September 2006 Archives

By David Sims

david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Elton John's Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy:

Open Solutions Inc. has announced that Pacific Coast Bankers' Bank, with $473 million in assets, has selected its enterprise-wide data processing platform, The Complete Banking Solution, and other Open Solutions' complementary applications.

The second largest bankers' bank in the United States in terms of assets under management, PCBB provides correspondent banking services to more than 400 independent community banks across the country.

Open Solutions sells integrated enabling technologies for financial institutions in the United States, Canada and internationally. In September 2005, Open Solutions announced an agreement with PCBB to offer PCBB customers its image item processing services as a complement to PCBB's cash letter settlement service.

Tom Evans, president and CEO of PCBB, said his company's primary focus was "finding an open architecture application that would allow the CBC to interface in a dynamic environment." They were also looking for a core platform "that could change as we grow, not only in assets but also in customers, products and services. We evaluated numerous vendors and focused on identifying the best solution to interface our in-house applications with the core database."

In addition to The Complete Banking Solution, PCBB will implement Open Solutions' Financial Accounting Suite -- general ledger, accounts payable and fixed assets -- and cView MyVision and Report Wizard.

Evans said the cView report writer would be used to create custom reports from many different applications including the core processor, CBC and others.

…

The ongoing Orbitz live CRM case study has been completed, and I'm sorry to report that through some of the worst customer service I've ever experienced, they've destroyed whatever possibilities for customer loyalty may have existed with us.

Basically, my family of five is flying from Istanbul to Washington, D.C. round-trip for Thanksgiving. We went online to look for tickets, and we'd had good experiences, both in price and customer service, with both Expedia and Travelocity, so we figured Orbitz was kind of like those guys.

We booked tickets, and went on Orbitz's site to pick out the seats, a feature they offer which we like.  It's booked through Alitalia but a few legs are operated by Delta, we have Istanbul-Milan, Milan-Boston, Boston-Washington going, and Washington-Atlanta, Atlanta-Milan, Milan-Istanbul coming. We filled in seat requests for all six flights, Orbitz charged our card for just north of $3,100, we figured the matter closed.

Then we noticed that the seats for the Washington-Atlanta and Atlanta-Milan legs were "pending," not confirmed. We sent an e-mail to the Orbitz customer service address promising "We try to answer all queries in three hours," or something like that, saying hey, what's going on here, we've paid and these seats are unconfirmed? Visions of being stranded at the D.C. airport danced through our heads.

My wife wrote to them and I did too.

Let's review: In CRM, the first priority is to make a good first impression on a customer. Orbitz failed there. Not the end of the world -- as I wrote on the first installment, the problem isn't the problem. How you handle the problem is much more important.

Customer loyalty is frequently won for good in the resolution of a problem. It's like a relationship that hasn't had any fights: You don't know what'll happen when a real problem comes up. When you have a fight and get over it you have a stronger relationship, right? Same with customers.

Look, nobody's going to provide perfect service. Not Orbitz, not Southwest, Nordstrom's, Amazon.com, Ritz-Carlton, Rolls-Royce, nobody. We customers don't expect perfect customer service. We expect problems to be handled the right way, and we'll give an amazing amount of loyalty to a company who does so.

So Orbitz's response to our problem was… no response. Not even an autoresponder saying "We've received your e-mail." We sent another e-mail saying look, we're getting concerned that we've paid you and we can't get seats confirmed on these two flights. Orbitz couldn't be bothered to answer that one either. Not a concern, evidently, they had their $3,100, what did they care about our personal problems?

So yesterday I sent them a fourth e-mail telling them I'd contacted our credit card bank and was requesting them to cancel the payment and that we'd rebook with someone else.

And I did, that wasn't an empty threat. I sent an e-mail to my bank instructing them to do that. And -- this is the honest 100% truth -- three or four minutes later I got a phone text message from my wife saying "Seats confirmed on all flights."

I called her back and it turns out this thing about Orbitz not giving us confirmed seats was stressing her out to the point where she took time off work to go to the Delta office here in Istanbul and personally get the confirmations. Oh, and Orbitz finally decided we were worth their precious time. Got an e-mail:

"Dear Orbitz Customer, Thank you for contacting Orbitz. In reviewing our contact history, I show that this is your first correspondence via e-mail and phone under the e-mail address 'david@david-sims.com'. It is possible that you may have corresponded using another e-mail address."

Well, bull, seeing as how I had sent that e-mail using the exact same system we'd used to send the first three. CRM Rule #1: Lying to your customers isn't a good move.

"In reviewing our reservation system, I show that the online seat assignment for the flight segment 'Istanbul to Milan' on Alitalia 707 and flight segment 'Milan to Istanbul' on Alitalia 706  has been restricted by the airlines."

Gee, thanks for telling us that when we tried to use your system for getting seat assignments on the site. And for not telling us that the first three times we asked.

"Please note that most airlines hold some seats for airport check-in only. However, you can be assured that you will always get your seat assignment at the gate or check-in counter on the day of departure.

Sorry, but seeing that Orbitz is perfectly willing to lie to me I don't take much faith in their reassurances that if I just trust them I'll get my seat assignments.

I wrote back saying they were damn lucky my wife wasted a day doing their legwork for them, and that the seat assignment confirmations were easily enough obtained from Delta since she had just gotten them, and their aside that our seats were probably just being held for airport check-in only was sheer misdirection. See CRM Rule #1 above.

They they wrote "also, Alitalia Airlines does not have online seat selection capabilities. This means that only the airline is able to assign these seats. We are also unable to view the seat map of the flight type… the airline will be assigning you these seats and you will see your seat assignments at the airport on the date of departure."

Well, look, stupid, Alitalia isn't operating the flights in question, that's why my wife went to the DELTA office, wasting time doing the work we had paid you to do, where she picked up the confirmations you claimed didn't exist.

So there's your CRM case study: How to Insult, Irritate, Patronize, Stress And Lose Customers, by Orbitz. Honestly. It makes me quiver that I ever entrusted my travel to them in the first place.

If  read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Only Life by The Feelies:

Cisco Systems has announced what company officials consider a "significant investment initiative" in Turkey, totaling up to $275 million (about 410 million New Turkish Lira… frickin' heck it's down to 1.45 YTL per dollar again, we live here in Istanbul and our rent's set in lira and we get paid in dollars, it's been as high as 1.60ish recently, let's see it do that again) over five years.

This announcement was made by John Chambers, President and CEO of Cisco Systems, during his visit to Central and Eastern Europe and highlights the growing importance of places like Turkey in the global emerging markets.

Chambers discussed Cisco's investment plans in Turkey with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan while in Ankara this week.

Chambers said Cisco's announcement about its investment in Turkey "supports the country's entrepreneurial focus and e-transformation initiatives, which are focused on establishing a more connected country and skilled workforce… and are vital for Turkey to sustain the same rate of growth it has enjoyed over the past four years."

Cisco Systems' five-year investment plan for Turkey will allocate investments in the following areas:

Create technology investment initiatives aligned with Turkey's Networked Economic Agenda to help accelerate country transformation and economic growth.

Support the Turkish Prime Minister's Connected Turkey e-transformation agenda by providing networking technology and prototypes to support pilot programs targeted towards rural broadband for education, as well as connectivity for small and medium businesses, municipalities and local communities.

Develop a Cisco Systems Technology Innovation Center to demonstrate the impact technology has on productivity across the different market segments and foster closer collaboration with local companies and partners to accelerate partner testing as well as customer pilot projects. As part of this, Cisco will provide a lab platform for testing complex new technologies for the Turkish marketplace with local partners and entrepreneurs and increase the number of CCIE engineers in the country to a minimum of 100.

Establish the Cisco Entrepreneurship Institute, an initiative between Cisco, the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey (TOBB) and the Turkish government, to teach skills for opening and running small businesses. The education partner in the program is the University of Economics and Technology. As part of this initiative Turkish entrepreneurs and small businesses will be eligible for equity and project financing, supporting information and communications technology development in Turkey.

Support the establishment of 200 new Networking Academies in the country over the next five years to provide enhanced technical programs in concert with leading local universities. There are currently 47 Networking Academies across Turkey.

Offer localized products as well as customer service and support for the technical needs and requirements of local service provider customers.

Increase overall headcount of Cisco employees in Turkey from 80 to 400 employees and expand office space to accommodate employee growth.

Cisco first established operations in Turkey in 1996 and today maintains offices in Istanbul and Ankara.

In an announcement sure to warm the cockles of Bob Thompson's heart, NetSuite, Inc., a vendor of on-demand business software suites, has announced the wide usage of NetSuite for Partner Relationship Management (PRM) by such companies as Opal Telecom, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Carphone Warehouse Group plc and key UK resellers.

Partner Relationship Management is basically CRM for businesses dealing with each other, it lets partners to do things like jointly manage leads and customers with their parent organization -- including lead registration, opportunity management, order management (entering orders, invoicing and billing).

Tools like NetSuite's have such features as Market Direct Fund (MDF) management, e-mail campaigns and customer service inquiries through a Dashboard with business intelligence and publishing capabilities.

With PRM tools, Opal Telecom's 150-plus partners can now manage and forecast opportunities as they work them through the sales cycle, providing forecast visibility to Opal Telecom's Dealer Channel sales group against their established quotas.

"Previous to NetSuite, our Dealer Channel sales team -- with about 150 resellers -- operated by way of a paper-based system," said Andy French, Head of Information Systems at Opal Telecom. "PRM capabilities have helped us streamline the process for our Dealer Channel sales teams, with opportunities feeding the forecast, so we now have complete visibility into our forecast for Dealer Channel sales."

The cornerstone of NetSuite's and similar PRM products is the collaborative web of processes for end-to-end business management that it enables. PRM capabilities extend those processes to provide a platform for collaboration among the extended enterprise of partner channels. Because the opportunities are managed directly in the same system as their other sales, marketing, service and finance operations, they get visibility into partner pipelines and forecasts.

Redundant day-to-day partner support is eliminated since partners can now access much of what they need to know simply by logging into the self-service portal. Customers can determine the effectiveness of joint marketing campaigns, and set up and run incentive compensation plans with as much complexity and levels as required.

The neat trick to all this is the company providing this partner access doesn't have to do anything special to enable the self-service portal. There's no complex data to be imported or exported, no tricky XML or Web services to be written. All that's required is a simple point and click graphical user interface to define what data and application functionality a specific partner has rights to view and edit, and the partners can be online.

PRM came out in the early 2000s, but never really took off the way some hoped it would. Nevertheless it remains a good idea, workable in places.

Software vendor FireSocket has announced what company officials call "significant enhancements" to its enterprise-wide customer relationship management (CRM) platform, DealerSocket.

