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RightNow Delivers First Customer Experience Cloud Platform
RightNow has unveiled the first customer experience cloud platform, RightNow CX Cloud Platform, making it possible for organizations to create, extend and integrate mission-critical customer experience solutions in the cloud. The new RightNow App Builder opens up the RightNow platform, allowing RightNow clients and partners to create new customer experience applications natively within the RightNow suite and extend RightNow CX to incorporate client- and industry-specific business processes. For example, adding a new service channel such as in-game help, building desktop extensions such as an order processing component, or creating industry-specific workflows and applications to tailor RightNow CX for specific vertical markets.
Infor Introduces Family of Intelligent, Decision-Making Software Modules
Infor announced its Advisor family of decision-making modules built upon its successful Infor CRM Epiphany Interaction Advisor software. The first module, Infor CRM Epiphany E-mail Advisor, enables marketers to drive incremental revenue and improve customer retention and loyalty with dynamic, intelligent e-mails that leverage customer information and behavior patterns. E-mail Advisor is at the forefront of e-mail marketing by determining which customer attributes are most predictive of offer acceptance and automatically adjusting targeting for all successive e-mails, including successive openings of the same e-mail accordingly.
DemandTec Deploys More nextGEN Capabilities
DemandTec, Inc., a provider of predictive merchandising, marketing, trade, and shopper analytics solutions, announced that the latest release of its software-as-a-service suite has been deployed and is in use by existing customers. This latest software update delivers several marquee enhancements enabling retailers and consumer products companies to take action on urgent pricing decisions more quickly, take a more localized approach to promotional display space decisions, and reap the benefits of more intuitive shopper insights dashboards.
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Customer Support Megatrends and Next Practices: 2010 Update
As mobility, online communities and social networks collide with globalization, support organizations find themselves in the eye of the storm. They are buffeted by powerful winds of change, increased expectations from CxO's and the imperative to build competitive advantage through all-channel customer support. Updated in 2010, this white paper discusses the eight megatrends transforming customer support organizations today, and best practices to make the most of the unique opportunities each megatrend presents.
DOWNLOAD the white paper now!
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| New Research Shows Nearly Four out of Five Clients Have Had Internal Discussions About Cloud Computing
TPI, a sourcing data and advisory firm, has released a new TPI Research report on corporate IT decision-makers' plans for Cloud Computing in the immediate future. Among the findings, 78 percent of clients indicated they have had internal discussions about Cloud Computing.
TPI recently surveyed more than 140 corporate IT decision-makers globally for their perspectives on Cloud Computing and where it fits into their service delivery strategies. The results indicate large corporations are interested in Cloud Computing because it offers a myriad of benefits without the exhaustive capital investments and resource-consuming projects characterizing the last four decades of corporate computing, not to mention the promise of cost reduction and nimbleness often discussed yet rarely achieved.
For small and mid-sized companies, Cloud Computing offers the promise of robust and highly scalable computing solutions nearly equal to those available to their much larger competitors, but without the same level of investment.
Yet Cloud Computing also poses risks. The TPI Research found that five concerns consistently arise in corporations' discussions about migrating business services to the Cloud:
- 79 percent of respondents say data security is inadequate or unclear
- 50 percent fear non-compliance with regulatory requirements
- 50 percent fear business continuity or disaster recovery issues
- 49 percent are concerned about integrating Cloud solutions with legacy systems
- 49 percent are concerned that others may gain access to company data
These risks have caused many companies to focus their initial embrace on more secure private Clouds, particularly since they do not know who can currently protect their data and consistently deliver service to meet the high expectations of their business customers.
More...
Study Finds Twitter Users Three Times More Likely to Impact Brands Online
A new study released by ExactTarget finds consumers active on Twitter are three times more likely to impact a brand's online reputation through syndicated Tweets, blog posts, articles and product reviews than the average consumer.
The survey of more than 1,500 consumers identifies top motivations for following brands on Twitter and provides new insight into consumers' expectations for interacting with brands online.
Key findings of the research include:
- Twitter users are the most influential online consumers -- 72 percent publish blog posts at least monthly, 70 percent comment on blogs, 61 percent write at least one product review monthly and 61 percent comment on news sites.
- Daily Twitter users are 6 times more likely to publish articles, five times more likely to post blogs, seven times more likely to post to Wikis and three times more likely to post product reviews at least monthly compared to non-Twitter users.
- 23 percent of online consumers read Twitter updates at least monthly.
- 11 percent of online consumers read Twitter updates, but do not have a Twitter account themselves.
- 20 percent of consumers indicate they have followed a brand in order to interact with the company – more than become email subscribers or Facebook fans for the sake of interaction.
- Men are more than twice as likely as women to follow brands on Twitter to interact with the company (29 percent compared to 13 percent).
- Nine out of the 10 most common motivations for consumers to follow a brand on Twitter involve consumers seeking information from a company.
More...
What Americans Do Online: Social Media And Games Dominate Activity
Americans spend nearly a quarter of their time online on social networking sites and blogs, up from 15.8 percent just a year ago (43 percent increase) according to new research released from The Nielsen Company. The research revealed that Americans spend a third their online time (36 percent) communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging.
