Brendan Read
TMC
10 Lessons from Volleyball, Part 2
Part 1 of the 10 Business Lessons from Volleyball can be found here. In volleyball, the only play you control yourself is...
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CloudTC and N-Able Acquired
"Australian-owned IP PBX systems company, Vixtel, has completed the acquisition of Silicon Valley based glass phone developer, CloudTC, for an undisclosed figure,"...
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ProfitBricks: Where InfiniBand Meets Cloud 2.0
In a recent meeting with William Toll and Pete Johnson of ProfitBricks, the pair were ecstatic to explain how their company has...
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Proactive Care Puts Operators One Step Ahead
By Thomas Fuerst, Senior Director, Multimedia Solutions MarketingAlcatel-Lucent
Monitoring and analyzing network data proactively saves operators time, money, and customers.
When a network service fails, it makes headlines, ticks off customers, and costs that network operator money. When a failure is headed off in advance, on the other hand, there might not be praise-laden headlines, but it's newsworthy nonetheless.
The traditional approach to customer care has typically been: a disgruntled customer calls customer service and complains of a service interruption or problem; the rep, learning of it for the first time, sends out a technician the next day, and eventually finds a resolution. Often, customers are left feeling put out, and the operator has spent significant time and money resolving the problem. Even worse is the customer who doesn’t call and just feels this is ‘typical’ of their network experience. That is a customer at risk of leaving.
Proactive care flips this dynamic on its head by using predictive analytics to identify potential outages or errors in the network and stop them before they occur. It consists of three main parts: one, constantly monitoring and measuring data on the network; two, real-time analysis of the data; and three, the most important, acting on that analysis to fix the problem.
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10 Lessons from Volleyball
I've played volleyball for over 25 years. I have traveled around the US to watch the pros live - both indoor...
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Emerging Threats Combats a Million Plus Pieces of New Malware a Week
There are 250,000 plus new pieces of malware being produced each day equating to one piece per person in the US in...
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NFV-Based Software Telcos Need OSS/BSS Interoperability
One of the goals of ETSI NFV is to allow new entrants to provide solutions to carriers based on software instead of...
Full Story »Offshore Coming Back Onshore
January 30, 2008
InfoCision Management Corp.'s VP Steve Brubaker wrote to me this morning letting me know about a piece he'd seen on MSNBC this morning about offshore call center work coming back to U.S. shores for quality reasons.
Steve wrote, "We are experiencing the same as several new high profile Fortune 100 clients are now using InfoCision to handle their calls in USA with high quality results. These companies have told us they have become disillusioned with the offshore model as the expected ROI has not materialized and poor quality has significantly hurt their customer satisfaction rates."
Unfortunately, I missed the piece. Does anyone know if it's archived anywhere? If so, please let me know.
TES
Steve wrote, "We are experiencing the same as several new high profile Fortune 100 clients are now using InfoCision to handle their calls in USA with high quality results. These companies have told us they have become disillusioned with the offshore model as the expected ROI has not materialized and poor quality has significantly hurt their customer satisfaction rates."
Unfortunately, I missed the piece. Does anyone know if it's archived anywhere? If so, please let me know.
TES
The Year Of the Home Agent
January 29, 2008
OK, you may have noticed that I write about home agents. A lot. You're probably thinking, "Sounds great, but does anyone actually do it, aside from a few high-profile companies?"
I was starting to wonder the same thing myself.
You see, every year, I am responsible for tabulating the Customer Interaction Solutions Top 50 Teleservices Agencies Rankings. On the application, we ask about the number of home agents a company has.
For the past several years, while I was busy extolling the virtues of the home agent model, the number of companies acknowledging home agents was depressingly small.
I was starting to wonder the same thing myself.
You see, every year, I am responsible for tabulating the Customer Interaction Solutions Top 50 Teleservices Agencies Rankings. On the application, we ask about the number of home agents a company has.
For the past several years, while I was busy extolling the virtues of the home agent model, the number of companies acknowledging home agents was depressingly small.
Anti-Spam
January 28, 2008
I'm using a new anti-spam solution called Sendio I.C.E. (Intercept, Confirm or Eliminate) and I'm fairly impressed so far. I had to do something. I was getting literally thousands of spams per week. I no longer check the "bulk/virus" folder of the product to make sure there aren't false-positives (legitimate e-mails) in there, since I have yet to find a single misidentified e-mail. The junk builds up and then self-deletes after a certain amount of time, and I never sully my eye-balls with it!
For a more in-depth review, check out Tom Keating's blog at http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/linux/sendio-ice-box-antispam-appliance-review.asp
I'm not the only one at TMC who likes it!