The upgrade focuses on the automotive service department and includes dynamic appointment scheduling, service management and follow up support tools that promise to optimize a critical but often neglected part of a dealer's business operations.

With as much as 60 percent of the average automotive dealership's profits coming from automotive service and repair departments, these new features stand to be welcomed by dealers. Most CRM technologies focus solely on a dealer's sales and customer service operations.

"Controlling and managing the pace of service is one of those 'make or break' issues in creating the ideal customer experience for a service department's customers," said Ord. "Unfortunately, it's often left to chance at most dealerships."

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Elton John's Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy:

German CRM vendor SAP AG has announced the availability of the third wave of its SAP CRM on-demand products, hitting the product target set in February.

With the new SAP Service on-demand, service managers can consolidate and track service tickets, establish rule- based escalations for follow-up and "better adhere to service-level agreements."

SAP also introduced capabilities for the existing SAP CRM on-demand products, including new sales automation features for product and quotation management. The new customer service capabilities in the SAP Service on-demand product include:

Service Ticket Management. This allows service agents to manage customer service tickets comprehensively and comply with service-level agreements. It enables multi-level categorization, rule-based service-level determination and due-date calculation, as well as rule-based service ticket distribution to service teams.

Rule-Based Service Ticket Distribution. This enables service ticket distribution based on priority, status, product and account type.

Service Level Monitoring. This helps agents specify the business time frame of service availability to track and improve compliance with service level agreements.

SAP is also introducing improvements to the SAP Sales on-demand product, including product support, which allows detailed product information to be uploaded from and integrated directly into mySAP ERP, enabling product definitions and attributes to be easily accessed and leveraged in all facets of sales, marketing and service processes.

Silverado Press has announced the publication of a new book by John I. Todor, Ph.D., titled Addicted Customers: How to Get Them Hooked on Your Company, now available in printable eBook format.

How do you get customers hooked on your company? Todor's book gives some guidelines, beginning with some fundamental psychological principles for building trust and loyalty in business relationships.

Addicted Customers is part of what's being called Customer Experience Management (CEM), evidently the CRM buzzword's lived past its shelf life, because contentwise there isn't any appreciable difference between CEM and what we've been doing in CRM for years.

The differences are of emphasis: CEM practitioners typically place heavy emphasis on making the selling environment more appealing, which is an essential first step. Todor adds a psycho-economic framework to enhance these pursuits, and shows, through many examples, why companies need to recognize the "emotional power of the customer experience."

Addicted Customers spends time providing a "strategic platform to apply CEM to product/service consumption," the aspect of experiences Todor considers "critically important to customers." According to Todor, loyalty accrues because customers value not just what the company has done for them, but what the relationship can do for them in the future.

While the implications of emotional and consumptive value might seem most obvious in the business-to-consumer sector, Todor argues that the strategies are equally powerful in a business-to-business context.

Addicted Customers is available now as a printable eBook at (www.AddictedCustomers.com/ebook). The printed version will hit Amazon.com and other book purveyors on October 30th.

John I. Todor, Ph.D., is the Managing Partner of The Whetstone Edge, LLC, a customer experience consulting and training firm that applies scholarly research on human behavior to buyer-seller dynamics including customer loyalty, trust, retention, customer service, CRM and marketing strategy.

Chep, a vendor of pallet and container pooling products, has opened a new Customer Care Center at its headquarters in Orlando, Florida.

The facility, covering 2,500 square feet on the building's first floor, serves as the main contact point for most customer inquiries.

Each week 23 full time employees in the Customer Care Center receive an average of 9,010 contacts, 68 percent by telephone, the balance by e- mail or fax. Coordinators are trained to handle a variety of calls, from placing and changing orders to invoicing. All relevant information is accessible and recorded on Chep's CRM system,or can easily be retrieved from other systems as needed.

"The Customer Care Center is now answering 99 percent of all incoming calls, 93 percent within 30 seconds. More importantly for our customers, the average resolution time is now 1.36 days, an improvement of 3.38 days compared with last year," said Brian Malloy, Senior Vice President Sales, National Accounts and Customer Service.

Consolidation is the driving idea behind the move: Before the Customer Care Center was started in 2003, there were several contact points for customers calling for assistance, Chep officials say. Depending on the question, service could be provided by the Asset Recovery, Customer Implementation, Logistics, Tracking and Tracing, Transaction Management, Information Systems or Account Management departments.

Different information systems and software applications were used to find answers, and many of these calls ended in a voice mailbox.

"We've eliminated dozens of different toll-free numbers coming into the Orlando office in favor of a one- stop shop for resolving common issues like proof of delivery, stock inquires, invoicing, order placement, booking of returns or answering general questions," said Skip Miller, Vice President of Customer Service. "We've also developed 37 different standard operating procedures and updated others to assure consistency in service."

Following up on our live, ongoing CRM case study with Orbitz, I must say, unfortunately, it's not going well for Orbitz. Not only have they continued to refuse to provide the airline seats confirmation service they accepted three thousand of my family's dollars to perform, they've refused to answer any of our e-mailed questions why not. And that is the real CRM problem here.

As I said in the original case study, it's not that they've failed to give us confirmed seats when we paid for them, mistakes happen, we accept that and since we're not flying until November it's not like we have to have them immediately. What's disconcerting is the fact that they refuse to provide even rudimentary customer service.

They have an e-mail question feature on their site, and promise most questions will be responded to within three hours. We've e-mailed them more than once and, days later, have received no response. Not even an autorespond, which is inexcusable.

There are opportunities, classic CRM theory goes, to win customer loyalty. One is on a first interaction. First impressions and all that. Orbitz failed there by not providing the service they had promised in exchange for the payment they accepted.

The second, more significant opportunity is when there's a problem. Hey we're normal customers, we'd prefer everything happen perfectly the first time but we know the world doesn’t work that way. There will be screw-ups, what's important is how the companies handle those screw-ups. Handle them right and the customer trusts you much more than if there had been no problem in the first place.

And the correct way to handle them is to stay in touch with the customer. Tell them yes we realize there's a problem, here's what we're doing to fix it. Customers want to know that you acknowledge their concern, especially a $3,000+, trans-Atlantic flight concern affecting a family of five. Otherwise the customer begins to suspect the company doesn't give a damn about providing the promised service at all. As we do now.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Aimee Mann's live CD, Live At St. Ann's Warehouse. Didn't know there was a patron saint of warehouses:

Callidus Software Inc., a vendor of Enterprise Incentive Management products, has announced that it has signed a Cooperative Development Agreement with SAP AG.

Under the terms of the agreement, SAP and Callidus will promote and market Callidus Software's TrueComp and TrueInformation products in the United States and Canada.

"With this partnership agreement, SAP and Callidus will offer their customers a comprehensive, fully-integrated incentive compensation and sales performance management software solution.  Callidus is pleased to be a part of the growing SAP NetWeaver ecosystem," said Robert Youngjohns, president and CEO of Callidus Software. 

Callidus specializes in tools for tracking incentive compensation for both direct and indirect sales channels. Company officials say they help with "efficient modeling, implementation, and monitoring of incentive compensation programs with easy-to-create business rules." Incentive compensation is "one of the untapped levers to bring these strategies to life," Youngjohns said.  

Global Vision Technologies, Inc., a vendor of software specializing in what they characterize as "cost effective, easy-to-use applications," has announced "full PDMA compliance support in their suite of pharmaceutical sales and marketing support products."

GVT has partnered with Signature Applications, a Lansing, Michigan based company, to provide software for the compliance requirement -- of which the pharmaceutical industry is loaded -- to ensure tracking of pharmaceutical samples. The new technology allows tracking through a touch pad to capture electronic signatures that are recognized by court officials.

"The GVT framework, because of its roots in clinical trials and Phase IV patient registries, already had the electronic auditing requirements necessary for compliance, but needed the actual signature piece to ensure the doctors that are documented as to having received samples, actually did get them," says GVT's President, Chris Freund.

"We have spent years developing a secure application to help automate and ensure HIPAA compliance in waiting rooms by using this technology," says Greg Rivet, President of Signature Applications, "and we have a current patent pending on this."

GVT expects to have this final piece integrated into their GVTIconnect product within the next quarter and is finalizing beta customers now. The GVTIconnect product is described by company officials as "a full, web based, Sales Force Automation/Customer Relationship Management (SFA/CRM) product" that is "particularly well suited for the pharma-industry due to its medical education portal and sample fulfillment/tracking handling."

The column First Coffee wrote about how Caiman.com screwed him over on a CD order, "Terrible Service Costs Caiman.com Another Customer," just keeps on giving. I've gotten more e-mails on that topic than any other I've ever written. The vast majority are commiserations, people saying how this cheapjack outfit has lied to or cheated them too. Why Caiman.com is still allowed to sell on Amazon.com is a mystery to First Coffee.

First Coffee doesn't think Caiman.com's necessarily a "terrorist scheme," there are plenty of other reasons for their perfidy. Sorry I don't have the Amazon.com 1-800 number, but I have printed Caiman.com's customer service number. Use it liberally before they disconnect it.

BV and ARTCommunications have announced that Enforta has acquired a 51 percent share in ARTCommunications Ltd.

ARTCommunications is a wireless broadband operators in Russia serving the countries two largest cities of Moscow and St Petersburg as well as Moscow Region. Upon completing this investment, Enforta broadband services are now available in a total of 18 Russian regional capital cities as well as the growing Moscow Region market. 

Both companies will have the ability to provide services to their customers within the expanded footprint. In fact, "The acquisition now gives us wireless broadband service capability in 18 cities," an Enforta official said. 

"Enforta's initial strategy was to focus on Russia's underserved regional markets, but to service our growing base of enterprise customers we needed to extend our service area to Moscow and St Petersburg earlier than originally planned," said Lee Sparkman, President of Enforta. "Due to the absence of additional radio spectrum, the only means to enter these two cities was through acquisition."

"It is clear that scale will be critical for success in the wireless broadband business and we wanted to affiliate with a company of like mind and objective", said Alexander Ohotnikov, co-founder and General Director of ARTCommunications. "The joining of our two companies will clearly benefit both our current and future customers."

Enforta has experienced rapid growth this past year both building and acquiring broadband wireless operators. In May Enforta announced the acquisition of "Netprovodov," the largest wireless broadband operator in Russia's Ural region. This was followed by the acquisition of Sky Telecom in Rostov and Mir TV in Ufa during August. 

Simultaneously, the company has constructed its own operations in 12 cities, and company officials claim the inclusion of ARTCommunications gives Enforta" the largest wireless broadband footprint in Russia."   

