Siebel today announced its plans to debut its new customer/user industry conference, called Siebel CustomerWorld. The conference will be held at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center from October 16th to 19th. The plan is to expand the success of the company's existing Siebel  User Week conferences and turn them into a more broadly targeted and accessible event.

Though no keynoters have been yet announced, it's expected that the event will feature high-profile speakers and "expert practitioners". The conference will be dual in its focus: it will aim for both IT and business people, and offer two tracks to serve the needs of both communities.

More info and registration details can be found at www.siebelcustomerworld.com.

TES

In an article written this morning for TMCnet by David Sims, he notes he'd lay his money on India, not China, to be the Next Great Thing. He write, "The three main reasons, of course, are that India is a) a widely Anglophone democracy operating under the rule of law, b) serious about protecting property and intellectual rights, and c) highly entrepreneurial. China is none of those nor ever will be, and you can’t name a significant long-term world economic power in the last hundred years who’s not at least two out of those three."

All I can say is "Right on, David."

In casual talks about business with colleagues and friends, when the topic of China comes up, I feel like I'm howling at the wind. Does anyone remember that China is still a communist country with a dismal human rights record? Remember? Communism? Chairman Mao and all?

India is a democratic nation. It operates under English Common Law. Its court system makes sense to Westerners. It likes us. 

In terms of call centers...you think your customers can't understand Indian agents? Do you really believe that Chinese agents are going to be an improvement? How, exactly?

What if the political situation between the U.S. and China (always touchy) deteriorates in the next 10 years? What's going to happen to U.S. investments there? You think you'll get them back?

Things to think about.

TES

If you're a space geek like me, you may be hoping to watch the 3:51 pm EST launch of the shuttle Discovery/STS-114. (I've still never seen one in person...it's a tricky prospect to plan to travel to Florida to witness one, as launches so often get delayed and rescheduled.)

NASA is currently running their "NASA TV" live feed, covering pre-countdown happenings. You can find the link to it here: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html and choose to run it in either Windows Media or RealPlayer.

Just try not to get in trouble with your IT department, hogging all that bandwidth, as I'm sure I'm going to get into with mine (sorry, guys).

TES

Can you imagine inventing something that, when it debuts to the marketplace at nearly $30 per unit, can move off the shelves of a single store chain at a rate of 50,000 per hour?

Welcome back to Hogwarts, kids.

Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio has stated that the bookstore chain expects to sell just that many in the first days (weeks?) of this weekend's release of "Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince."

The only books that sell anywhere near as well as J.K. Rowling's international phenomenon (intergalactic, maybe? Are beings from Alpha Centauri eagerly awaiting the release as well? It wouldn't surprise me) are the Bible, and that ever-popular best-seller, "Quotations From Chairman Mao".

I'll admit to being a fan. OK...maybe "addict" is a more appropriate term. If you haven't read these books, understand they're like bibliophilistic crack. I read the first Harry Potter book many years ago, shortly after its release. My then-11-year-old niece bought it for me for my birthday. I read it, initially, to humor her and see what she was reading at the time. I remember that I finished the book around 9:00 pm, and ran out to the bookstore, wearing my sweatpants, to buy the second book.

"Just a few days to go," say the fans excitedly.

"Just a few days to go," says JK Rowling to her editors, publishers, financial advisers, tax accountants and public relations team.

"Just a few days to go," say bookstore owners and executives eagerly.

"Just a few days to go," groan bookstore clerks and security guards despondently.

TES

In case you have a scrap of sympathy left over after you finish regretting having to relocate those slugs from your garden last weekend, spare a moment for poor Bernie Ebbers, former CEO and Chief Robber Baron of WorldCom. According to the New York Times today, a federal judge refused his request for a new trial, opening the path for Bernie to go hop, hop, hopping off to jail.

Bye, Bernie!

All those people whose livelihoods you stole are right behind you...waiting to push you into your cell. Is there room for Dennis Kozlowski next door?

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-WorldCom-Ebbers.html?hp&ex=1121227200&en=c3bd3e114eb5f652&ei=5094&partner=homepage

TMC is currently embarking on an exciting new venture: We're collecting the user community's opinions on the software and systems call center/contact centers use in their everyday operations. We want your honest opinions. (Yes, you can be mean if you're so inclined).

Our Best In Class Survey, which is currently underway, will pay you $10 if you fork over your detailed opinion about any of the systems you use every day: CRM, workforce management, on-demand products, call recording, ACDs, headsets, IVRs, speech systems, list management, PBX/IP-PBX, dialers, teleservices, sales force automation, knowledge management.

From take-no-prisoners evaluations that begin, "This product should only be used as a doorstop or a hitch to the dinner table for short people" to "My life became complete when this software was released," your opinions will help us build a very realistic picture of what the call center software horizon looks like, entirely minus the spin. (Something that's a bit hard to find nowadays.)

Please visit the survey site, http://www.tmcnet.com/survey/ and log in with your opinions. You can take the survey for more than one product area, so please don't be shy.

