I'm preparing for a webcast on February 7th, "Raising the Bar for Remote IT Support: Reach More Users, More Often," to discuss the expanding reach of remote support. The sponsor for the webcast is LogMeIn, and we are talking about how remote support technology has moved way beyond desktop computers. This also points out a key selection criteria when shopping for remote support software: be sure that the solution you choose offers as much flexibility for supported platforms and devices as possible.
Standard remote control for desktops running Windows has been around for more than a decade, and while MS Windows continues to own the lion's share of the market there are other platforms to consider.
Continue reading "The Expanding Reach of Remote Support"
If you were to ask me which industry to avoid these days, I'd likely say financial services (FS). A slow down in purchases has been named as the reason behind quarterly earning disappointments for a while now. But as I learned last week, support technologies with a clear ROI are still selling within the FS industry, and it appears that consumer banking, in particular, is investing in multi-channel support automation as a way to cut costs and increase service levels.
Last week I had the opportunity to spend a day at a Talisma event, including presentations from two customers: Richard Searle, head of electronic channels for Nationwide UK; and James McGuire, vice-president, Online Strategy and Client Experience, Royal Bank of Canada. Fantastic content. Consumer banks are under great pressure to move more interactions to online banking, deflecting live agent interactions to cut costs. But since the FS industry understands loyalty and churn propensity, they are darned sure going to capture every interaction, regardless of channel, and monitor customer behavior to be sure the customer experience doesn't suffer.
Continue reading "Despite mortgage crisis, Talisma finds success in Financial Services"
I've been preparing for an upcoming Webcast with Bomgar (January 24th, stay tune for registration info) entitled "The ITIL Imperative." ITIL, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is a library of best practices for all phases of IT operations, including books on service delivery and service management. ITIL grew out of a UK government project in the 80s, and found huge popularity with the North American IT service desk/help desk community over the last 5-7 years. I admit I haven't always been a huge ITIL fan, having once said "the emperor is scantily clad" in a Forrester Trends report. My issues with ITIL at that time were:
Yes, ultimately, I think that they will.
I just wrote up my 2008 Web Self-Service trends (to be published later this week), and I am now becoming convinced that Wikis are the new knowledgebase (KB):
"Though discussion forums dominated the Web 2.0 conversation in 2007, look for wikis to grab some of the spotlight in 2008. This easy to access, search and edit ?living document? is a logical replacement for the maintenance-intensive traditional knowledgebase. A key new process for 2008: identify ?best practices? as they emerge in discussion forums and migrate them to the wiki library."
Continue reading "Will Wikis replace the traditional KB for Web self-service?"
I'm working on my top trends for 2007/2008, to be published next week, and one of the trends is definitely embedded analytics. Over the last decade, enterprise software has done a great job of capturing details about every customer interaction--information that previously was lost to the ether. However, now companies are realizing they have this huge store of information and no way to leverage it. I hear horror stories of support management having to keep a staff of 6-10 programmers on staff just to analyze the data and look for something meaningful.
This is quickly changing. As I've written about previously, enterprise software vendors have been acquiring standalone analytics/business intelligence vendors to embed in their suites, offering business-user targeted real-time analytics reporting created for specific business roles and problems. Outside of core CRM and ERP, this trend is also happening in contact center applications, with Verint acquiring Witness to bring together 'best of breed' workforce management (WFM) and quality monitoring (QM) on a core analytics platform. And today another announcement that further proves this trend: Genesys, with 4,000 customers for contact center software, has acquired Informiam, an Atlanta-based vendor of realtime "Business Performance Management" tools.
Continue reading "Genesys Acquires Informiam: Embedded Analytics Trend Continues"
When I launched Ragsdale's Eye on Service back in February, one of the first posts was about the merger of two leaders in quality monitoring, Verint and Witness Systems. Ten months later, after the initial announcement and subsequent merger close, that remains one of the most frequently read posts on my blog. So consider this an update, because clearly the SSPA community (and the support community at large) is interested in this market--technology that is so critical to improving the customer experience.
Heaven knows there have been many, many acquisitions this year, and frankly, the new combined entities are typically slow in delivering value. I'm happy to say that Verint is definitely not one of those, because this week they already launched the first new product combining the 'best of breed' components of Witness quality monitoring (QM) and workforce management (WFM) and Verint ULTRA analytics/business intelligence on a new platform. Having a unified suite this soon after a merger/acquisition not only shows that the transaction was well planned out as far as product roadmap, but it also proves that the work both vendors have done in previous years to move to standards-based architectures has paid off.
Continue reading "6 Months After Merger Closes, Verint/Witness Delivers New Converged Platform"
The SSPA Research 'topic of the month' for November was web collaboration, and when I surveyed members to see what they wanted me to write about I expected Web chat to be the top vote getter, but turned out "Leveraging Web 2.0 to Improve Collaboration With and Among Customers" was the most popular choice. I just published a report on this topic, and thought since it was a Web 2.0 topic I should recap a truncated version here.
With many companies launching ?voice of the customer? initiatives, input from customers is becoming more sought after than ever before. As support organization push towards Value-Added Support, direct input from customers is critical to delivering service offerings and products that not only fit customer needs, but help deliver more business value and better enable customer success. But capturing customer feedback isn?t always easy, and relying on surveys as the only mechanism to gather input will soon exhaust the patience of some customers. Finding new ways to collaborate with customers, and encourage peer-to-peer customer collaboration, is a good strategy to collect the necessary input, as well as build stronger relationships with customers overall.
Continue reading "Leveraging Web 2.0 to Improve Collaboration With and Among Customers"
RightNow Technologies announced their latest version this week, RightNow November '07 (also debuting their new naming strategy for quarterly releases). The release, which went GA last week and had been in beta for a while--there were customer testimonials at their August customer summit--has three significant additions: expanded language support, a redesigned customer portal, and a very cool knowledge syndication widget.
Continue reading "What's cool in the RightNow November '07 release: knowledge syndication widget"
Boy, it sure is a good time to own stock in providers of business intelligence/analytics software. Talk about mega-trends. As SSPA members have been very vocal about, companies have spent 10 years creating huge data stores of customer information, but can't leverage it to do anything. The big enterprise application vendors recognized this and began acquiring standalone BI vendors to bring a needed dose of business intelligence to their transaction-heavy application suites.
Let's look at some of the major acquisitions along the way:
Continue reading "IBM's acquistion of Cognos is good news for niche BI vendors"
I'm always on the lookout for things that happen in my daily life that have applicability to service and support, and there's an idea that has been occurring to me every morning when I read the paper and today I decided to bring that idea to you. As much as I have written about evolving support operations to meet the requirements of new customers, such as embracing customer forums and non-phone channels, this doesn't mean abandoning the support processes that your existing customers have come to expect. In other words, doing new things doesn't mean you have to abandon everything that has worked in the past. If you do, you run the risk of alienating your existing customer base and giving them reason to churn.
Continue reading "Meeting the needs of new customers doesn't mean abandoning your old ones"