Enforta plans to further extend services to a total of 30 cities by the end of 2007. "Actually, we have found that the wireless broadband products match well with requirements of SME and enterprise customers," Sparkman said. "And those customers are constantly pushing us to expand the footprint. So while we were planning 30 cities by end of 2007, we have already launched operations in 18.  [This is] faster than we had originally planned, but we have our investors' full support."

Enforta was formed in October, 2003 with the objective to provide broadband services using Wi-Max and other advanced technologies in Russia. Enforta is owned by Sumitomo Corporation, Baring Vostok Capital Partners, and its management team.

ArtCommunications Ltd was founded in 1995 and is in the Russian Internet and broadband access markets. In 2002 ArtCommunications began operation of its wireless broadband network under the trade mark "5G," constructed using pre-Wi-Max equipment provided by InfiNet Wireless, and company officials say today 5G has "the largest wireless footprint in Moscow, St Petersburg, and Moscow region." 

Forget Mozart writing a symphony or opera or whatever when he was eight, do you ever hear it performed? No, wonder why not? Because it sucks, that's why not. First Coffee's impressed with today's birthday boy, George Gershwin, born in 1898, who wrote Rhapsody In Blue when he was 26. Now that's music to be proud of.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Eric Dolphy's great Out To Lunch CD:

My family plans to travel from Istanbul to see family in America for Thanksgiving. So a couple weeks ago we searched out plane tickets online, using Expedia, Travelocity, the usual suspects. We settled on buying our tickets via Orbitz, a company we've never used before. But we hadn't heard any reason not to use them.

Not because of any problems with the other companies, we've used them and have been satisfied with their service. When I went to Munich a couple months ago I used Travelocity, when my wife and I went to Slovenia last month we used Expedia. Sure they had good prices, but customer service matters to us as well.

This time we found the best price through Orbitz, so we bought our tickets, a little over $3,000 for a family of five, which isn't bad for five round-trip tickets between Istanbul and Washington, D.C., but for us it's not chump change either. We weren't expecting any customer service issues to arise, but as I said, we'd never used the company before.

In other words, they had the opportunity to delight us with their service, show us they valued us as customers, win us for repeat business and establish a level of loyalty. Orbitz had their CRM Golden Opportunity #1 to delight us as new customers, but they skunked it. Badly. But they still have a chance:

We booked round-trip flights on Alitalia -- Istanbul to Milan, Milan to Boston, Boston to D.C. Returning it's Washington-Atlanta, Atlanta-Milan, Milan-Istanbul. We leave and arrive at reasonable times, no 4:00 a.m. flights. Orbitz charged our credit card, which meant, we assumed, that we had the seat confirmations Orbitz offered at that price.

We like it that Orbitz lets you go into the seating charts for the flights and pick your seats. Traveling with young children that's important, we picked seats together, of course. We haven't seen that feature on all online travel sites, it's a good added value offering.

Looking over our flight itinerary -- Orbitz also does a good job listing out flights and confirmation status clearly and easily -- we noticed the flights from Atlanta to Milan weren't confirmed, the seating was "pending." My wife figured she'd forgotten to pick the seats, carefully followed all the procedures for doing so and re-entered the information.

After a couple days there was still no confirmation. Puzzled, she sent an e-mail to the customer service address on the site, which said that they respond to inquiries in three hours. No response, days later. She tried reserving seats on the flight again, noting that there were fewer available now. Naturally this caused stress for us.

Still no confirmation from Orbitz, which had already taken our money for the tickets, but which had not provided the confirmed seats they had promised in exchange for the money. This was now a full-fledged customer service problem.

A couple days ago I wrote an e-mail to Orbitz's three-hour response address, clearly -- and nicely -- laying out the issue: You've taken full price out of our credit card, but you haven't provided the service you promised. We're still not confirmed on the crucial trans-Atlantic leg of our return trip, and as wonderful as the Atlanta airport is, we don't want to live there. Please provide the service you have already accepted our payment for.

No response. Not even an automated "we received your e-mail" kicked back. There are even fewer seats available now, we've noticed, and not five together anymore, which means some poor citizens are going to have to sit next to individual children. Now we're not only stressed over missing our flights we've paid for, but over whether Orbitz gives a damn or not, or is even going to do anything to solve the problem they've caused us.

So now Orbitz's terrible customer service has put them in a particularly tetchy place, that of satisfying a dissatisfied customer. It's also a prime place for cementing customer loyalty: Resolving customer complaints in a manner to win the customer is one of the most powerful aspects of good CRM; there are few areas of customer service so rich in possibility for building customer loyalty.

First Coffee remembers CRM veteran Dick Lee telling a story about when he was traveling he stayed at a well-known upscale chain's hotel, and had a problem at checkout, and the property's manager took personal care of the issue, resolved the problem, and pleased Dick to the point where Dick would stay at the chain again. I asked how the manager knew he had a problem.

"I was standing at the front desk screaming," he said.

In other words, a dissatisfied customer stood at its front desk, but a satisfied customer walked out -- and back in the hotel chain again. It's an axiom of CRM that one of the best times to win customer loyalty is in this situation -- when there's a problem. Resolve the problem in a manner that shows you value the customer, that you're willing to do what it takes to please aforesaid customer, and odds are good that you will impress and keep that customer. Blow it for the sake of a short-term savings and kiss the long-term customer profits goodbye.

CRM consultant Skip Liebman notes, "say the wrong thing to a dissatisfied customer and the encounter can turn from bad to worse in a few seconds. In today’s competitive environment, whether face-to-face or phone-to-phone, the key to increased sales is maintaining good relationships with all customers including the most challenging customers." As well-known wise man and customer service expert King Solomon wrote in Proverbs, a word fitly spoken is like an apple of gold.

True. And how much more so when the problem isn't the customer's but the vendor's. Who knows why Orbitz didn't give us the confirmed seats we paid for? Lots of things could have gone wrong, I understand that. But now, having pointed out the problem to them, I expect it to be corrected. If they do a good job correcting it I'll certainly book travel with them again. If they don't, I -- or you -- would be an idiot to use them again.

Customers understand everyone makes mistakes, we don't expect perfect service. We do expect mistakes to be corrected, especially mistakes which are the company's fault which cost us money. Like about $3,000 and a trip to America to see family over Thanksgiving. There's a lot hanging in the balance for both us and Orbitz. See, in CRM, the problem isn't the problem. How you handle the problem is the problem.

A few years ago Ritz-Carlton got it and authorized any employee to make any decision costing up to $2,000 to solve any customer issue on the spot, no "Gee, let me pass this on to the manager and we'll get back to you" garbage. That new policy pleased a lot of customers and won Ritz-Carlton a lot of customer loyalty. The policy itself was cited in the Ritz-Carlton's 1999 Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award.

Because in CRM price isn't all that matters, even when you're in a business like online travel, where price is frequently a prime consideration. Dick Lee has also told me about his "Anybody But Northwest" flight policy, and other people have told me they would pay higher fares to fly favored carriers -- Continental and Southwest, among others. 

That's the category my family falls in. Sure price is a factor, even though we're getting silly rich working for TMCnet, of course, like everyone else here is -- you should see Tracey Schelmetic's new heliport at her place in Greenwich -- we still like to save a nickel here and there. But only up to a certain point.

Because customer service matters. My wife is from New Zealand so we fly there on occasion, and if Emirates Air costs a few bucks more than a lesser airline, we'll pay the extra and fly Emirates. The bigger the price tag the less small differences in price matter and the more good customer service matters, and we like Emirates' customer service.

So now Orbitz has CRM Golden Opportunity #2: Solving a customer service problem in a way that turns a disgruntled customer into a loyal customer. Not receiving the confirmations we paid for is turning us into stressed, screwed over, dissatisfied customers of Orbitz -- and the one thing they'd better not do is say "Contact the carrier" or some crap like that. The carrier didn't ding our credit card.

So we'll let you know how things progress, and if Orbitz has successfully practiced good CRM and, practicing proactive customer service, taken advantage of a crucial opportunity to transform a dissatisfied customer into a loyal customer. Stay tuned.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Miles Davis's Sketches Of Spain:

Not a bad day for musical birthdays today -- 1926 John Coltrane, 1930 Ray Charles and 1949 Bruce Springsteen.

Wrapping up the news for the week, bear in mind that a couple days ago Support Fusion, a vendor of web-based Helpdesk, CRM, and Business Process products, announced the immediate availability of its no-cost, web-based Helpdesk Application Service for commercial and non-profit organizations

Traditionally companies of all sizes have "struggled with the overall value proposition" when it comes to implementing helpdesk systems largely due to cost and resources, company officials say, claiming that Support Fusion "mitigates cost and resource risks by providing a no-cost option along with the convenience of an application service."

Along with Free web-based Helpdesk, Support Fusion offers a no-cost, no obligation "needs assessment" to help companies understand their business requirements, and will provide assistance and startup training to get users and system administrators off to a successful start.

"Our Free system is the perfect way to level the playing ground when it comes to providing a feature-rich, easy-to-use system for issue and task tracking," company officials say in a clear marketing pitch to the "little guy" out there. The product's Professional version with additional features can be added on to the basic system for "as little as $9.95 per user per month," too.

Effective immediately, users can click to the main Support Fusion Web site and register online to receive their Free system -- no cost, no obligation, officials claim. The first 100 users to register will also be entered into a drawing to receive 12 months of the Professional add-on features at absolutely no cost.

Unipower Solutions, a UK vendor of software that handles all customer-facing retail and wholesale activities, has joined Symbol Technologies' PartnerSelect Independent Software Provider Partner Program as an ISV member.

Symbol's PartnerSelect ISV Partner Program provides qualified ISVs the opportunity for joint marketing, demand generation and collaboration with Symbol and other PartnerSelect members.

ISVs do not resell Symbol products, focusing instead on relationship development, application software and professional services.

Unipower's software also integrates with Microsoft Dynamics NAV to provide a complete end-to-end retail and wholesale product including: EPoS, supply chain management, service management, in-store back office, financials, merchandising, eCommerce, distribution & warehousing, mobile, business intelligence, CRM, HR and payroll.

Joining Symbol's PartnerSelect ISV Partner Program complements Unipower's "established strategy" of "building relationships with complementary software vendors and other organizations involved in the retail sector," company officials say.

Word of advice to Larry C.: Look, stop running that same tired, rewritten "Lean" press release flogging that same tired Practices report. It's tiresome, nobody's impressed and it makes you look desperate.

Didn't know there was a CRM Hall of Fame, did you? Yankee Group has announced that Sheryl Kingstone, director of Yankee Group's Customer-Centric Strategies Decision Service, has won the 2006 Influential Leader Award and, as a result, is inducted in the CRM Hall of Fame.

