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Happy New Year! Let's be counterintuitive for a moment, shall we? We're in a recession and we all know it. Traditionally (and sadly) in an economic downturn, when companies seek to lower their expenses, they cut their marketing budgets -- and why not? Marketing costs money.
When Bob Pinion and his son bought a small sports bar in Palatine last year, they hadn't counted on paying to have their electricity hooked up. So it was a bit of a shock when ComEd asked for a $2,850 deposit to get the power flowing. Pinion paid the money because he had no choice. But he eagerly awaited the day when he would get the deposit back.
E-commerce has certainly not been immune from the recession battering the U.S. economy, but for reasons that can only be guessed at, most of the leading e-tailers have not stepped up their efforts to retain customers by providing improved service, according to a recent customer satisfaction survey.
This summer, Bob Lyons was tapped to lead Avaya's contact center division. The new general manager and vice president of customer service applications joined the company at a crucial time. It was in the midst of reorganizing its operations around three business units: the contact center, unified communications, and small and mid-sized business applications.
You knew it was a bad time of year to go to that store, but you went in anyhow and you wished you hadn't. The lines were long and filled with grumps and kids, both way past nap time. You couldn't find anything because the place was a mess. The sound system was broken, and the same Christmas song was playing over and over and over till you thought you'd scream. You couldn't wait to get out of there.
The game has changed for retail. In an era of increasingly competitive online business, failing corporate giants and consumer fear over the state of the economy, it's clear that small online retailers will face an uphill battle over the next several months. The good news is, e-commerce may be the one bright light in an increasingly dismal world of retail, and there are steps retailers can take to improve profits online.
There is little doubt that these are increasingly uncertain times for managers. In 2008, U.S. businesses cut nearly 2 million jobs -- amounting to 11 straight months of shrinking payrolls -- and some economists predict that we could lose another 3 million jobs in the next two years. In the past four months, we've seen continued triple-digit fluctuations in the Dow.
First, the caller screamed about not receiving her unemployment check. Then, she began hurling F-bombs in a breathless barrage of profanities until claims rep Dale Whitman, unable to ascertain her problem or to quell her outburst, hung up. "I felt bad for her, but she wouldn't calm down and she had actually cheated her way in through the foreign-language line," said Whitman.
Two-thirds of online shoppers carry out Internet-based research about retailers before making a purchase, yet only half of retailers actually monitor their own reputation, according to new research by 1&1 Internet. The hosting firm surveyed over 1,500 consumers and over 400 companies and found that nearly half of UK shoppers read online reviews or recommendations about specific products before buying them.
Internet-scale data sets and Web-scale analytics have placed a different set of requirements on software infrastructure and data processing techniques. More types of companies and organizations are seeking new inferences and insights across a variety of massive data sets -- some into the petabyte scale.
Move over Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and make room for yet another retail-inspired shopping event. Free Shipping Day is here -- or rather, it will be here on Thursday, Dec. 18 -- the last day someone can order a gift online and have it guaranteed to arrive on Christmas Eve with free shipping.
Business software maker Oracle is scheduled to report its fiscal second-quarter results after the stock market closes Thursday. Oracle has been on a roll for several years as it snapped up dozens of its smaller rivals, but the Redwood Shores-based company will be hard pressed to keep the momentum going as more corporate customers curtail their spending on technology to weather the recession.
Customer satisfaction with their interaction with the call center is essential to overall success of the call center. The main purpose of the center is to provide customer support and if they cannot do that is a way that is satisfying to the customer, the whole organization suffers.
Have you ever answered one of those "how was our service?" questionnaires to let somebody know you weren't happy with the experience you'd had, and then never heard anything back from the business that asked? Or maybe this holiday season your boss asked where the staff wanted to go for the office party, only to have him pick his favorite spot regardless.
Nearly five years ago, I wrote a white paper that resonated around the industry like a three-point shot clanging off the front of the rim as time expired. A "brick," in the vernacular of basketball; nonetheless, I view it as some of my finest work. The paper, "The New Garage," takes as its premise that cloud computing and platforms would be the next big thing in our business.
The familiar social media paradigm of "Listen ... Learn ... Engage ... Earn" has a correlative imperative: "Publish or Perish," and enterprises probably need to find someone else to do the job for them. But be really careful about whom you select. I've covered the specifics of B2B digital media relations and social media marketing in previous articles.
Voice today is at center stage in the enterprise. Carrier Session Internet Protocol trunks, enterprise SIP trunks, converged IP networks, federating private branch exchanges, unified communications and communication-enabled applications are but a few of the many voice initiatives you'll find underway in any large enterprise today.
SugarCRM has released Sugar 5.2, which packages some existing Web 2.0 features with new technologies. The company is also introducing Cloud Services -- a framework for developers to build links to third-party data sources such as LinkedIn or JigSaw. In a way, SugarCRM has been a cloud company since its beginnings, said Martin Schneider, vice president of product marketing.
A clean, well-lighted menu board. Speakers that clearly coo "may I take your order?" And the biggie: speed without screw-ups. That is the gold standard for a fast-food drive-through, and McDonald's and its rivals have developed a science of sorts to try to meet it. Each year, the drive-through captures a little more of the fast-food industry's sales, so a smooth-running drive-through is a competitive advantage.
The holiday season has come to signify not only a time of celebration among family and friends -- it's also usually a period of joy for retailers. This year, however, the lagging economy threatens to dampen everyone's holiday spirit, and retailers who depend on a large holiday season sales boost should prepare for a much smaller increase.
