By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the second first coffee, and the music is The Crofters’ Hold My Beer While I Kiss Your Girlfriend:

 

Autonomy Corporation has announced that Inovis has used Autonomy’s Intelligent Contact Center products to “improve support staff training,” resulting in an increase of Level One Service request closures within a six-month period.

 

Inovis, which sells on-demand Business Community Management products, has installed Autonomy etalk’s call recording, agent performance evaluation, and speech analytics products. Inovis authorities credit the Autonomy products with improvements in providing products to customers at first touch.

 

Inovis has used Autonomy etalk’s voice and screen recording capabilities for coaching and providing ‘best practices’ training for new hires and existing agents. By capturing customer interactions to use as examples, Inovis has improved the way its agents handle customer calls.

 

“A focus on first call resolution is important. By rethinking the way our first line support handles calls, we are able to more quickly resolve our clients inquiries,” said Vicki Sewell, senior vice president, Client Services and Customer Support, Inovis.

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IFS applications have won the Middle East’s Center of Enterprise Research award for ERP System of the Year 2007 in the service industry category.

 

IFS, a global enterprise applications company, has won the CER Award for its business software, IFS Applications, for the second year running. CER officials say they evaluated the competing products according to implementation time, ergonomics, technology, integration, support concept, customer value, and communication.

The award recognizes how the SOA-based architecture, which IFS Applications 7 is based on, “optimizes total cost of ownership and enables companies to react with agility to changes in the market, to maintain competitive advantage.”

Ian Fleming, IFS Managing Director, Middle East, Africa & South Asia — a man who’s never heard a single James Bond joke — said, “Naturally, we are very pleased to be named ERP System of the Year by CER, as we are growing and focusing on this region, specifically the Middle East, across key verticals including utilities and telecom, process industries, construction, contracting, and service management.”

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CRM vendor eLoyalty Corporation has announced it recently signed two additional Behavioral Analytics contracts — a deployment contract with a national utility company and an assessment contract with a large HMO.

 

The new contracts bring eLoyalty’s fourth quarter Behavioral Analytics contract activity to “a record of four new deployment contracts and six new assessment contracts. As of the end of the fourth quarter, the company has 30 Behavioral Analytics customers, 16 in Deployment and 14 in Assessment.

 

Both of these contracts are new applications of Behavioral Analytics. The utility application is to use the analysis of customer calls to enhance customer experience and improve business processes, while the assessment for the HMO is to analyze member calls to identify ways to improve disease management outcomes.

 

ELoyalty officials say they expect its Managed Services Backlog to increase to approximately $73 million at the end of the fourth quarter. Based on the increases in managed services backlog, the company currently expects that its first quarter 2008 managed services revenue will grow to about $10.8 million.

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Technology Evaluation Centers has partnered with SupplyChainBrain, publisher of Global Logistics & Supply Chain Strategies, to produce a 2008 ERP-distribution buyer’s guide specifically aimed at the mid-market.

 

The 2008 ERP-Distribution Software Buyer’s Guide is for those companies operating in distribution and logistics industries “actively searching for enterprise resource planning (ERP) distribution software for their needs, or looking to improve business processes with supply chain management (SCM), distribution process management (DPM), or retail and commerce systems,” the TECers say.

 

It’s organized to provide product and vendor information, detailed comparative analysis and customer case studies, as well as a comprehensive vendor directory. The book highlights 150 industry vendors in ERP, in distribution, transportation management systems, warehouse management systems and supplier relationship management.

 

With planned distribution to over 500,000 IT decision makers via TEC’s channels and to more than 50,000 C-level executives via SupplyChainBrain, the 2008 buyer’s guide is scheduled for publication at the end of January and will be available for download at no charge.

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Tarrytown, New York-based Datacap, a vendor of capture and forms processing software products, has announced the recipients of its 2007 Partner Excellence Awards.

 

The Channel Partners chosen for the Excellence Awards “epitomize the value that they bring to customers,” the Datacapians say. “Each of our partners has helped us push Taskmaster’s capabilities into new areas either by designing new applications or integrating Taskmaster into new products,” said Scott Blau, Datacap CEO.

 

The 2007 Partner Excellence Award Winners are Applied Docs, CGI, Electronic Knowledge Interchange, Torrential Data, and Cutting Edge Solutions.

 

Applied Docs of Almomte, Ontario provides document management products for the transportation industry. In 2007 they implemented a product for Kuehne + Nagel Canada that automates customs information capture from commercial invoices.

 

Integrator CGI has combined Taskmaster with its Sovera products for healthcare, delivering capture of patient medical records and Accounts Payable documents. Cutting Edge Solutions of Kansas City, Missouri has used its Datacap Rules expertise in Taskmaster implementations to work with of a roster of customers, including KC Life, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona, and Murphy-Hoffman, among others.

 

Torrential Data of Virginia Beach, Virginia had previously integrated its high volume document management toolkit, known as Datahaven, with Exel Transportation Services’ custom accounting application to help Exel manage the paper-intensive accounting transactions of its contract logistics and freight management business. In 2007 Torrential Data added Taskmaster for Invoices to the product to help Exel process invoices.

 

Electronic Knowledge Interchange develops document management products for corporate and governmental organizations. In 2007 it completed its application for the Chicago Department of Public Health as part of the Cities Readiness Initiative, a federally-funded program to aid cities in increasing their capacity to deliver medicines and medical supplies during a large-scale public health emergency.

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Mobile vendor Bango has issued its predictions for what 2008 will bring for the mobile industry.

 
First is that there’ll be increasing numbers of people accessing the Internet on their mobile phones. “As the majority of new phones come with Internet access as standard, we envisage that by Q3 2009, more people will access the Internet on their mobiles than through a PC,” they say.

 

Secondly, they see mobile advertising surging. “There are a number of factors holding it back,” Bango says,” mainly the lack of analytics so advertisers can verify the results of their campaigns.”

 

Thirdly, they see a shift from messaging to Internet for data usage on mobile phones — pretty self-explanatory.

 

Fourthly, they see mobile commerce of physical goods coming of age: “Buying travel tickets and basic consumables via the mobile web has been popular in Japan and Korea… because the operator payout rates to content providers approach that of a credit card.”

 

And lastly, “The PC and mobile will become closely linked.” MySpace, Facebook or Twitter, for example, will be able to share content and information with mobile phone users.”