April 2007 Archives

Here's an article from the Washington Post today on a topic I've been loosely following: the increasing incidence of violent, sexual threats against women tech bloggers.

You can read the full article here.

It appears having two X chromosomes and having something intelligent to say about technology brings out the violent, insecure trolls with gnarly, misogynistic humps on their backs.

TES

SugarCRM, which provides commercial open-source CRM software, announced it will host its first-ever SugarCRM Global Developer Conference, May 3rd to 5th, 2007, at the Sainte Claire Hotel in San Jose. The company states that HP, Intel, Microsoft, MySQL, Novell, Pervasive, Oracle and Sun are among the industry players sponsoring the conference, which has been designed for developers, administrators, users and managers of CRM projects. Open-source CRM has worked amazingly well for some companies  with unique CRM needs. Should be an interesting conference. Find more info here: http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/events/developer-conference.html

TES

Do you offer a solution or service that delivers call center capabilities via IP in a particularly creative, innovative or elegant way? If so, we'd like to hear from you. Customer Interaction Solutions is putting out a call for nominations for its IP Contact Center Technology Pioneer Awards.

To be considered for this award, visit the following link for more information or to apply: http://www.tmcnet.com/tmc/poty/Default.aspx?awardid=29

Good luck!

TES

I'm editing a contributed feature from Witness Systems for the May issue and ran across this tidbit of information that shocked even me:

"Global consultancy Bain & Company asked 362 companies whether they believed they had delivered a “superior experience” to their customers. Eighty percent of the companies said that they had indeed done so. Bain then asked the customers of these companies if they felt they’d received superior service. Only eight percent agreed that they had."

If the old phrase "delusions of adequacy" can be invoked here, it seems to apply in breathtaking amounts, to b-to-c company executives and management. One wonders what else in their business they are being so clueless about.

Starts to make you wonder if maybe Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers really DIDN'T know what was going on right under their noses? I wouldn't go that far, but still...

TES