TES
For a more in-depth review, check out Tom Keating's blog at http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/linux/sendio-ice-box-antispam-appliance-review.asp
I'm not the only one at TMC who likes it!
TES
Bigfoot On Mars
January 25, 2008
OK, is it just me, or does anyone think that the figure in the photo many conspiracy theorists are touting as proof of life on Mars (see photo here) bears extraordinary resemblance to the purported photos of Bigfoot (see here)?
Proof of Bigfoot on Mars?
TES
Proof of Bigfoot on Mars?
TES
Charter Deletes 14,000 Inboxes
January 24, 2008
If you are a Charter Cable customer and stored photos, recipes, contact information and other valuable information in your e-mail inbox, you may find some tough luck this week: a technical glitch has irretrievably deleted the inbox contents of 14,000 Charter subscribers.
Oops!
TES
Oops!
TES
Cell phone jail
January 24, 2008
Loved this piece written by MSNBC's Tech Editor Bob Sullivan about the efforts American wireless companies have expended locking their customers into "cell phone jail." Why, in a country that is ostensibly proud to be a free market economy, do we put up with this?
There's some interesting information in the article about the rather sleazy practices the wireless companies have developed to keep customers locked up, which companies are better than others, and how you can get around some of those practices. (Did you know you don't HAVE to put up with a cell phone that is locked to only one carrier? I didn't.)
TES
There's some interesting information in the article about the rather sleazy practices the wireless companies have developed to keep customers locked up, which companies are better than others, and how you can get around some of those practices. (Did you know you don't HAVE to put up with a cell phone that is locked to only one carrier? I didn't.)
TES
SpaceShipTwo
January 23, 2008
Here's a first look at Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo design.
Anyone else think it looks like a cross between an electric toothbrush and a Tie-fighter?
Anyone else think it looks like a cross between an electric toothbrush and a Tie-fighter?
Self-Regulation Is The Answer
January 23, 2008
The time has come (the Walrus said), for a little self-regulation. This is the message that the American Teleservices Association (ATA) is offering to any company that does outbound communications. The conventional wisdom is that if outbound organizations don't regulate themselves, the government will, and the results will be much stricter than guidelines crafted by the industry.
This is the message that will be shared at the annual ATA Washington Summit in late April, which is accepting registration now.
To find out how you can help with crafting the legislation (and not just responding to it, as the ATA says), visit the event's Web site.
TES
This is the message that will be shared at the annual ATA Washington Summit in late April, which is accepting registration now.
To find out how you can help with crafting the legislation (and not just responding to it, as the ATA says), visit the event's Web site.
TES
When Open-Source Isn't Open
January 22, 2008
In doing a little research today for a potential article I'm mulling over, I ran across this piece by Michael Tiemann on the Open Source Initiative's Web site (click here to see entry). The piece points out that many solutions on the market today, many of those in the CRM arena, that claim to be open-source are not, in fact, and that the term "open source" has become an abused buzzword by corporate marketing departments.
True open-source, he points out, should be defined by the open-source community, not by marketers. In fact, true open-source should be approved by the Open Source Initiative, as the organization was the one to initially define the term.
He indicates that Microsoft has been more honest in their approach by using the term "shared source" for some of its solutions.
It's true that the term is increasingly used without question under the enterprise business trade umbrella, and perhaps we all have to take a little more care that we're not using terms without fully understanding what they mean and recognize that this can harm the real thing.
TES
True open-source, he points out, should be defined by the open-source community, not by marketers. In fact, true open-source should be approved by the Open Source Initiative, as the organization was the one to initially define the term.
He indicates that Microsoft has been more honest in their approach by using the term "shared source" for some of its solutions.
It's true that the term is increasingly used without question under the enterprise business trade umbrella, and perhaps we all have to take a little more care that we're not using terms without fully understanding what they mean and recognize that this can harm the real thing.
TES
$50 Billion Online Ad Market
January 18, 2008
Funny how time flies. It seems that not very long ago (OK...10 years ago, which still isn't VERY long ago), we were deriding the concept of online advertising as naive. Who would advertise online, we wondered, other than those dubious shady people operating in the porn industry?
Pay-for-content was the way things were going to go. Well, here we are, just a few weeks after the New York Times, the last hold-out of pay-for-premium content, gave up that particular ghost, and we get the news that the online advertising market is being predicted to reach $50 billion by 2011.
There's a reason why people are queasy about predicting which technologies are going to fly and which ones are going to die.
Pay-for-content was the way things were going to go. Well, here we are, just a few weeks after the New York Times, the last hold-out of pay-for-premium content, gave up that particular ghost, and we get the news that the online advertising market is being predicted to reach $50 billion by 2011.
There's a reason why people are queasy about predicting which technologies are going to fly and which ones are going to die.