TES

Congratulations goes out this morning to the co-founder of Hispanic Teleservices Corp., Kit Cooper, for being named as one of this year's Ernst & Young Entrepreneurs of the Year. Hispanic Teleservices Corp. is a rising company within Customer Interaction Solution's Top 50 Teleservices Ranking.

The Texas-based company operates call centers in Monterrey, Mexico and targets the rapidly growing U.S. Hispanic market.

Congratulations to Kit.

TES

Hispanic Teleservices Corporation Co-Founder Named

2005 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year

Hispanic Teleservices Corporation (HTC), a leading provider of outsourced customer support for the Hispanic market, announced today that its co-founder and president, Kit Cooper, has received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for the Houston and Gulf Coast region.

“This is a great honor for HTC.  We are always striving for excellence and this award serves as recognition of our innovation, growth and leadership position in the outsourced customer support industry.  To maintain our leadership position in our industry we have many more things to accomplish, however this award shows how special our employees are and what they have been able to accomplish.” said Kit Cooper.

The Ernst & Young award program is designed to honor outstanding entrepreneurs who have demonstrated excellence and extraordinary success in such areas as innovation, financial performance, and personal commitment to their businesses and communities.  The Entrepreneur of the Year Award program was started by services firm Ernst & Young and is sponsored nationally by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. 

About Hispanic Teleservices Corporation

Hispanic Teleservices Corporation (HTC) is a leading provider of outsourced contact center services for companies serving the Hispanic market. HTC serves as a “remote office” for bilingual contact center operations, providing customer care, technical support, customer acquisition and e-services. We help clients gain and solidify Hispanic market share by offering a solution that integrates contact centers and specialized value-added services. HTC’s operations are based in Monterrey, Mexico, allowing clients an onshore solution with access to a large pool of bilingual, university-educated agents. HTC’s institutional investors include JP Morgan Partners and Citicorp Venture Capital.

Jacada announced this morning a new user: British wireless company Vodafone. The company adopted Jacada's Fusion product.

I like this product. If you haven't seen it in action, this is what it does: It takes the multitude of screens that call center agents need to keep open at all times: CRM, e-mail, SFA, Web chats, WFM, call recording, etc., and merges them into one screen. The amount of time wasted in call centers by agents toggling back and forth between as many as nine different applications is enormous. Between the physical switching, there is also the mental adjustment ("What screen am in now? Where's the pertinent info located for THIS system") that adds precious minutes onto contact center interaction. Under Fusion, everything comes into one GUI, allowing the agent to view one screen, all the time.

Just imagine the metrics that can be improved under these circumstances. They're truly almost limitless.

TES

Jacada Announces that Vodafone UK Signs Enterprise License Agreement for Jacada Fusion

ATLANTA – July 12, 2005 – Jacada Ltd. (Nasdaq: JCDA) today announced that it has entered into an enterprise license agreement with Vodafone UK.  Based on the successful outcome of an initial project in the customer retention contact center, Vodafone UK has purchased an enterprise license and will implement Jacada Fusion in more of its UK contact centers and retail outlets.  As was announced on March 30, 2005, the software license agreement is expected to yield several million dollars over the coming quarters.

Vodafone UK is a member of the world’s largest mobile network, has 15.2 million UK customers and offers a wide range of voice and data communications.

Vodafone implemented Jacada Fusion to simplify how contact center agents in its SAVES group access and utilize applications across different computing platforms, as multiple problems resulted from having agents accessing two separate systems with no real-time data exchange or updates. With Jacada Fusion, agents can now access and utilize the separate systems through a single user interface, eliminating time consuming processes and tasks brought on by the disparate systems.

Through the single user interface, an agent can now look up customer information; perform a security check; check and order handset stock; build a deal; and automatically complete the wrap-up process.

“By employing Jacada Fusion, Vodafone has cut the time of a successful customer retention call by 50%, and we completely eliminated our manual call wrap-up process,” said Steve Johnson, chief architect at Vodafone.

“Vodafone selected Jacada Fusion because it provided a non-intrusive, rapid and cost-effective solution to help our retention group improve productivity,” said Johnson. “Jacada Fusion met our criteria on several levels. It utilizes the systems we already have in place and is 100% non-intrusive, so it required no changes to our existing Windows and host-based legacy systems. In addition, the rapid design and development environment provided for an unmatched ten-week development cycle of the Jacada Fusion-enabled transactions.”

“Jacada is very pleased that Vodafone had experienced such success with Jacada Fusion,” said Jeremy Young, UK country manager for Jacada. “We look forward to working closely with Vodafone as they deliver a Single User Interface company wide to their retail stores, inbound call centers, and corporate functions.”

