By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is three Frank Sinatra and two swing CDs on the changer. It’s going to be a
good morning:
As part of First CoffeeSM’s occasional series of
interviews with important types in the CRM and contact center space, we have an
interview with CobbleSoft Chairman, CEO and
minority owner Richard Stevenson.
A Brit living in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of New
York state – if First CoffeeSM moves back to America that’s one
place under heavy consideration, that and the Shenandoah Valley – Stevenson’s just
overseen CobbleSoft’s release of Version 3 of its flagship product, COIGN, web-based
help desk and service management software.
Excerpts are printed here, the complete interview appears as
an article by First CoffeeSM’s mild-mannered reporter alter ego on
the TMC site:
Richard, thanks for your
time. What do you find are the best CDs to play at work?
A pleasure, David. Recently, I discovered Aria 3, Metamorphosis by Brit Paul Schwartz. It is incredibly powerful music, inspired by
his love of rock and opera – you should play it for First Coffee… you never
know when you walk into my office if you’ll hear The Who, South American salsa
or classical.
To the uninitiated, in
as plain English as possible, can you explain what it is that COIGN brings to
the market that isn’t being, uh, brought anywhere else?
COIGN was one of the first truly web-based helpdesk
products, and certainly the first to use Apache/Oracle for the middle tier, as
opposed to Microsoft’s IIS. Developed
exclusively for the Oracle Database… where COIGN adds value over and above
other products is the sense of collaborative ownership it generates, whereby support
does not have to be limited to IT or the helpdesk. CobbleSoft believes there are vast amounts of
knowledge spread throughout any organization, and COIGN enables you to tap into
that knowledge, resulting in faster and more accurate service and resolution.
In the past you’ve
mentioned other products, that CobbleSoft is being asked to come in to
deployments and do better. Exactly what is it that those users are
wanting improvement on?
We are taking an increasing number of calls from companies
that are re-assessing the practical value they get. The companies we’re talking
to are being pressured to cut overhead costs, increase their ability to respond
to change, and create greater service satisfaction. Ease-of-use, reducing IT headcount, web-based
architecture, integrated knowledge base and search capabilities – all these are
high on their lists.
You’ve said running a
coffee shop is a great way to learn real-world customer service.
Some folks simply want to buy a regular cup of coffee and
leave – and that’s okay. Others will
request assistance or a recommendation. The point is, people have different ways of asking for the same thing,
or expect different results from the same service. We, as the solution
providers, have to be able to listen, learn and deliver.
As an industry
observer, not necessarily as someone with (quite) a vested interest in CobbleSoft, what
do you see as the two or three biggest challenges ahead for the self-serve help
desk segment of the industry?
Self-service solutions must provide the ability to evolve
and scale to an organizations’ growth. There are many products out there, but very few which are capable, for
example, of integrating to other applications or to data warehousing. Integrating knowledge bases and content
management with enhanced search capabilities is absolutely critical. People need, basically, useful information –
and they aren’t getting it right now.
You talk about the
need to build dynamic business rules processing into help desk and service
management.
We’ve seen during the last few years, for example, how lean
manufacturing has increased efficiency for companies. Too often today, people
are using e-mail and instant messaging – which means no audit trails, no SOX
compliance, and no knowledge capture or sharing.
Do most businesses
really get it that you must support and empower employees with things like
real-time access to real-time data?
I think that many of them do understand it, but have lacked
the right tools or resources to achieve it. For many, the sheer volume of disparate applications and data silos is a
huge barrier to empowering all employees, let alone IT or customer-facing
departments.
I’ve heard you say “self-service
is great, if you know how your users are serving themselves.” What do you
mean by this?
You can’t just put up a knowledge base or FAQs and hope that
employees and customers find what they want. You have to know what they are looking for, what they find, how
satisfied they are. If they log a
ticket, the technician should be able to see what the user has already tried in
order to solve a problem. We’ve just
introduced real-time analysis whereby technicians can see immediately what the
user has downloaded, what they’ve searched for, and what feedback they provided.
Why don’t more Brits
drink coffee?
If they’re like me, they grow up on lots of tea and really
bad instant coffee!
…
EdGenuiti Worldwide, vendor of enterprise
software designed specifically for higher education is announcing that Harvard
University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government will implement their Multi-Channel & Multi-Campus CRM for Higher
Education.
Richard Cahoon, Director Of Enrollment and Information Systems, John F. Kennedy
School of Government said the school selected edGenuiti to help “better understand
and segment our prospective student population, giving us the ability to design
specific and personalized communications moving the right student along our
enrollment process.” Veritably.
…
SAP tester Sucid Corporation is announcing that OZSoft Consulting Corporation has
joined the Sucid Integrator Alliance Program, and will use Sucid products to deliver SAP test automation services and
products to its customers.
Major SAP projects such as version upgrades, new module deployments, platform
upgrades/migrations and custom enhancements generate test budgets that can run
into millions of dollars. Then when the testers finish and cash their check the
business users have to duplicate many of these tests as the product’s
fine-tuned for that specific company. You see the problem.
Test automation would seem to be the answer, but so far they’re so
time-consuming, expensive and complex themselves you might as well pay some
test consultant. The Sucid Integrator Alliance Program is designed to use Sucid’s
products, which are billed by company officials as eliminating “the need for
test script development and maintenance,” thereby “reducing the time and cost
associated with SAP test automation.”
Linh Nguyen, VP of Professional Services at OZSoft Consulting said Sucid
products “reduce the time required to develop and maintain SAP automated test
suites by such a great degree,” and should help OZSoft’s customers “reduce
their SAP test budgets while simultaneously eliminating the need for manual
testing of the automated processes for a period of 3-4 years.”
Under the agreement, OZSoft will provide a Software as a Service license to the
Sucid products combined with the OZSoft professional services to client
companies.
...
No doubt you celebrated J.K. Rowling’s 38th birthday
yesterday by finishing your kid’s copy of The Half-Blood Prince. Only one more Harry Potter book to go, she
claims.
That wailing and gnashing of teeth you hear is her publisher
begging her to reconsider.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
