM is, understandably enough, to help businesses create, acquire and retain customers, and find more profitabe ways to interact with them. TeleTech officials say that by incorporating the Net Promoter methodology in their offering, their clients will be able to improve that process.

CEM relies on a functional alignment among departments, and while technology isn’t a silver bullet for that, it must start with correct business processes and company priorities, the right technology is necessary.

Read more here.

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TMC named Harmony, a product of workforce optimization vendor KnoahSoft, a Customer Interaction Solutions 2011 Product of the Year Award winner.

According to the award citations, Knoahsoft Harmony is an IP-based product designed to let agents and supervisors collaborate: “Agents can review their own calls and evaluations to understand and improve their performance, while unique self-service tools enable lifestyle scheduling to increase agent satisfaction and reduce attrition.”

Ralph Barletta, President and Co-founder of KnoahSoft, said the company prides themselves on helping customers “exceed their customer interaction goals.”

Read more here.

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Also recently, Anuradha Shukla noted that seller Beyond the Arc is offering more Voice of the Customer products, using sentiment and text analytics software provider Clarabridge’s software, which can identify trends “across sources such as social media, public commentaries and regulatory filings, and identify areas of improvement for the customer experience,” as Shukla said.

Right now the product is pitched to financial service companies, to whom it’s being marketed as a way to help them understand their customers better and find out more of what they want. The emphasis is identifying things the company can do to sell more products and services to the customers.

This includes improving processes and tools for analyzing customer feedback, for starters, which anymore means being able to read social media, call center reports and online communications. The idea behind Beyond the Arc’s offerings is to help with just that.

Read more here.

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