This year's slate of honorees includes Kingstone, Joe Montana, Willie Nelson, Shiloh Pitt, Stephen King and whoever the guy was who came up with Velcro, who by law should be in every Hall of Fame that exists.

There will be a gala Hall invitation-only black tie banquet at the Ritz Carlton in New York tonight at eight. First Coffee will be there reporting on what the backs of the heads of the celebrities look like from behind police barriers across the street.

The CRM Influential Leader award is presented to "industry individuals who have demonstrated leadership and significant influence in the marketplace within the past year," and the CRM Hall of Fame award is a "special recognition for individuals who have made a significant impact and displayed leadership year after year."

First Coffee has gotten in the CRM Hall of Fame, and hey, so can you the next time you're in Duluth with an extra $2.50 you don't know what to do with. The standing exhibit includes a transcription of the first customer complaint ever recorded, the first customer response card ever placed on a Denny's table, a picture of Dick Lee with long hair at Woodstock and Bob Thompson's sophomore year of high school report card.

"This acknowledgement of our analyst Sheryl Kingstone affirms her established leadership and reputation in the CRM space," said Eugene Signorini, Yankee Group wireless/ mobile enterprise solutions vice president.

Kingstone joins former winners such as Larry Ellison, Brad Wilson, the general manager of Microsoft CRM and 2005 Hall of Fame inductee Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com.

Samples of Kingstone's research include "Marketing and Sales Effectiveness Vendors Gain Momentum Using the Business Web," September 2006, and "Customer Centricity: Improving the Customer Experience," August 2006.

Scott Smith, President and Chief Executive Office of TGI, has announced that IQ Consulting Services has been added to TGI's Platinum Partner program.

IQCS's experience in the plastics industry (okay, the scene from The Graduate, everybody together now: "Ben -- I just want to say one word to you -- just one word. Are you listening?" Dustin Hoffman: "Yes I am." "Plastics.") and in WMS software will "truly compliment our partner program," Smith said.

IQCS's team specializes in providing manufacturing and distribution related consulting services for the automotive, plastics, and life science vertical markets and consults for ERP implementations.

"We set out to find an ERP product to support order to cash integration, and specific industry requirements for small to mid size companies," said Steve Crapser, President and Chief Executive Officer of IQCS, adding that TGI was their "clear selection."

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first gallon or so of coffee this morning, welcome to Radio KCRM 98.6, the classic hard rock edition, brought to you courtesy of Guns 'n' Roses' Appetite For Destruction:

I used to do a little but a little wouldn't do it

So the little got more and more

Good, good news for you campers out there, you might've heard that The Most Dangerous Man In Show Business, Howard Stern, is disgruntled that nobody's listening to him on his uncensored Sirius shows, and is rather hankering for his days of commercial broadcast radio, where sure, he couldn't say (deleted), or (deleted) and certainly not (deleted), but where more than eighteen or so people heard anything he said at all.

So we are pleased, very pleased, oh so pleased to welcome Howard Stern to Radio KCRM 98.6, the classic hard rock edition, take it away Howard!

Stern: Awright, you (deleted) (deleted), let's (deleted) today, all the CR(deleted)M news that's fit to (deleted) (deleted), and you know what I'm (deleted) talking about. First up, we have the (deleted) --

Hey, thanks Howard, sorry about the, ah, mike problems there, I'm sure the engineer'll get it sorted out, but until then we'll fill in here. I believe Howard was about to tell you of RWD Technologies, Inc., a company that provides human performance improvement products and services, which has released their latest CD, a new suite of services designed to help companies maximize their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) investment while "improving their overall customer experience" and slamming out crunching metal riffs.

A twenty-four city tour opening for Audioslave is in the works.

RWD CRM Optimization Services will help organizations align the three critical components of CRM success, according to band members -- customer experience, customer strategy and employee performance -- and "incorporate best practices and improve return on investment (ROI)."

According to research firm and rock critics Gartner, Inc., " ... the success rates of mature [CRM] sales force technologies remain stubbornly disappointing (or low), with few markets exceeding 50 percent... Of course we blame this on all that JoJo and Justin Timberlake sludge, but this trend also suggests that shortcomings and inefficiencies aren't necessarily technological, but rather organizational, particularly with change management, process definition and project management skills employed for initiatives."

RWD's CRM Optimization Services improve ROI and customer experience by integrating the human components of CRM and business strategy and by, like, turning it up to eleven.

RWD's CRM Optimization Services include the RWD CRM Performance Aligned with Customer Expectations (PACE), which is a six-week analysis that provides a clear action plan for CRM success and some really heavy power chording in fifths progressions. During the PACE analysis, RWD assesses the five dimensions of CRM success -- customer experience, customer strategy, business process design, technology selection, and individual band members' performances, with particular attention given to on-stage solos.

Industry best practices are then aligned with CRM needs in an action plan for success.

There's also the CRM Certification eLearning Courses. Together with BPT Partners, a leading authority on CRM and one of the top-grossing touring acts over the summer, RWD offers access to CRM experts through these courses. This first-of-its-kind Internet-based training series is based on CRM at the Speed of Light, the best selling book by Paul Greenberg and the successful global seminar series and concert tour of the same name, with Axl Rose and Slash appearing onstage for two shows with Greenberg at the Palladium.

"Too often the decision to roll out a CRM solution comes with little consideration to the 'human factor,'" said Paul Greenberg, CRM consultant, author and lead guitarist. "Businesses must see CRM as a philosophy and business strategy. Technology's role is to improve human interactions in a business environment and enable workers to improve productivity and customer advocacy and really rock the rafters."

"When it comes to CRM success, those organizations that focus first on the human factor will see greater ROI than those who lead with technology," said Patricia Begley, Vice President of Strategic Business Initiatives and bassist, formerly of Limp Bizkit who's also toured with the Black-Eyed Peas and Hinder. "RWD believes that CRM done right improves a customer-facing employee's ability to build customer trust, loyalty, a strong set list and, ultimately, account profitability."

RWD Live At Budokan will be released in October.

CRM vendor and longtime summer rock festival attraction Open Solutions Inc. has announced a double bill tour with Rosetta Technologies Corporation, a Tampa-based band and vendor of secure enterprise printing products. The tour, which kicks off next week, will provide enhanced software and MICR laser printers for the printing and management of image replacement documents (IRDs) or substitute checks for the new Check 21 initiative.

With the addition of the Rosetta Technologies functionality to Open Solutions' imaging and item processing lineup, banks and credit unions processing items in-house can print cash letter and IRDs.

"This relationship is unique in that Open Solutions is not only going to resell Rosetta Technologies solutions in a traditional value-added reseller capacity, but Open Solutions is already an end-user of our IRDPrint products in their item processing sites," said Rob Hullar, president and rhythm guitarist of Rosetta Technologies. "On this tour we'll alternate opening and closing bands nightly."

Hullar added that the tour would concentrate on mid-market cities and venues in conjunction with a greatest hits CD to be released next month.

"Imaging has the power to dramatically reduce operating expenses for community financial institutions," said Mark Ryan, vice president, general manager and lead vocalist for Open Solutions Imaged Payment Technologies. Ryan attributed the success of Open Solutions to their "wide influences, everything from Muddy Waters and Hank Williams to AC/DC and ABBA. Seriously, those Swedes knew how to write songs, shame about the Spandex, though."

Mike Nicastro, Open Solutions' SVP, drummer and chief marketing officer said his band's relationship with Rosetta Technologies "allows our fans the opportunity to move even further into the electronic payments world."

The German telecom operator and heavy metal band O2 has chosen goth rockers TietoEnator (come on, it really sounds like a goth band, doesn't it?) to upgrade its current customer service platform by migrating it to Voice over IP (VoIP).

O2 decided to implement an IP contact center suite tightly integrated into its business applications which, the band's agent says, will help them "lower total cost of ownership and to improve time-to-market for new products and services, creating a stronger bond between the band and their loyal headbanging fan base here in Germany and Europe."

As general contractor and system integrator TietoEnator is going to develop the new innovative customer services IT-solution on the basis of network and contact center applications from Cisco and Genesys, and is negotiating with the Rolling Stones to open some of their North American tour dates.

All customer contact media, such as telephone (mobile and fixed), customer self-service, e-mail, fax, SMS, MMS, the Web and written correspondence, will be supported by the IP contact center solution, say members of O2, who also complain of being frequently mistaken for Irish rockers U2.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Miles Davis' landmark jazz album "Bitches Brew." It's considered a "landmark" by critics, personally I like what he did before this album better than what he did after it.

Bigcheeseware has announced a 30-day trial for businesses of what it calls its "Total CRM Design."

As more and more online consumers take advantage of free trial services, Bigcheeseware officials say, Internet-based businesses like to offer free trial sessions.

Some more "free" than others, of course, in First Coffee's opinion the truly devious ones are like Sports Illustrated saying "Four Free Issues!" and it turning out that if you subscribe first, they'll throw on four free issues at the end of your subscription term, not that they'll give you four free issues to decide if you like the magazine or not.

"Free trials differ in terms of use and the period of use," Bigcheeseware officials note. "From kids’ and adults’ computer games to anti-virus software and CRMs, free trials are one way of taking hold of a business’ target market."

Which of course is what Bigcheeseware is doing. "Bigcheeseware’s countless features make it one of the most powerful tools in live chat support software," company officials claim, saying it's also "packed with features absent in other support software," to wit, Instant Message and Email Notification of Dropped Chat and Chat on Queue, a Web Call Back System, Live customer support agents -- hey, there's a new one!

There's a Customizable Proactive Chat Total CRM Solution, as well as a Real Time Agent Performance Reporting, which lets you "evaluate your live support agents with Bigcheeseware’s Performance Agent Scores feature."

Bigcheeseware’s promotional 30-day free trial registration runs on secure pages, company officials say, adding that registration information is kept private and is used only for verifying purposes. Bigcheeseware free trial is enhanced with the most basic live chat features.

Bigcheeseware combines voice, e-mail and chat technology with real live customer support agents in real-time interaction.

Callidus Software Inc., a vendor of Enterprise Incentive Management, has announced that Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, which calls itself -- and First Coffee has no reason to disagree -- "the nation's leading fraternal benefit society with nearly 3 million members," has selected Callidus' TrueComp Manager and TrueInformation software modules to "automate the organization's administration, reporting and analysis of incentive compensation."

Thrivent Financial officials says they chose the Callidus Software to "reduce operating costs and to improve time to market with new products and compensation changes." The organization will implement Callidus Software's TrueComp Manager and TrueInformation software modules for its 2,500 financial representatives.

Thrivent and its subsidiaries offer financial services including insurance, annuities and mutual funds, as well as a broad range of educational and volunteer opportunities.