Are cable "bundle" customers changing channels to wireless telecom services? A recent study by the CFI Group, which focuses on measuring customer satisfaction and CRM issues, indicates they are. That is, if they can. Some can't, either because the choice is unavailable, or they have signed the option away.
Many organizations spend months and endure significant costs to obtain the reporting and analysis capabilities that BI technology promises, only to find that different "versions of the truth" still exist without any definite way of determining which one is real or accurate. This raises the question: Is "One Version of the Truth" achievable?
We can all read the news. Credit is frozen, or nearly so, and the federal government is laboring mightily to get credit flowing again. Unfortunately, here in the U.S. as well as in other places like the UK, banks have become averse to doing business. The news reports I read say that after being too lax, many banks are being too strict in their lending policies and are sitting on the cash that governments have given them to lend.
Microsoft CRM operations are in full swing, and bloggers are sharing tips and information. Update Rollup 1 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is now available. No, it's not a new release -- but as with anything Microsoft, the cyber-community is talking about implementation do's and don'ts.
Despite the city's fiscal woes, Philadelphia's 3-1-1 nonemergency call center is on track to open by the end of the year. Still, Managing Director Camille Barnett said that some of the plans have been scaled back. "It's changed in the parameters, but we've kept the essence," Barnett said.
Bank card users should be cautious when using ATMs this holiday season. A sheriff's office fraud department in Georgia is investigating an ATM scam that netted two suspects $30,000. The two men were arrested at an ATM after using "skimmers" to tap into several bank card customer accounts.
For much of 2008, travelers flying American Airlines have grappled with some of the poorest service in the airline industry. The Fort Worth, Texas-based carrier has been at or near the bottom of a variety of quality rankings, including on-time performance, cancellations, lost luggage and overall customer service. However, the beleaguered airline appears to be improving.
I have in my hot little hand a two-page handout that I got at the recently concluded Dreamforce 2008 event in San Francisco. With all the excitement about the election and the economy, as well as this day job I have, I had not really taken the time to peruse it. A quick glance a couple of weeks ago told me that the company had added a new color -- blue -- to its logo, but closer inspection reveals that it isn't just the color.
Marketers often ignore a critical measurement -- customer attitudes and emotions -- when examining customer behavior. This critical measurement can hold the key to insights that can drive the best kind of marketing -- presenting the right message and offer to the right people at the right time.
In spite of the rocky economy, customer satisfaction as measured by the University of Michigan had a modest 0.1 percent drop in the third quarter. The American Customer Service Satisfaction Index now has a score of 75 on a 100-point scale for the nondurable goods sector, which includes apparel, athletic shoes, breweries, cigarettes, food manufacturing, pet food, personal care and cleaning products and soft drinks.
President-elect Barack Obama may not find it that hard to give up his BlackBerry after all. Verizon Wireless has announced that some of its employees accessed his personal cell phone account records. The wireless provider apologized to the president-elect and said it would discipline the employees involved.
The joke used to be on the U.S. Postal Service. Indeed, jabs about the government's mail system may have driven business to private-sector competitors like United Parcel Service, Federal Express and DHL. That was decades ago; now, it seems, some of the same companies designed to outperform the USPS have attracted complaints about sluggish deliveries and failure to deliver.
At its annual Dreamforce event, Salesforce.com and several of its partners -- Facebook, Google and Amazon -- made announcements intended to encourage more businesses to pursue Web-as-a-platform using their Force.com business process platform. Taking away significant amounts of hype, there were three themes for the conference.
It was just a matter of time before businesses started to respond to the financial meltdown with some creativity, and as usual, the biggest advantages will go to the early movers. I have been noodling on several convergent ideas recently, and they seem to be taking shape in the marketplace, but in some quarters where you might not expect innovation or creativity. Exhibit one is the return of layaway in retail.
Jeff Stiefler, Chairman of TouchCommerce, is a former president of American Express and CEO of IDS Financial Services. He also was the CEO of banking outsourcer Digital Insight, now part of Intuit. Stiefler spoke recently with ECT News Network interviewer Blake Glenn about technology and the economy.
What mistakes will cause emergency communication systems to undergo excessive stress or possibly fail in a disaster, and what steps should be taken to improve performance? One of the biggest challenges for emergency communication centers is the wide range of situations that require responses.
Online shoppers looking to save a few bucks have plenty of options this holiday season. Those looking to save on shipping costs in particular might find themselves at FreeShipping.org, a new Web site that lists free shipping deals for hundreds of retailers. "We noticed how many retailers were offering free shipping, and that shoppers were wanting it," said Luke Knowles, cofounder of the company.
Folks in IT tend to ask a lot of questions. We're a curious breed by nature. In fact, we have to be. Change comes about so quickly in our industry, technology moves so fast, and our businesses adapt so fluidly that we have to ask questions just to keep up. Some might even say that a healthy curiosity is the hallmark of a successful IT professional -- and I wouldn't disagree.
When you encounter a phrase like "workforce optimization," it's understandable if your first impulse is to dismiss the term. The idea of optimizing something as abstract as a workforce seems to come from a mindset that perceives call center agents only as units of labor. But in practice, we don't aim to optimize agents.
Sears Holdings is bringing layaway back to its namesake stores next week, nearly two decades after it was scrapped, after seeing a strong response to the pay-as-you-go plan at its Kmart locations. The move comes as shoppers look for ways to save money during what's expected to be the worst holiday shopping season in decades.