Additional findings include:
- Online games overtook personal email to become the second most heavily used activity behind social networks -- accounting for 10 percent of all U.S. Internet time. Email dropped from 11.5 percent of time to 8.3 percent.
- Of the most heavily-used sectors, videos/movies was the only other to experience a significant growth in share of U.S. activity online. Its share of activity grew relatively by 12 percent from 3.5 to 3.9 percent. June 2010 was a major milestone for U.S. online video as the number of videos streamed passed the 10 billion mark. The average American consumer streaming online video spent 3 hours 15 minutes doing so during the month.
- Despite some predictions otherwise, the rise of social networking hasn't pushed email and instant messaging into obscurity just yet. Although both saw double-digit declines in share of time, email remains as the third heaviest activity online (8.3 percent share of time) while instant messaging is fifth, accounting for four percent of Americans online time.
- Although the major portals also experienced a double digit decline in share, they remained as the fourth heaviest activity, accounting for 4.4 percent of U.S. time online.
The way U.S. consumers spend their Internet time on their mobile phones paints a slightly different picture to that of Internet use from computers. In a Nielsen survey of mobile web users, there is a double-digit (28 percent) rise in the prevalence of social networking behavior, but the dominance of email activity on mobile devices continue with an increase from 37.4 percent to 41.6 percent of U.S. mobile Internet time.
Portals remain as the second heaviest activity on mobile Internet (11.6 percent share of time), despite their double digit decline and social networking's rise to account for 10.5 percent share means the gap is much smaller than a year ago (14.3 percent vs. 8.3 percent).
More...
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| Five mistakes to avoid when implementing self-service CRM
Many customer support organizations consider self-service CRM to be a promising strategy for reducing the costs of customer service. Unfortunately for those organizations, self-service CRM doesn't often meet those expectations. Investing in self-service technologies primarily to save money is one of the common mistakes that companies make, industry experts say. Here are five pitfalls to avoid when launching a customer self-service software project.
Full Article...
Brand Building, Beyond Marketing
Consumers are becoming more suspicious of traditional branding, and many enlightened organizations are moving branding away from communications and toward strategy, culture, and wider stakeholder involvement. These organizations understand that brand building is a participative process involving the whole organization and is the responsibility of all employees. Following their examples, here are five steps to regain consumers' trust.
Full Article...
How to Improve Your CRM Lead Tracking
In almost any CRM system, there's a field in the leads object that indicates the source of the lead. In most systems, that lead source field is carried along as the lead is converted to a contact and an opportunity. Clean -- simple -- and wrong. The reason? People and businesses don't buy because of one ad, or one Web site view, or one whitepaper.
Full Article...
Doctoring the Customer Experience
There's movement toward a new customer service norm even in the hallowed halls of finance. Hey, come sit a spell, bring your dog, have a specialty coffee -- or a hot dog on us -- get comfy, use our computers and yes, spend, spend, spend! It's CEM -- a process wherein businesses intently study the entire customer experience from start to finish and over every channel.
Full Article...
3 Trends That Will Shape CRM Evolution in the Year to Come
Many businesses are reluctant to take the social CRM leap without the ability to measure its impact on their revenues and ROI. This hesitancy is giving the analytics side of the equation a chance to catch up. It doesn't hurt that some of the significant voices in the space are strongly advocating the development of a coherent approach to analyzing social CRM data as part of your initial social CRM strategy.
Full Article...
What Is Customer Opinion Good For?
Is it my imagination, or is marketing research and interest in customer views on anything of importance on the wane? The thought was triggered by Steve Jobs' initial response to reports that customers were having trouble with the antennae on Apple's iPhone 4, its latest "superproduct." It was reported that he commented that iPhone 4 users would have to learn not to hold the phone by its lower left-hand corner, precisely the way many of us seem to grasp it naturally. Apparently, the thinking is: Who needs customers' opinions or reactions when you can come with ideas and products like these?
Full Article...
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 Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd
by Youngme Moon
If there is one strain of conventional wisdom pervading every company in every industry, it's the absolute importance of "competing like crazy." Youngme Moon's message is simply "Get off this treadmill that's taking you nowhere. Going tit for tat and adding features, augmentations, and gimmicks to beat the competition has the perverse result of making you like everyone else." Different provides a highly original perspective on what it means to offer something that is meaningfully different -- different in a manner that is both fundamental and comprehensive
For more information, or to order your copy...
You can find more industry sepcific books at our web site:
http://www.crmindustry.com/
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Free Research on the Service and Support Industry
Are you looking for the latest research available (for free!) on the service and support industry? Then check out the research section of SupportIndustry.com. Some of the current offerings available to members are:
- Research Insight: Average Speed to Answer, Wait Time and Handle Time
- 2010 Service and Leadership Trends in Customer Support
- Research Insight: Effectively Measuring Customer Loyalty
- Research Insight: Cost Per Contact (Phone & E-Mail)
- Research Insight: First Contact Resolution
- 2009 Service and Support Metrics Survey
All of these reports can be accessed by clicking here...
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