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...
Full Story »
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,"...
Full Story »
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...
Full Story »
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.
Full Story »
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...
Full Story »
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...
Full Story »
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 »Credit Freezing
March 13, 2006My article last week about the ability to "freeze" your credit with the credit agencies so no one can steal your identity has caused me to get a lot of mail. I'll reproduce one letter I have received already:
Tracey:Â Read your article/letters re Credit Freeze.
Thought you might like to know:
Identity theft is the fastest growing crime in America, increasing 600 percent since the year 2000.
Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter
March 10, 2006If you're a space buff like I am, visit www.nasa.gov right now and choose the MRO - Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter page, where you can watch live on NASA TV the JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) mission control monitoring of the "burn" the vehicle is undergoing to insert itself into orbit around Mars, at which time it will begin a 6-month-long aerobraking process to slow itself down before it begins returning what may be the most detailed data about Mars to date. Among other things, it will search for traces of water beneath our nearest neighbor planet.
Exciting stuff!
TES
Outbound Provider: Last Call
March 9, 2006In our April issue, Customer Interaction Solutions magazine will be running a roundup of outbound technology providers.
This is the last call to be included: to find out how, visit http://news.tmcnet.com/news/2006/02/06/1346988.htm
TES
Illiterate Spammers
March 9, 2006I received the following spoof e-mail today, purportedly from a colleage:
Dude,
I found your email from whois info of a web page that was used in spam and illigal activity,
please do something or you will be sued and busted. Was very dumb to leave your email, a**hole!
P.S Attached file is self-exatracting archive with information about your criminal activity.
Of course, our spam filters eliminated the virus, but left the text behind. All I can say is...I'm glad spammers are such illiterate losers...it helps those of us who have real jobs to spot them easily and their "illigal" activities. Dude.
TES
Walmart Blogs Itself
March 7, 2006An article that appears in the NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/technology/07blog.html?_r=1&oref=login)Â today discusses the fact that Walmart appears to be employing bloggers to post positive comments about the media-challenged company.
My experience with Walmart and the blogosphere is rather different. A blog I posted last year about bad Walmart customer service has drawn a tirade of negative comments about the retail supergiant by readers. This truly is the company that everybody loves to hate. And until Walmart figures out why it deserves a lot of this criticism, it will continue to operate in the "point the gun, aim for the foot" method of publicity that it seems to enjoy.
Here's a link to the commentary on Walmart: http://blog.tmcnet.com/walmart-customer-service.asp
Enjoy.
TES
Getting More Call Center For Less
March 6, 2006The days of a single call center...one centralized location full of agents...may be starting to fade. Why? Because today's technology allows companies to efficiently tie together a host of disparate locations and inviduals into a single virtual call center, and in doing so, companies can save a great deal of money on overhead while improving the resources of its call center entity.
Join us tomorrow for a Webinar entitled, "Multisite Call Center Strategies To Reduce Costs and Increase Productivity" and learn how to create such a virtual call center entity on your own. The Webinar is sponsored by Telephony@Work, and takes place at 2:00 pm EST.
For more information, visit http://www.tmcnet.com/Webinar/telephonyatwork/multisite-call-center-strategies-reduce-cost.htm
TES
Credit Freezing
February 28, 2006I'm trying to put a "freeze" on my credit, as I'm allowed to do in Connecticut as of January 1st, thanks to a bill signed by Governor Jodi Rell. "Trying" is the operative word. Not only is there NO INFORMATION WHATSOEVER on the Web sites of the three main credit agencies regarding how to effect the freeze, these companies are very busy actively discouraging people from doing so. Of course they don't want you to freeze your credit...they want you to buy their credit monitoring services. Am I the only one who thinks that putting the three credit agencies in charge of this is like expecting the cat to guard the tuna for someone else without eating it?
Quit Sabotaging Your Customers
February 27, 2006In the February issue of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine, I wrote about a study conducted by Allurent that indicated that 82 percent of online shoppers, after a bad e-commerce experience, say they will never return to that company's Web site again. There is evidence aplenty that poor e-commerce and e-support experiences also significantly damage a company's store-based retail sales. The excuses are running out for companies with bad Web sites and a spotty record on remote support.
On Wednesday, Citrix GoToAssist is sponsoring an informative Webinar called "Empowering Your People With The Remote Support Competitive Edge." If you offer support via your company's Web site, you cannot afford to miss this Webinar. Your competitors will be listening.
http://www.tmcnet.com/Webinar/citrix/empowering-your-people.htm
TES
Calling All Outbound Solutions
February 24, 2006Do you offer a solution that falls under the umbrella of outbound technology? If so, get listed in Customer Interaction Solutions magazine's April issue "Outbound Technology Roundup".
To find out how to submit information, click here: http://news.tmcnet.com/news/2006/02/06/1346988.htm
TES
Press Zero Anytime
February 21, 2006You may have noticed, via its humorous commercials involving a little Woody Allen-like guy attempting to get through to his credit card company and setting his kitchen on fire, that Citibank's CitiCard credit card division is offering a powerful new incentive to switch credit card companies: When you call the company, you can press "0" at any time during the IVR spiel and be connected to a live operator.
So what's a great differentiating point among credit cards? It really tells you what kind of world we live in when a company offers "being able to talk to a human whenever you want" as a superior selling point, and the rest of us fully agree. Many of us would be happy to pay a few extra points in interest rates if it guarantees us frustration-free calls to our credit card companies.
