Voice of the Customer

TMCnet - The World's Largest Communications and Technology Community
New Coverage :  Asterisk  |  Call Center Outsourcing  |  Call Recording  |  SIP Trunking  |  Hosted Exchange  |  PBX
Webinars
Channels by Topic
Share
 
| More
RSS-XML alerts
Print this page
E-mail this page to a friend
Voice of the Customer Featured Article Archive

[May 06, 2006]

First Coffee for 6 May 2006: Sobering RFID Stats, CRM and ERP Combined in Complete Solutions DG, S1 Corp's Contact Center MISER, Firstwave and Galactus IPA

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Neil Young’s version of “All Along the Watchtower,” one of Bobby Zimmerman’s more covered songs:

Firstwave Technologies, Inc., a web-based CRM vendor, has announced that it has completed an Intellectual Property Assignment Agreement with Galactus Software LLP that will expand the use of the .Net Integrated Development Environment that Firstwave developed to use in writing applications for the CRM Market.

Richard Brock, CEO of Firstwave said that under the terms of the agreement, Firstwave will have exclusive rights to continue to use the IDE in the CRM Market, and Galactus “intends to take it to a much broader market. Both companies are expected to benefit from the potential exchange of future enhancements to this technology.”

Brock said Firstwave is moving away from developing tools such as the IDE and toward building applications in markets “where we can gain competitive advantage.”

Since Galactus agrees that the rights granted in this agreement will not diminish any rights granted to First Sports International or M1 Global in the agreements we reached with them, and agrees that we can still use the IDE without restriction to develop our CRM applications, “we expect this to be a win-win for Galactus, Firstwave, our customers, and our partners,” said Brock.

For his part, Greg Lenox, President and CEO of Galactus said for them, the strategic value of the IDE “can’t be overstated.” Lenox is expecting the IDE to help expedite their time- to-market and “provide thought leadership products for our clients because of the IDE’s superior functionality, unique capabilities, and ease of use through the drag-and-drop application development engine.”

Galactus Software is based in Cape Coral, Florida and works in platform conversion. Basically they take proprietary, home- grown or legacy applications based on closed or outdated platforms and converts them to more open technologies, such as C# and Java, “with a touch of a button.”
…

S1 Corporation, a vendor of customer interaction software products for financial and payment services, has introduced S1 Marketing Center for MISER, a software tool that company officials say helps financial institutions to improve cross selling in all channels.

The new product is a new component of S1’s Full Service Banking Application for MISER branch software and is integrated with the Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. MISER core processing system.

S1 Marketing Center for MISER profiles an institution’s customers, segments them according to a user’s qualification criteria for a particular promotion, and identifies cross-selling opportunities at the time of service for tellers and customer service representatives.

“Now MISER users can be much more proactive and effective in cross selling to existing customers,” said Matt Hale, group president of S1 Corporation. “S1 Marketing Center for MISER helps to segment those customers who are most likely to buy. Knowing who is in the target group gives users the freedom to make offers without fear of soliciting customers who have the product or declined the offer, ultimately improving the customer experience.”

Users of S1 Marketing Center for MISER can define appropriate cross- selling responses for teller, account service, contact center and Internet channels. Using previously built profiles and selection of targeted customers, the tool delivers cross-selling prompts only when a transaction or contact session is occurring with a qualified customer. Offers can be restricted to specific channels or directed to all channels.

Customer responses to an offer are tracked by employee. Goals, sales results and referrals can be tracked by cost center, employee and channel. The system was developed in conjunction with MISER-S1 customers and has had comprehensive pre-release field testing with them.

In addition, the tool’s reports help management to identify effective cross sellers who can help train other employees.
…

Latin America’s contact centers have proved “slow to adopt IP telephony,” according to research by US call center software provider Genesys.

Industry journal BNAmericas reports that research shows that only 15 percent of Latin American respondents had adopted IP technology, compared to 25 percent in the Asia Pacific region and 19 percent in Europe, Middle East and Africa, the statement said.

Globally 60 percent of interviewees plan to migrate to IP telephony within a year, BNAmericas says, “whilst 82 percent will organize the change within two years, according to the research. In the transition period, the majority of technology managers will adopt hybrid systems, the statement said.”

“We hope for strong growth in [IP telephony] by the year-end,” said Laurent Delache, director of operations at Genesys’ Brazilian unit.