"We believe that the TrueComp EIM software will provide better support for our sales teams, support our cost reduction goals and provide significantly improved reporting and analysis capabilities to help us better monitor our business," said Mark Coleman, vice president, field administration of Thrivent Financial.

EIM software products are used to allow employees and channel distribution partners to be compensated accurately and on time.

"Thrivent Financial is positioned to achieve improved alignment of incentive compensation with member engagement, a key metric for a fraternal benefit society," explained Leslie Stretch, senior vice president worldwide sales for Callidus Software.

Hansen Information Technologies, a vendor of software for the public sector market, has announced that it has been awarded a $1.1 million contract to provide the Hansen 8 Community Development and Regulation product to the City of Sarasota, Florida.

The four phases of the CDR solution will include Licensing and Escrow, Code Compliance, Building and Permits, and Development Application Review.

Also included in the deployment plan will be a mobile product and Hansen's DynamicPORTAL. DynamicPORTAL will give the citizens of Sarasota the ability to input service requests, apply for permits, schedule inspections, and more.

"Our previous system was expensive and difficult to use, and limited both our reporting ability and our capacity to adapt to change," said Kevin Wells, Manager of Electronic Government Services for the City of Sarasota. So in February 2005 the city began searching for a CDR product.

The business of government is increasing, evidently, and much to the chagrin of us civil libertarians everywhere: The City of Sarasota serves over 58,000 citizens and 22,000 properties. In 2005, the City issued over 5,600 permits, managed over 2,300 code enforcement cases, and processed over 6,100 occupational licenses -- up from 5,300 permits, 1,800 cases, and 5,800 licenses in 2004.

The city expects the Hansen product to help streamline the permitting process and make information transparent and directly accessible to developers, contractors, and owners. City officials also hope it will reduce the total cost of construction by reducing downtime from inspections, and increase the effectiveness of citizens' tax dollars by automating routine tasks, and that it will "significantly" decrease the cost and increase the effectiveness of governance by integrating information across the city.

Aspect Software, Inc., has announced the general availability of Aspect Quality Management™ 2.5.1, a product billed as "simplifying the call recording and quality management process."

The latest release of Aspect Quality Management includes a tight integration with Aspect Spectrum ACD, which means the quality management and full-time recording is available to all users of the Aspect Signature ACDs, including Aspect CallCenter ACD.

Aspect Quality Management, from the company's Contact Center Performance Optimization product line, provides capabilities for recording, reviewing and reporting on customer interactions. Many companies use that information to help improve agent performance and job satisfaction, increase customer satisfaction and revenue generation, and better manage overall costs.

The new integration with Aspect Spectrum ACD, as well as the existing integration with Aspect CallCenter ACD, can probably benefit contact centers using the Aspect Software Signature ACDs, including lower cost of ownership, ease of use, improved partitioning of call access and security, and more power to find calls of interest quickly.

The recording and compression technologies used in such products do make it possible to capture considerably more calls, allowing contact centers to implement 100 percent recording. Such systems perform audio and screen recording of the full interaction, with easy access to all call segments when calls are transferred to observe the complete customer experience.

Good systems (such as this one) even allow for the customer to be automatically surveyed after the call, using tools that any contact center manager can administer, removing the need for IT resources when new surveys are desired.

Brian Derr, vice president of quality management solutions at Aspect Software explained that being able to configure call recording rules based on existing ACD definitions, and then monitor every segment of a call as it is transferred "while receiving tightly integrated customer feedback when the satisfaction survey is completed," helps to identify areas for improvement with the agent, "the overall interaction process, and the enterprise as a whole."

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the crying and wailing of the 300 or so songs I deleted from the iTunes music library on my laptop this morning for space considerations… screeching and caterwauling… Weird Al Yankovic and The Eels, Beatle duplicates and Romanian gypsy music… all equal in the end:

Attunity has announced the immediate availability of Attunity InFocus 2.0, a software platform for configuring, deploying, running and managing Workplace Applications. What company officials are billing as "an industry first for customers," it provides ways to improve how activities of an organization are managed, promoting "more effective working of operational, management and key knowledge-workers towards the goal of high-performing management."

Attunity InFocus has been designed to help organizations focus on their most valuable assets -- people -- using their knowledge and experience, and facilitating their "natural" work style by using a new breed of software application known as Workplace Applications, company officials explain.

The way they explain it, drawing on underlying technologies such as personal productivity, communication and collaboration tools, as well as search, data access, business intelligence, content and knowledge management, "Attunity InFocus now brings together, on a single platform, all the necessary capabilities for robust management-focused Workplace Applications."

So if that's the kind of thing you've been waiting for, well, this is your lucky day. It seems to be most popular among companies in highly regulated industries such as Financial Services, and Supply Chain industries such as manufacturing and logistics.

According to Tom Austin, VP and Gartner Fellow, "Maximum long-term growth in most enterprises will come from workplace investments that focus on helping people do what isn't amenable to traditional structured techniques (automation), but that can improve the ability of those people to do what is uniquely human -- deal with, explore and analyze the unknown or unexpected; innovate or create new approaches, processes, products or market segments; and collaborate with others to help them do such things."

By augmenting how people do the non-routine, instead of just trying to automate it, Austin said, organizations with the right mind-set and capabilities can "dramatically improve their overall agility." This is the target market for Attunity's product, evidently.

Leave it to some second-rate French hack to slam Steve Irwin on the day of Irwin's memorial service. Jean-Michel Cousteau said he disagrees with Irwin's hands-on approach to nature television.

Irwin would "interfere with nature, jump on animals, grab them, hold them, and have this very, very spectacular, dramatic way of presenting things… I think it's very misleading," said the man who doesn't have to work at a real job because he had a famous father. "You don't touch nature, you just look at it. And that's why I'm still alive. I've been diving over 61 years -- a lot many more years that he's been alive -- and I don't mess with nature."

So Cousteau has never touched a fish, a sponge, a clam or any other "nature." He's never interacted with nature, just… looked at it. No wonder he never seems to be enjoying himself or what he's doing and his shows are dry and boring, whereas Irwin got more pleasure and enjoyment out of any afternoon than Cousteau's gotten out of the past 25 years.

Of course Cousteau's petulance wouldn't be due to the fact that Irwin's shows -- as well as his own father Jacques's -- were vastly more popular than his. And his tastelessness in reminding everyone that he's been diving longer than Steve Irwin was alive is unbelievable, even by Gallic standards. I bet he wonders why everyone thinks the French are a bunch of arrogant, insensitive clods, too. Sorry, claudes.

CA, which used to be Computer Associates, Inc. but wishes to be merely CA these days, has announced that it has extended its agreement with SAP AG to provide SAP NetWeaver customers access to Introscope, an application performance management product from CA’s Wily Technology Division.

Under the expanded agreement, SAP Solution Manager customers will receive a SAP-specific license to use read-only Introscope capabilities within their enterprises for SAP-developed dashboards and instrumentation.

SAP customers interested in customizing or adding additional Introscope functionalities may license those capabilities directly from CA’s Wily Technology Division.

“We selected Introscope for SAP Active Global Support because it offers best-in-class Java diagnostics capabilities with the lowest overhead in the industry,” said Dr. Uwe Hommel, executive vice president, SAP Active Global Support, SAP AG.

SAP has used Introscope since January of 2005 to diagnose and resolve application performance problems in customer deployments, as well as for SAP internal deployments such as SAP’s corporate portal and in-house development systems.

Introscope is a product for monitoring and optimizing the performance of complex web applications. It delivers real-time visibility into production environments, enabling IT staff to detect, diagnose and resolve problems before the business is impacted.

Drive Medical's corporate offices are located in Port Washington, New York and operate from three 125,000-square-foot distribution centers located in Hauppauge, New York; Pico Rivera, California and Atlanta.

The new technology will "streamline Drive Medical's operational processes in a fully integrated system," according to Ki officials.

"The new software includes a fully integrated warehouse management system, automated supply chain management function and state-of-the-art customer relationship management (CRM) system," according to Richard Kolodny, Executive VP of Drive Medical.

Ki Solutions uses SAP software to create the prepackaged, customizable mySAP All-in-One product. Ki4 Wholesale Distribution includes preconfigured best practice scenarios, tools and accelerators.

PacificNet Inc., a China-based vendor of CRM and telemarketing services, announced today that its PacificNet Epro subsidiary has been selected by NanJing Airlines International Ticketing Center to provide CRM consulting, and Call Center Operation Management Training services.

This comprehensive call center and CRM consulting project consists of best practices in Customer Service, Critical Success Factors on Customer Affinity, Communication Skills, Five Steps of Inbound Telemarketing and Customer Service, Practical Skills of Telemarketing and Customer Service, Complaint Handling Skills, and Customer Service Agent Role Playing Sessions.

Mr. Tu Jing Wei, Head of NanJing Airlines International Ticketing Center said the design of the training is "in close relationship with our practical works, which gives us a better understanding of how to skillfully manage our customer service."

Tony Tong, Chairman and CEO of PacificNet, said there's an "evolving and increasingly competitive" nature of the financial services industry in China. He believes that today, "consumers choose a provider in China not solely based upon price, but upon a number of factors including CRM service, loyalty, and retention programs. This trend has created the demand for and deployment of large scale customer contact centers."

Tong said his company believes that the CRM contact center has "emerged as a major new competitive advantage for market leaders in China. To become a market leader in China, whether as a product or service provider, a company has no choice but to devote extensive resources to CRM and customer service."

He also mentioned the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, saying "there will be tremendous changes taking place in Beijing and throughout China."

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Electro-Shock Blues by The Eels. The Eels is essentially the vehicle for E, born Mark Oliver Everett, and the guy writes interesting, if dark, songs. Hey you probably would too if you were in his moccasins -- his father was a brilliant physicist who originated the many worlds theory of quantum physics, and died at 51 from heavy drinking. Mark's sister later committed suicide, his mother died of cancer, eliminating the last of his immediate family, and if that weren't enough, his cousin was a stewardess on the 9/11 flight that hit the Pentagon. So his music isn't exactly ABBA, although his songs were used on the Shrek soundtrack:

So much e-mail to sort through here, the life of a busy columnist…

Hi David – I have an interesting topic for you, let me know if we could tell you more.

APA Cables & Networks have now focused on bringing broadband equipment to rural areas throughout the Midwest as opposed to bustling metropolises – why? Because, surprisingly that’s where the better technology is…Smaller, more rural communities are starting to outpace larger cities with the adoption of all fiber networks.  What used to be a void is now turning into a huge market for vendors like APA – my associate can discuss this anomaly; how rural areas are leading the evolved broadband charge -- I thought it might be good fodder for a chat.

Let me know, we also have a slew of news we will be announcing at the show … thanks!

