Customers

When designing a Web page, where exactly should one place the icon to let the consumer know Live Chat is available? On the home page? In the service section? Should that icon be flashing? What color should it be? Believe or not, a group of executives spent at least half an hour of earnest conversati...

Governments are turning to private sector techniques -- namely benchmarking -- to ensure that their back-office processes meet industry performance standards, according to a new study by Accenture. The resulting savings are, at least in theory, being applied to constituent-facing processes. "We know...

Trying to get your hands around organizational change is a difficult challenge for most companies, but it is even more daunting when you are trying to identify the needs of employees that support multiple product lines and span numerous geographic locations. Today, Web-based surveys continue to tak...

ATG continues to build out its e-commerce platform -- an area into which it has been pouring resources for the last two years -- with the introduction of three separate but related sets of e-functionality. These include new navigation or search capabilities for users that ATG calls "searchandising,...

In buying a U.S. company, liabilities do not cease once a seller has completed a deal. The allocation of liabilities is usually determined in the acquisition agreement. Acquisition agreements are described in the previous article in this series. The role of indemnifications in mergers and acquisi...

Business intelligence applications have always delighted company executives -- at least as they watched simulated exercises on a sales rep's laptop. Real-world execution, though? Until recently, that has left much to be desired. To be sure, it is not entirely the fault of the vendor. Earlier generat...

Walk into a typical command center and what do you see? A wall or desktop filled with multiple screens reporting statistics from a number of disparate systems. Details from a leading-edge workforce management solution are prominently displayed on one screen, stats from the ACD are on another monitor...

Sprint had a problem ubiquitous to all retailers: a percentage of customers unhappy with its products and services. However, for Sprint -- one of the nation's largest wireless telecom providers with a complex supply chain that touches upon numerous and overlapping related customer service processes ...

There are a few challenges facing the North American customer care outsourcing industry that may dampen growth in the coming years, according to a new Frost & Sullivan report that projects earned revenues to reach US$20.1 billion in 2012 from $19.5 billion in 2005. These predictions are intentio...

While enterprise PBX product lines continue to register the highest level of growth in the telephony market, newly emerging trends will eventually realign use and deployment patterns, according to a survey conducted by market researcher Dell'Oro Group. These include a shift to hybrid systems and a n...

Oracle has acquired Telephony@Work, an on-demand provider of IP-based software infrastructure for hosted contact center services. Telephony@Work provided much of the functionality in Oracle's OnDemand Contact Center application via an OEM deal the company had with Siebel, which Oracle has since acqu...

RightNow Technologies has introduced two new voice applications that provide contact center agents with enough identifying information about the customer to eliminate the need to repeat information when a call is transferred to a new agent. The new functionality addresses a long-standing customer c...

In many companies, marketing is experiencing a resurgence and new relevance, a rejuvenation if you will towards aligning closer to customers than ever before. What's most encouraging about this is the fact that strategies based on dated cause-and-effect relationships with clients are, through the u...

A new report shows that government agencies are "reinventing" themselves with online customer service. The study indicates that the Internet is thus "redefining" the relationship between citizens and their governments, as government agencies around the world adopt digital applications, from allowing...

In a major leap for a company that only recently introduced the Software as a Service model, SAP announced it is combining its on-demand CRM application with its on-premise CRM suite in a new product it calls SAP CRM 2006s. "We are moving our entire CRM product [line] to the hybrid model," Angela Ba...