First Coffee for July 14, 2005

David Sims : First Coffee
David Sims
| CRM, ERP, Contact Center, Turkish Coffee and Astroichthiology:

First Coffee for July 14, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Primal Scream’s 1994 album Give Out But Don’t Give Up:

A tip of the coffee pot to Lawrence “Larry” Asten, who’s being given the position of vice president, worldwide sales and business development at Excel Switching Corporation, a vendor of carrier-class, open services platforms, media gateways and media servers.

Asten’s a respected industry veteran who has about as many years in telecommunications sales and business development as First CoffeeSM has on the planet. He’ll lead Excel’s global sales effort.

Market analyst Datamonitor is releasing a report this morning examining “the drivers affecting U.S. banks’ distribution channel strategies and the resulting technology implications.” It gets worse.

Regular readers of this space know that First CoffeeSM casts a colder eye on studies purporting to know to decimal places how much money’s going to be spent on this or that a few years off in the future, since the one thing you can always, always count on is that current trends will not continue as neatly as they’re graphed out. But it is nice when you can at least discern what the report is saying.

The report, “Distribution Strategies In U.S. Banking,” rubs a sleeve on the crystal ball and predicts total channel technology spend by year end 2008 will increase by $3.3 billion on 2004 expenditure, creating a $16.5 billion opportunity for vendors.

“Investments will be directed towards optimizing the distribution channel mix and the functionality of individual channels as U.S. banks cut back on aggressively targeting new customers and focus on retaining and cross-selling to more profitable existing clients,” says Clare Buckmaster, financial services technology analyst at Datamonitor and author of the study, who probably doesn’t talk like that in real life.

Giving the ol’ BuzzWord Rand-O-MizerTM a spin, Datamonitor officials say the report finds that “banks hoping to differentiate on seamless customer service must integrate channels to support customer relationship management sales and service tools and capitalize on synergies.”

They also report that “by investing in process-centric multi-channel architectures and gearing functionality towards channels’ strengths, US banks can offer seamless customer service across channels, in addition to improving cross-sell rates and leveraging process synergies to reduce costs,” whatever the hell any of that means.

The study uncovers the fact that – you may want to find a chair – “it has become apparent that, rather than commit to anyone [sic] channel in particular, many customers are choosing to make use of the full range of channels available to service their accounts, be it to perform basic transactions or research and buy new products.”

Yew doan say.

Jason Stamper has a good interview with salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff on ComputerWire this morning. Turns out even back in 1999, when he left Oracle to start salesforce.com, Benioff was already looking past CRM.

“We always set out to create an integrated platform for all sorts of hosted applications, not just CRM, but I didn’t know how to do it. So I thought I’d do an application first to learn what customers want,” he tells ComputerWire.

Consumers got the first clear indication of that with the launch of Summer ‘05, which introduced Multiforce 1.0, which lets customers write all kinds of applications on the Multiforce platform, sharing the salesforce.com data model, security and user interface.

He sees it all as a way of knocking Microsoft down to size, responding to suggestions that Multiforce is a nascent virtual operating system a la Microsoft’s Windows with “we had to do this because Microsoft has let us all down. Excel has not changed dramatically in 20 years – it’s ridiculous.”

For Benioff, it all comes down the platform. Control that and you control everything – “If you focus on an application you will win for a while but you will not win forever. What wins is the platform,” he tells ComputerWire.

Digital voice recording manufacturer Wygant has announced Interactive Personal Score Cards, a new feature of Portfolio, its reporting and analytics package, itself part of CenterPlus, Wygant’s Quality Monitoring and Analytics product, which enhances its voice logging and quality monitoring systems.

The main selling point of Personal Score Cards appears to be the ability to drill down from performance summaries through the categories and questions and on to the original forms and underlying recordings. This can help contact center quality monitoring and agent coaching.

Wygant president David Lezak himself says “the most significant feature of these Personal Score Cards is the drill-down capability,” saying it lets the agent and coach “move smoothly among different levels of detail.”

Everybody’s oohing and aahing about China’s immense potential, which they’ve been doing approximately since Marco Polo laid eyes on the place 750 years ago, how they’re going to kick America’s butt in everything and take over the world along the way, but First CoffeeSM’s money is on India in the Next Great Thing sweepstakes.

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 and geared to the private sector. 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.

Also right now China’s making all the mistakes Japan made back in the ‘80s, getting suckered into paying grossly overinflated prices for essentially symbolic, threadbare businesses such as Maytag and Unocal (Firestone Tire at $80 a share, anyone?).

Indians are under no such cultural pressure to prove their manhood internationally, not saddled with the demands overinflated national pride places on countries like Japan and China they’re free to work in objective clarity, another huge advantage.

Also a piece in the IndiaDaily this morning, reporting on a McKinsey report saying there will be 4.1 million outsourced jobs to developing nations in 2008. Great, India thinks – “rejoices,” according to the article, since of course it’ll get the lion’s share of those.

However, the article says “the real story is China and India will face massive unemployment and staggering inflation as Robot [sic] take control of factories and intelligent configurable new generation software replaces IT programmers.”

Right now China’s only true economic advantage is that it pays its labor force nothing, so can afford to sell products cheaply overseas.  IndiaDaily’s right that if robotics take over factory production China will be “totally redundant,” although First CoffeeSM doesn’t think that will happen to such an extent, since there’s handwork that needs to be done which robotics will never quite get the hang of.

“Intelligent software applications make programming software obsolete. That takes care of Indian IT boom,” the article frets, adding that “the web based online help and political backlash takes care of call center operations,” and the fear is India’s back to the dirt-poor, squalid pre-Raj days.

Actually China has far more reason to worry about factory automation, since they can’t pick up the services or IT, biotech or any other business as easily as India can. Plus India shows a much greater talent for innovation and competitive advantage than China, which depends heavily on cheap exports –10 percent of India’s economy is dependent on export, compared to 50 percent of China’s. You can have the state-controlled Chinese hare, First CoffeeSM bets on the free market-responsive Indian tortoise.

Now if India would only welcome direct foreign investment...

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content from India, China or anyone.



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