Might be, that's one thing First Coffee's been watching for with the explosion of broadband. When the Internet arrived I thought that would democratize geography, East Slingshot, Nebraska was now on a level playing field, communicatively, with San Francisco and had better schools and more affordable housing. Of course the dispersing of business never really happened, because, well, there were good reasons why San Francisco got crowded and East Slingshot didn't in the first place.

What happened was people moved a bit further out, a day's commute from Boston type of thing, for the slightly better schools and slightly more affordable housing in Waltham.

But now with broadband, it reminds me of when, thanks to Ronald Reagan being right and the Democrats being wrong about the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall came down, the 1950s-era infrastructures of Eastern Europe simply leapfrogged the '60s, '70s and '80s directly into the '90s, and you had small towns in Romania with the highest density of cell users anywhere in the world, etc.

The same thing could happen in rural areas with broadband, sleepy carriers can leapfrog directly to the best technology available and don't have as much invested in legacy hardware or software as the bigger boys do. It'll be interesting to watch.

Just saw your article about Zimbra 3.2 beta and am confused as we were just about to upgrade to version 4.0. Has there been a fork or something?

Hi Ewan, let me look at the info again… it's definitely Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 3.2 Beta, they're introducing something called the Zimbra Assistant and keyboard navigation, as well as other beta features. Hope that helps.

Today, CA announced an extended agreement with SAP AG to provide SAP NetWeaver customers access to the top application performance management solution, Wily Introscope. Wily and SAP share a common goal of helping customers deploy web applications rapidly and performing optimally. Through this agreement, all SAP customers can now realize the benefits of Introscope without additional license fees.

As one of our important contacts we’d appreciate the opportunity to brief you on the significance of today’s announcement. I will follow-up with you shortly to gauge your interest; however feel free to contact me directly to coordinate a briefing. I look forward to your feedback. The full release is also embedded below for your convenience.

Thanks and best regards,

"CA" being Computer Associates, of course, the company founded by Charles Wang in 1976, but for some strange reason you have to dig pretty deep in their Web site, back in the History timeline, to learn that "CA" stands for "Computer Associates." That's the only place I saw it mentioned on the site.

And an e-mail about my experience with the virtual rep, Anna at IKEA,

I think you missed her showing you the “garden tables”, no link is provided, but the home page changes automatically.

You are, of course, right that asking questions outside of the knowledgebase of words and phrases results in no answer or a best guess.

The systems are initially built around FAQs but they are continually improved based on the questions asked. So perhaps Anna in Istanbul will know about the menu if you ask her enough times.

Some clients’ spot check the “correct answers” to make sure they are really answering “the question” and that drops the percentage correct by about 3 percent, but still over 85 percent.

The volume of questions answered by Lingubots is increasing so it looks like customers are voting with their fingers. The sites with an avatar always have higher volumes.

From a business point of view every question answered by a Lingubot instead of a call center saves them money.

This technology has been around for a while but it is only in the last couple of years that we have really achieved a momentum, with both end users and businesses adopting the technology. Some clients have linked answers to appropriate FAQs and navigation to web pages. Lingubots are becoming more prominent because clients are  responding to the natural language dialogue, instead of menus or search boxes.

If you are interested and have an hour, we would be happy to show you how Lingubot works and where it is going.

I’m sure virtual person (avatar) answer bots help a lot of people, but my point was that static FAQ boxes help a lot of people and don't raise unrealistic expectations of human-style interaction the way avatars do. And while it's true initially that "every question answered by a Lingubot instead of a call center saves them money," what happens then is that the easy questions, the ones any minimum-wage hack can answer, are cleared off via Web site FAQs.

Which means the ones that get to the call center are the harder ones, the ones that take real brains and knowledge, so you need higher-quality people in your call center then, not just any old job-seeker, and it gets more expensive to hire them. I've heard of doctors who make $120,000 a year working at pharmaceutical and other high-end health companies' call centers.

Hey Dave, you see this news?

SAN FRANCISCO - A type of fish so common that practically every American kid who ever dropped a fishing line and a bobber into a pond has probably caught one is being enlisted in the fight against terrorism.

San Francisco, New York, Washington and other big cities are using bluegills -- also known as sunfish or bream -- as a sort of canary in a coal mine to safeguard their drinking water.

Small numbers of the fish are kept in tanks constantly replenished with water from the municipal supply, and sensors in each tank work around the clock to register changes in the breathing, heartbeat and swimming patterns of the bluegills that occur in the presence of toxins.

Sounds like a great idea. No doubt The New York Times is already protesting that this is illegal and gives us an unfair advantage over terrorists, and the first time a bluegill dies PETA will condemn the government’s use of fish in this manner.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Eels' Daisies Of The Galaxy:

Further, the new beta features an expanded set of Zimlets -- customizable Web mash-ups -- such as the customizable flight tracker and RSS reader, as part of the standard download.

Zimbra Assistant is an optional feature that allows users to interact with ZCS by typing requests in language which is more user-friendly than in a traditional pop-up form. For example, by launching Zimbra Assistant and typing "appointment," followed by the details of the meeting, an appointment is automatically created. Zimbra Assistant works with calendar, e-mail and any Zimlet, such as the SMS Zimlet for sending text messages or the salesforce.com Zimlet for adding leads to a CRM system.

Zimbra Assistant provides users with feedback as they enter their requests; for instance, Zimbra Assistant displays potential conflicts when a date is entered for an appointment.
ZCS 3.2 Beta also supports full keyboard navigation. Users can navigate the ZCS using the arrow keys and other keyboard commands that are standard on many desktop applications but not often available in Web-based applications. 

Rebecca Gill, vice-president of Technology Group International, has suggested that "ERP vendors must support organic producers in food processing and manufacturing, as well as full distribution management throughout the entire supply chain."

Indeed the record keeping required to authenticate "organic" status is significant, costly, and comprehensive. Gill detailed some of the key features technology solutions must provide to ensure organic standards, such as record keeping for organic raw material purchases, country of origin tracking of purchases, organic supplier tracking, separate organic product storage to prevent product commingling (hate when that happens), hazardous chemical tracking and reporting to prevent contact with prohibited substances as well as ERP's specialty processes -- online processing procedures to ensure adhere to compliance standards and online record keeping and audit trails for fast compliance reporting.

Organic food must be at least 95 percent organic ingredients and list which ingredients are organic to use the USDA seal and must list the certifying agent. Made with organic ingredients means at least 70 percent organic ingredients are contained in the food product and it too must list which ingredients are organic, yet is not permitted to use the USDA seal; it also must list the certifying agent.

You can imagine the record-keeping involved. Hello, ERP.

Some organic ingredients indicate the finished food product is less than 70 percent organic ingredients and cannot use the word "organic" on the package but can list organic ingredients. The product cannot use USDA seal or certifying agent's seal.

And just to keep things topical here, Popeye, "it is a common misconception that organic food (such as oh, say, spinach?) could be at greater risk of E. coli contamination because of raw manure application," Gill says, adding acidly "although conventional farmers commonly apply tons of raw manure with no regulation."

Organic standards set strict guidelines on manure use in organic farming: either it must be first composted, or it must be applied at least 90 days before harvest, which allows ample time for microbial breakdown of pathogens, Gill says.

Founded in 1990 and headquartered in Toledo, Ohio, Technology Group International delivers Tier 1 application software, specializing in software for small and mid-market manufacturing and distribution companies.

Aspect Software's first "Contact Center Satisfaction Index Europe" survey, conducted by the Leo J. Shapiro and Associates market research firm, has measured consumer satisfaction in phone and internet interactions in six countries, with consumers giving the contact center industry in Europe a grade of 67 percent.

The countries surveyed were the U.K., the Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. A variety of industries were represented.

Aspect found that Europeans tend to like e-mail better than North Americans for customer service transactions, and, oddly, "favor efficiency much more than North Americans." Evidently they base this conclusion on the fact that in Europe, 66 percent of customers prefer telephone contact and 33 percent of customers like to use e-mail to contact companies, while in North America, 79 of customers prefer using the telephone and only 18 percent use e-mail to contact a company.

Gee, maybe because when you get a person on the phone you tend to get the problem solved a lot quicker and they know exactly what you want, instead of shooting e-mails back and forth. Gee, maybe talking to someone on the phone is more, ah, efficient.

In a completely unshocking finding, more than 20 percent of customers in Europe and North America reported that their last contact center interaction fell short of expectations, yet a small minority of contact centers feel that they fall short of meeting customer expectations -- only two percent of contact center managers in Europe and only 10 percent of North American contact centers acknowledge these shortcomings.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Meatloaf's "Saturday Night (Love That Rock'n'Roll)" from The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack:

Seems the latest kerfuffle here in our little corner of the telecom world involves the Competitive Telecommunications Association (CompTel) protesting the mergers of SBC and AT&T on the one hand and Verizon and MCI on the other.  

Little background: You may have heard of the $67 billion-dollar merger between AT&T Inc. and BellSouth proposed in March. It would give AT&T control of Cingular Wireless, the nation's biggest wireless operator. It seems CompTel, a trade association of small phone companies, "filed comments in early June asking the FCC to reject the merger," according to the Wall Street Journal's Amy Schatz on her good Washington Wire blog.

Interestingly, new Federal Communications Commission member Robert McDowell, a Republican, used to work as a lawyer for CompTel, might be recused from voting on the AT&T-BellSouth merger. As Schatz says "McDowell handled political matters for CompTel, not regulatory work," nevertheless "he said he believes he will be automatically recused if his former employer filed comments." Others disagree, saying he would have the right to vote.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin wants a vote by the end of October.

Schatz thinks McDowell's absence from the vote "could be a problem for AT&T. The company is hoping that few, if any, conditions will be placed on the deal. McDowell's absence from negotiations would give the FCC's two Democrats more leverage to seek conditions -- particularly on the issue of net neutrality, or rules requiring Internet traffic be treated equally," she points out, adding that "McDowell is firmly in FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's camp on that issue, both arguing the government doesn't need to step in unless there's evidence consumers are being harmed."

But back to the matter at hand, CompTel invoking the Tunney Act to protest the AT&T/SBC and Verizon/MCI mergers. What, you ask, is a Tunney Act?

According to an overview by liberal Jason Oxman, managing director of the leftist Law Media Group, the Tunney Act was created during the Nixon Administration to "keep the Department of Justice from making sweetheart settlements with powerful corporations." Congress wanted to prove that it wasn't cozying up to huge corporations facing antitrust suits, so the Act allowed "independent judicial review of decisions by the Department of Justice not to pursue antitrust action against giant corporations." Basically determining whether a proposed antitrust settlement is in the "public interest" or not, Oxman says.