About Jacada - Jacada solutions help customers rapidly simplify and improve high-value business processes while eliminating the traditional long and expensive systems replacement projects. Jacada solutions are deployed in over 100 contact centers to over 100,000 customer service representatives (agents) worldwide, and to millions of users through self-service applications designed to off-load contact center activity. Jacada has over 1200 customers worldwide including major Fortune 1000 corporations and government organizations such as AAA Mid-Atlantic, Bank of America, Caterpillar, Delta Air Lines, The Hartford, Lillian Vernon, the U.S. Navy, Nationwide, Porsche Cars North America, Prudential, Raytheon, and West Corporation.  Founded in 1990, Jacada operates globally with offices in Atlanta, Georgia; Herzliya, Israel; and London, England. Jacada can be reached at www.jacada.com or at 1-800-773-9574.

Talk about "po-tay-to" "po-tah-toe". I liked this news that a survey indicates that "businesses are adopting mobile applications faster than they'd planned."

Mightn't it also be that companies waaaay underestimated the growth and adoption rates of mobile applications?

In any case, it explains why every company and his brother's company has been offering its products on mobile platforms lately. Turns out this wireless business is big...who woulda thunk?

TES

There are certain technologies many of us in the industry are guilty sometimes of considering less capable of innovation than other areas of the industry: display technologies and headsets are two industries that sometimes fall prey to these very undeserved prejudices.

Turns out, while many people were considering display technologies commodities -- a sort of necessary purchase but not one to get excited about -- the companies that produce these products and their associated real-time data applications are quietly doing very well.

Why? The contact center industry has become data hungry. More specifically, it has become hungry for real-time, actionable data. Companies that offer these real-time information solutions have found themselves selling to customer service organizations of all ilks in an increasingly precise quest to gather information not after the fact ("What did we do right? What did we do wrong?") but in time to effect changes that will make a real difference in current campaigns. Couple this with the continued drive to turn call centers into profit-generating entities, and it's not surprising to see results like those posted today by Inova Solutions, which is reporting a 75 percent increase this first half of the year over the same time period last year. The full release is below.

TES

It continually amazes me, after all this time, that the results of a successful outsourcing venture are still viewed as surprising. In the release below, we see some concrete results reported by Indiana-based HMO M-Plan regarding post-implementation results with its outsourced partner, Beryl.

This reminds me of a television commercial that aired a few years ago (I do not remember for which computer hardware/services company) in which a company's upper management gathers for its usual nightmarish weekly IT troubleshooting meeting. Turns out, the company turned all its IT functions over to said (forgotten) hardware/services company.

"So...no problems now? Then what are we going to talk about at this meeting?" asked the CEO anxiously.

"Shirts," replied one of his employees. "Remember...we make shirts? Let's talk about them." The message, obviously, is that if you outsource your housekeeping headaches, you can concentrate on your core business.

I commend Beryl and M-Plan for making these results available. We at CIS talk outsourcing until we turn blue, but it seems that the message is not always gotten, or it's still viewed with suspicion. It's only case studies such as these that allow organizations still slogging through their own customer care to see what they could be accomplishing by *not* attempting to accomplish it.

TES

Beryl Publishes Case Study Demonstrating Value of Outsourced Call Center to M-Plan, One of Indiana's Largest HMOs

DALLAS, July 11 /PRNewswire/ -- The Beryl Companies, the nation's largest healthcare-exclusive customer interaction center, has published a case study demonstrating the value of its partnership with Indianapolis-based, M-Plan.

The HMO began searching for a call center outsource partner after a troubling conversion to a new computer system and the acquisition of a large new client with thousands of new members. The result was a flood of member calls that overwhelmed the telecommunications system, increased caller wait times, contributed to high call abandonment rates, and produced sharply lower member satisfaction scores.

M-Plan chose Beryl as its outsourced partner based on its reputation for providing unparalleled customer service, its teamwork approach, its ability to quickly learn and understand the challenges facing the client, and its commitment to helping its clients successfully achieve their goals.
The case study shows Beryl's ability over the past 24 months to significantly reduce caller wait times, dramatically reduce call abandonment rates, and significantly increase member satisfaction scores. Based on its successful performance, Beryl's relationship with M-Plan has expanded to include a variety of caller services including benefit coverage, member eligibility, PCP referrals, network and address changes, ID card requests, and out bound new member welcome calls.

To obtain a copy of the case study, visit Beryl's Web site at http://www.beryl.net/ .
Since 1985, more than 500 hospitals, hospital systems, insurance plans and other healthcare organizations have trusted their customers to The Beryl Companies. In that time, Beryl's call advisors have served more than 16 million callers by providing physician/service referrals, health information, telephone nurse triage and class/seminar registration to hospital callers and enrollment and benefit information to insurance plan members. A million more have interacted with Beryl via email and the Internet. The Dallas Business Journal has named Beryl one of the "Best Places to Work" in the Dallas/Fort Worth area for three consecutive years. More information about Beryl is available at http://www.beryl.net/ .

M-Plan, one of the largest health plans in Indiana, was organized in 1989. It is one of the few provider-owned health plans in Indiana, and is a wholly- owned subsidiary of The Healthcare Group, LLC. M-Plan offers two products: M-Plan, the commercial health plan and Senior Smart Choice, a Medicare Cost product.