The research polled 500 contact center technology managers in 20 sectors globally.
…

Kate Palmer reports from Auckland that New Zealand CRM heavyweight Complete Solutions has merged with ERP specialist Datagroup, the new company is Complete Solutions DG and they’re just rarin’ to “take advantage of growth in the integration of CRM (customer relationship management) and ERP (enterprise resource planning),” according to John Biggs, founder of Complete Solutions and CEO of the new entity.

Having successfully retained all staff through the transition, Biggs tells Palmer that Complete Solutions DG effectively doubles the number of Microsoft Dynamic SL-certified consultants available to clients.

He also believes that the merger “gives reassurance to existing customers,” in Palmer’s words, about the longevity of the company:

“A lot of it is in how you address a merger. From my view it is two companies coming together and the challenge for us is to get a culture going,” he tells Palmer. “We have to retain the loyalty of our staff and customers but I don’t see that as a hassle. This allows us to go vertical with some of the offerings we have and we can continue to build on the skill level and knowledge of these technologies.”
…

Sobering stats for the RFID industry: the June 2006 issue of Consumer Reports has found the RFID industry “lacking in the necessary measures to strengthen tag security against identity thieves.”

During their investigation, Consumer Reports found consumers are barely aware of RFID technology, yet its use is exploding, with sales of an estimated 1.3 billion tags this year.

While RFID tags are currently being used in credit cards, prescription-medicine packaging, computer equipment, TVs, clothing, cell phones, and the workplace, they’ll. Soon the tags will be embedded in tires for safety recalls.

The U.S. government has begun issuing new e-Passports, which contain an RFID chip in the back cover. The chip in the e-Passport will have enough memory to add fingerprints or iris patterns in addition to basic data already in the passport, but the potential for snooping has increased dramatically. Security experts in the U.S. and abroad have cracked payment devices and chips implanted in humans.

In an effort to patch up privacy protections, at least seven states are considering RFID bills of varying quality. But the RFID industry has mounted a subtle PR campaign to fend off consumer and government objections and to forestall government regulation.

The report appears in the June 2006 issue of Consumer Reports which goes on sale May 9th and is also available online at http://www.ConsumerReports.org .

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.

[ Back To Voice of the Customer Community's Homepage ]
› Return to Voice of the Customer Home

FOLLOW US

FREE Voice of the Customer eNewsletter

Subscribe Now

Featured White Papers

  • Seven Best Practices for Speech Analytics: Speech analytics is valuable for identifying issues in the contact center. However, limiting its use to the contact center only considers a portion of all customer interactions and subsequently only reveals a small part of the voice of the customer. This paper discusses how organizations can optimize their Speech Analytics implementation strategy to realize the promise of this exciting technology.
  • Understanding the Voice of the Customer: Today's contact centers involve a sea of information that must be captured, processed, and distributed on a daily basis. Effective use of this information enables companies to remain competitive in an increasingly aggressive and customer centric marketplace. An overwhelming percentage of the information that circulates in a contact center's audio recordings, documents, web pages, and emails is unstructured in that it resides outside of a normal structured database and cannot be managed efficiently. These unstructured items contain valuable information, yet this information historically has been difficult to organize, categorize, and access.
View All ›

Case Studies

  • Aflac: Aflac, the leading provider of guaranteed-renewable insurance turned to Autonomy to help them automate the process of monitoring their contact center agent for quality and compliance. The company now has a system that can offer continued improvement in agent quality and productivity while enhancing the customer experience. ...
  • Avaya: Avaya, a global leader in business communications, inherited 880 websites as well as numerous intranets and extranets when it was spun off from Lucent Technologies. The sheer volume and diversity of the sites and the over 500 content creators resulted in inefficient content distribution rife with divergent branding, messaging, and product information. ...
View All ›

Video Showcase

    Interview with Autonomy: Rich Tehrani interviews Simon Hayhurst, SVP of Autonomy

Featured Events

  • Multichannel Analytics with Autonomy Explore: In today's world of constant connectivity there are a variety of direct and indirect channels of communication between an enterprise (or a brand) and its customers. 80% of these valuable interactions are generated in a human-friendly, unstructured format across multiple touchpoints and channels. With this ever growing mountain of information how do you extract the emerging trends and topics of interest to the enterprise? ...
  • SES Chicago 2011: Marketers and SEO professionals attend SES Chicago each year to network and learn about topics such as PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more. The conference offers 70+ sessions, intensive training workshops, and an expo floor packed with companies that can help you grow your business. While you're at it, network with peers and leading industry vendors. Programmed by the SES advisory board, you can be assured - SES content really is king! ...
View All ›
 
Share
 
| More
RSS-XML alerts
Print this page
E-mail this page to a friend