It was signed into law by President Ford in 1974, and nobody heard of it again until 2004, when Congress didn't like what they thought were overly favorable terms given to Microsoft for their antitrust settlement, so they made Tunney reviews of DoJ settlements mandatory, instead of optional.

And as Oxman explains, the big hairy deal here is that the review of the SBC/AT&T and Verizon/MCI mergers "marks the first test case using the recently revised statute… this is the first time since the Tunney Act was overhauled by Congress in 2004 that a merger challenge has been allowed to go to a hearing."

Back in April the DoJ responded specifically to CompTel's objections to its handling of the Tunney review of the mergers, finding that "the mergers in question presented a relatively narrow competitive problem for Local Private Lines and related services in certain 2-to-1 buildings, and it negotiated a relatively simple, straightforward divestiture remedy to replace the competition that would otherwise be lost."

Yet Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia "last week rejected the DoJ/Bell request for a rapid review and instead scheduled additional proceedings and demanded additional evidentiary submissions from the government for his review," Oxman writes.

The government doesn't want a Tunney review. None of the companies involved in the mergers want one. CompTel wants one, since it represents dues-paying interests which believe they're harmed by the mergers. Oxman himself was until just a few months ago CompTel's Senior Vice President for Legal and International Affairs, so guess where his bias lies in this issue.

Yes, shockingly, Oxman, a former FCC staff attorney, former in-house lawyer for Covad, former CompTel exec, is… wait for it… opposed to the mergers. As far as the filing itself goes, he's arguing that the "core claim of petitioners in the Tunney Act case is that DoJ violated its statutory obligation to conduct a thorough review of these mergers, choosing instead to rubber stamp approval."

Translation: The DoJ reached a conclusion Oxman doesn't like. Had they reached one he liked he would have described the review as "logical, penetrating and fair."

Indeed, in the filing itself, CompTel charges that "Despite being given multiple chances by the Court to demonstrate that entry of its consent decrees (proposed amended final judgments, or PAFJs) is in the public interest, the Department of Justice has failed to provide the Court with anything more than argument, casual empiricism, and misleadingly-select portions of information collected from third parties in the course of its investigation."

That's gussied-up lawyer talk for "Copycat! Copycat!" What CompTel's saying is that the DoJ is simply parroting the companies' own arguments as its own argument: It is "striking," CompTel says, that "in light of what the DOJ asserts was a very extensive investigation, the DOJ would choose to rely so extensively on 'evidence' proffered by, or -- in some cases -- created by the Defendants."

Oxman's prejudices are made plain by his pious intonation of "the fact that a fair and independent federal judge is reviewing the DoJ's favorable treatment of AT&T and Verizon should give hope to all of us who fear the remonopolization of the telecommunications network. Judge Sullivan may be the only chance we have of bringing this era of Bell favoritism to an end."

Probably some of Oxman's fawning over Judge Sullivan is due to the fact that in May he allowed CompTel eave to participate as amicus curiae, or "friend of the court" in the SBC/AT&T and Verizon/MCI Tunney Act merger review proceedings at all. Of course should Sullivan find for the mergers, he certainly won't be described as "fair and independent" by Oxman, but rather as a sycophantic tool of the DoJ.

But that shouldn't be surprising. The Law Media Group itself was founded by left-winger Julian Epstein, D.C.  and operates as paid lobbyists -- you know, like Jack Abramoff -- dutifully pushing the drearily predictable lockstep liberal agenda like obedient soldiers. You might have heard Epstein repeating the standard leftist talking points on CNN, or you may have heard him on the leftist radio station Air America, but given their ratings the odds are more likely that you received Martian transmissions in your tooth fillings.

As far as First Coffee can make out, CompTel's argument itself, as summed up in the filing, is that the DoJ's decrees that everything's hunky-dory with the mergers "serve no purpose, other than to transfer the shame of passively allowing the two largest Bell monopolies to eliminate the two largest local competitors in their respective regions."

That's really the crux of it, there are dozens of pages in the redacted version of the filing itself, but if you can make sense of gobbledygook like CompTel's accusation that the court is attempting "to persuade the Court into granting it the excessive deference that it needs to survive an independent review" by "raising the specter that anything but blind acceptance of the limitations the DOJ now seeks to read into its Complaints would transgress the prosecutorial discretion of the executive branch," then you either wrote it or attended the same Obfuscation 101 writing class the author did.

CompTel itself has first-hand experience with mergers, as the boards of directors of CompTel and the Association for Communications Enterprises (ASCENT) agreed to merge the two trade groups in 2003, forming the CompTel/ASCENT Alliance. No word on whether there was a review by a "fair and independent" judge on the merger.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The David Holland Quartet's Conference Of The Birds. Good music if you're into atonal '70s jazz, kind of like late period John Coltrane meltdown. First Coffee isn't particularly and doesn't see this album getting a whole lot more play until we have guests over we want to get rid of, but the album has distinctly cool cover art.

You really don't get high quality of cover art with CDs, as a friend of mine noted rather sadly recently, they have to cram a name and title on the tiny space, and the, well, art of cover art has declined precipitously as a result. No more Sgt. Peppers or Weasels Ripped My Flesh, no more Exile On Main Streets, no more of those Yes covers, no more Herb Alpert's Whipped Cream And Other Delights, a particular shame.

As is apparent First Coffee is a fan of album cover art, and laments the eclipse of this pop art genre. In its day it was a rather prestigious and fun job for a noted artist, Andy Warhol's designed record covers,

Lingerie and apparel retailer La Senza has gone live with Connected Retailer Merchandising 3.0 and Replenishment. The products are now fully re-integrated with La Senza's other NSB products, including Sales Audit, Warehouse Management and Sourcing and Product Development.

The initiative began last year with the implementation of Connected Retailer products at the La Senza Girl chain and was completed this year with the rollout at its parent company. The project was fully customized to meet La Senza's specific business measurements, lifting certain processes.

La Senza noticed a return on their investment the same week they went live, company officials say, explaining that the ROI came from "better integration with the sourcing application, streamlined processes, and reduced overhead and data manipulation when allocating goods."

Martin Thibodeau, La Senza's Vice-President of IT, said NSB and La Senza have had a "successful relationship" for many years, and this implementation was so successful that "we can predict further cooperation in the future. NSB's products have provided us with outstanding results in the past, so we felt confident in our decision to expand our Connected Retailer suite."

No word on whether La Senza's products have produced desired results for NSB officials.

"We are delighted that La Senza has chosen to once again entrust their business processes to NSB," says David Henning, NSB's Senior Vice-President of NSB's Enterprise Business Unit. "This implementation went very well, and NSB will continue to work with La Senza to ensure they achieve maximum ROI."

Connected Retailer Merchandising products basically exist to synchronize key retail functions with scalable tools, including .NET Allocation and Replenishment and .NET Purchase Order Management.

Bracknell, England-based Planned Storage Systems, an independent manufacturers of storage products, is to deploy Epicor Software's Vantage 8.0 manufacturing enterprise resource planning (ERP) product to help improve its business processes as it expands its manufacturing capability into Eastern Europe.

"We have used Tetra CS3 for a number of years and it has offered us a competent product for financials, but lacked the more advanced lean manufacturing and logistics capabilities we need to grow our business," explains James Delap, CEO of Hi-Lo PSS Group, "We are in the process of expanding our manufacturing capability into Romania which provided us with a perfect opportunity to deploy a new ERP product that was more suited to our manufacturing and resource planning needs."

With over 30 years experience as one of the leading UK manufacturers of storage products, PSS is accredited to ISO 9001 standards. In March it began a selection process based initially on eight candidate recommendations by an independent ERP consultant.

Over a three-month process of evaluation and comparison, PSS reached a shortlist of three products from Epicor, Exact and Sage. And of those three, overall, "Epicor provided the best fit for our current operational needs with the ability to deliver modular upgrades to support the rapid expansion of our business," Delap said.

Epicor, and especially its Epicor Scala division, also had "a good understanding of tailoring the system to meet the needs of trading within Romania as well as localization for other countries within Europe," he explained.

PSS will deploy core Epicor Vantage 8.0 manufacturing and scheduling alongside Epicor iScala financials at its UK and Romanian sites by November 2006. A more advanced implementation of additional Planning, CRM and SRM modules will commence in early 2007.

FrontRange Solutions, a vendor of IT Service Management, Communication Interaction Management, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products for small to mid-sized enterprises (SME) and distributed enterprises, has announced the general availability of version 5.0.3 of IP Contact Center (IPCC).

Company officials describe it as a "communications interaction management product which provides an integrated voice communications platform that extends the functionality of other FrontRange software products.

FrontRange IPCC is now deeply integrated with HEAT, the FrontRange help desk management product. FrontRange created such interoperability with HEAT so organizations can use it for inbound call routing, customer self-service options, screen pops with pre populated customer data with status information, after-hours service and stuff like that, management of shared incidents that affect multiple users.

Self service is one area in which FrontRange officials believe they've made a "major enhancement to IPCC," since it now lets users offer callers the option of completing a service request without needing to speak to a live service representative. "Callers may now initiate and log a service ticket or check on an existing ticket without speaking to a live agent," officials say.

When callers identify themselves, IPCC creates a ticket and updates the database with the appropriate caller data and issue reported. The integration to third party text-to-speech engines allows IPCC to read ticket numbers and status updates from HEAT journal entries for tracking and follow-up purposes.

IPCC also performs "data dips" in HEAT to intelligently route callers based on skill sets, or to route callers to agents with whom the caller last spoke. Agents also handle calls more effectively because screen pops with corresponding information accompany the inbound call.

Company officials see that help desks run more efficiently when after-hours calls automatically open new service tickets that include caller contact information and voicemail attachments within the ticket, so they built that functionality in as well.

FrontRange officials also tout IPCC's ability to automate the handling of major "shared incidents" such as network outages or product recalls. The contact center communication platform can dynamically update the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) so that callers hear options for the leading open issues.

So if the caller presses "1" to indicate a product recall issue, the system automatically initiates a service ticket and groups the ticket for appropriate handling by the help desk. This eliminates analysts taking hundreds of individual calls on a single service issue. Analysts now take just a few calls, freeing them up to work on a resolution instead of being tied up on the phone with redundant conversations.

And once a shared incident is resolved, the system automatically outdials to all affected users to notify them of the resolution, as well as provide an option to close a service ticket. Callers may also opt to talk to an agent if they wish.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is probably the single finest performance in rock history next to The Clash's "Complete Control," Ten Years After's "Goin' Home" rendition at Woodstock. The real one, kids, on Max Yazgur's farm in upstate New York. Ask Jim Berkowitz, he remembers.

Full credit to Alvin Lee's guitar pyrotechnics, of course, but ever notice what a great job the bassist does? This morning I tried listening to it without the bass track and was surprised how much the overall performance suffers:

First Coffee has written about Dell's lousy customer service recently, and got the usual -- although better-written than most, I must say -- "rebuttals" from Dell PR flacks saying hey, our customer satisfaction has increased so much (they don't say from where to where, though, just that it's not spiraling downward at the moment), blah blah blah.

I am a recipient of the latest and greatest Dell customer service, which has now been going on for the last month. During this period I have been passed off from one division to another continually having e-mail discussions with people who ask redundant questions and others who do not know what they are taking about.

There is my case; I feel I get nowhere writing back to the field staff. I am writing to you regarding your article on Dell Customer Service and asking if you have Richard Hunter's e-mail address. If I am going to write someone in the blind I would rather it be someone with some power who has the fortitude do something. I understand it may not go anywhere but it is worth a shot.

Sorry, my friend, I know ex-act-ly how you feel, trust me, but a) I don't have the guy's e-mail, and b) I probably wouldn't give it to you if I did. But if you find it yourself, have at thee.

Comfort yourself with this, however, that in the next life, as Dante showed us, Richard Hunter will be forever having to use Dell's customer service himself to complain about the heat settings.

As a matter of fact, in tomorrow's broadcast of Radio KCRM 98.6, All Smiths All The Time, we're going to be taking a trip with a modern-day Virgil through The Inferno Of Bad Customer Service, illustrations by Frank Frazetta. Brace thyself.

Ross Systems, a vendor of enterprise software products and a division of CDC Software, a subsidiary of CDC Corporation, has announced a partnership with SupplyScape Corporation, a vendor of something called E-Pedigree products for the pharmaceutical supply chain.

The point of the partnership seems to be to provide a packaged software products that "allows pharmaceutical manufacturers to track their product through the supply chain and meet regulatory and trading partner obligations associated with emerging standards for e-Pedigree."

There it is again, companies having to spend time and money dealing with regulatory crap. What a drag.

Ah, here we are, an explanation: It seems e-Pedigree is "an electronic certified chain of custody detailing each distribution of a drug, from the manufacturer, through acquisition and sale by any wholesaler or re-packager, until final sale to a pharmacy or other person administering or dispensing the drug."

Yes, friends, every time you rush to the drugstore for antacids after watching Miss Congeniality II you are ending the e-Pedigree chain.

It works when, using Ross' ERP, drug makers such as PrecisionDose, an FDA registered repackager of pharmaceutical products, upload specific lot and shipping information into SupplyScape's e-Pedigree application, which then verifies, certifies and transmits the pedigree, and provides automated, cost-effective pedigree authentication and tracking through the supply chain.

"We purchased SupplyScape e-Pedigree software because of its ability to fully integrate with the Ross ERP, willingness to assist us with the validation of the software, and the quality and ease of tracking for electronic pedigree," said Robert Koopman, president of PrecisionDose.

"We expect the combination of Ross ERP solution and SupplyScape e-Pedigree software will address the assurances and requirements of our customers, the FDA, and our company," Koopman said, as well as "with the new and future electronic pedigree laws as they are established."

Tel Aviv-based Commit Business Solutions, a vendor of management software products for small to mid-sized computer service and support businesses, has announced the launch of its new QuickBooks Link.

Maayan Porat, CEO of Commit, said this new feature of Commit CRM will help customers "more efficiently manage their day-to-day activities, particularly their billing procedures."

What the tool does is allow users to bill for "every service or repair they've provided without worrying about duplicate data entry and wrong data, errors that are common to manual data entry," he explained.

"Integrating with Intuit QuickBooks was an obvious decision on our part," added Maayan. "Most of our customers already use QuickBooks."

Cole Valley Software has introduced ContactEase Advanced Outlook Integration, a product enhancement now available in version 9.23 of its Client Relationship Management (CRM) software product.

Advanced Outlook Integration expands ContactEase's Microsoft Outlook address book integration, company officials say, adding that the new feature gives users "access to any ContactEase data on clients and prospects while in Outlook."

ContactEase CRM software is marketed as helping professional service firms "manage, coordinate and synchronize client contact information including phone, address, and e-mail information, as well as any communications, events and relationships with others at the firm."

What the CRM system does is create a firm-wide contact database, providing users with a more complete picture of their contacts as well as those of their colleagues. With updates from time & billing and other data sources, ContactEase creates a central electronic information bank for everyone within the firm.

"Our clients were demanding more information on their clients and prospects than Outlook could provide," claims Jeff Reade, President of Cole Valley. Reade explains that by automatically feeding Outlook data into ContactEase, users can access and use client information more effectively.

"Once they are sharing data across the firm using the basic ContactEase/Outlook integration, professionals want more information, such as 'Who else do we know at that company?', 'Who else in my office knows this contact?' 'Did they get invited to our last firm event?', 'Who are their other legal or accounting service providers?', 'How much did we bill them last year?'. Since they are often already in Outlook, they can get their answers immediately."

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Oliver Nelson's The Blues and the Abstract Truth:

Lingubot, whose officials like to call it "the world's busiest interactive web assistant," is now available in America, officials say.

Lingubot officials claim their interactive web assistant has "over 250,000 conversations every day for leading global organizations, such as Lloyds TSB, Aviva, IKEA, BBC, Daimler Chrysler, BT and over 100 other companies." It's available in America from Creative Virtual.

Lingubot uses a natural language interface, as officials explain the "Lingubot Natural Language engine interprets user questions from key words and phrases and responds with qualifying questions and options to proceed," such as asking "What kind of account would you like to open," and listing the account types available.

The Lingubot engine can also be integrated with forms within the web site, as IKEA did for their "Ask Anna" feature. Anna's a typical bot of this type -- an animated face and shoulders, cute but not too cute, who looks like she was thinking how she could best answer your questions in the shower this morning.

The thing is, with bots like this, they're much like the clanky Soviet style of customer help -- the "help" person is much more interested in getting their script right than actually helping you, and you need to already have a pretty good idea of what you want to use them, it's hard to go from 0 to 60 using one.

It's like Apple's obnoxious Help feature on their iMac, where they don’t let you search a database with keywords, but make you select from lists of general questions instead. You need to already know something to use the feature, it's not much help to those who need help the most.

Same with Anna. When you're specific enough with your questions, she's okay -- typing in "garden tables" elicits "Please have a look at the Tables," but strangely no link is provided -- but you'd think she'd pick up on key words a little faster: "Where can I get a garden table?" gets you "I'm sorry, to which IKEA store would you like directions?"

And of course the whole Cute Answer Gal bot idea is a case of too limited a function being presented as something else. I mean, we all understand database querying FAQ lists, if you want to know where the wombats in the zoo are you type "wombats" in the box and you get what the database has about wombats including, presumably, the most-asked question first, where they are. But if you see a human face you simply expect to be able to ask a direct question and get a direct answer. Anna can't do that.

For this reason, putting a human face on the functionality of a database FAQ is giving your online browser greater expectations than it can fulfill. Sure it's a cute idea, but it's not a good one, it can really only disappoint.

For example, the IKEA here in Istanbul is known fondly in the foreigner community, and among many Turks, for serving unusually good salmon at a good price in the cafeteria. But you try asking Anna "How is the salmon today?" and you get told "I know people love animals, but I'm here to talk about IKEA."

And ask her "Do you sell cars?" You get "answered" "I'm sorry, to which IKEA store do you want directions?" By the way, that seems to be her all-purpose answer when she doesn't know what else to say, instead of offering immediate escalation options.

And you kind of feel sorry for Anna too. Asking her "Are you free for a movie tonight" gets "I don't really want to talk about personal issues like marriage. If you could talk to me about IKEA that would be much better." Any gal who thinks you're proposing when you ask her out to a movie, well, you understand why she's at work 24/7.

But you can see why she's still single: Try paying her a simple compliment, "You're pretty," and she says "You are perfectly entitled to hold any opinion you want about me. Furthermore, your comments improve my knowledge base. Thank you!" That's what you like to hear from a girl, that you really improve her knowledge base.

She does have a sense of humor, though, ask her for her measurements and she answers "Which product would you like to know the size and volume for?" And I must say she has spunk, get in the least off-color with Anna and she smacks you down with "I am not designed to understand or feel insults, although my knowledge will surely improve after this conversation." Take that Mr. Potty Mouth, soap's in Aisle 4!

First Coffee has never been crazy about the idea of animated faces taking the place of simple FAQs and good old write your query here text boxes. Lingubot officials reel off the usual stats -- typically over 90 percent of questions are answered successfully by a Lingubot, clients can realize a 30 percent reduction in e-mails and a 25 percent reduction in call center contacts, they can instantly escalate the query to a human customer service assistant via live-chat, e-mail or call-back, using existing call center management software.

Yeah, but all that's true for pretty much any form of online self-help. And animated bots like Anna needlessly raise customer expectations; I can't imagine a scenario where they improve a store's customer loyalty:

"Honey, let's drop by Home Depot and look at light fixtures on the way home from church."

"Oh, um, sorry, we really can't do that, I've already asked Anna about lights, I think she'd be hurt if we didn't go to IKEA."

If there were a functional reason for the things, if there were anything they did function or information-wise better than text boxes, if people were willing to talk to Anna who just couldn't bring themselves to type "tables" in a text box on www.ikea.com, if they actually conversed the way you'd expect a sunny gal like Anna to converse, well, fine.

But since none of those things are true, give us plain ol' text boxes where we know what to expect and give Anna a break.

Traction Software, a vendor of products for secure, scalable, web-based collaboration, has announced Traction TeamPage Release 3.7. New features added in this release include extensible widgets, edit history and rollback, inline sections, flexible outputs to any format, and upgraded mobile device support.

Company officials say customers or partners can program Traction live text widgets to recognize invoice numbers and link to an ERP page, or recognize a customer code and show it as a customer name that automatically links to sales history in web-addressable CRM system.

"Traction's products combine the group editing of a wiki, the simplicity of a blog, and a unique access control and comment model to provide secure, scalable web-based working communication and collaboration," said Greg Lloyd, Traction Co-Founder and President. "TeamPage 3.7 adds new capabilities to link, edit, discuss, and deliver web content securely to customers, suppliers and external stakeholders as well as groups within a single enterprise."

Basically, Traction 3.7 lets users create widgets that show, list or link to internal and external web resources. TeamPage widgets can be inserted into any TeamPage blog post or page.

Widgets include inline sections to show lists of links or content driven by any Traction query, mashup style widgets that to show text and graphics from any external source (e.g. a live weather report for any zip code), and live text widgets that turn a text pattern into an automatically live link.

An example of Traction's new live text widgets include a widget that recognizes the text pattern of a UPS tracking code, and turns it into a live link to UPS's status page for that shipment.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.