The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is the perfect rock'n'roll wallpaper - the so-called Apple Jam portion of George Harrison's All Things Must Pass. It's little more than half an hour of fine blues-based rock guitar jamming chopped up into five "songs" with titles like "I Remember Jeep" or "Thanks For the Pepperoni." But it's perfect if you want an up-tempo background without distracting lyrics:
Everlusion has announced the release of CustomerHunt 2009, described by company officials as sales and customer management software for small businesses. It's billed as a customer management application "that enable users to boost their sales results with intuitive tools."
It's supposed to help sales people increase individual performance by managing their customer contacts through a selling pipeline and accessing "every detail related to their interactions."
"One of the advantages of CustomerHunt over existing customer management systems for small business is its usability," says Vera Zvereva, Everlusion CEO. "Unlike most of products in this category, being or inheriting the features of the down-scaled enterprise CRM systems, CustomerHunt is designed with the focus on the needs and requirements of its end user - the seller."
Basically the product's built around the methodology of Sales Pipeline. It's split into Lead and Opportunity managers that allow a focus on activities associated with stages of the selling process, foresee "picks and valleys" and are designed to "improve individual sales method."
It also, company officials say, has the ability to track referrals of sales leads, add custom statuses, sales stages and contact groups and generate printer-friendly sales repots and customer contact printouts. Wizards prompt users on how to tune the program to individual requirements and help feed in the contacts from MS Excel, MS Access and CSV files.
CustomerHunt 2009, Personal Edition is available at the license price of US $189.95.
Vindicia, a vendor of on-demand payment management software, has announced a new version of its hosted billing product, CashBox. Designed for recurring and one-time transactions, Vindicia CashBox lets online merchants access a variety of services, including a built-in tax engine and support for multiple processors, currencies and languages.
New features include integration with payment processor Global Collect. As company officials describe it, the combination of CashBox and Global Collect "provides merchants with access to global payment methods." The initial integration will support North American and European credit and debit cards along with Boleto Bancario in Brazil.
The product also has a feature called "metering." In addition to providing traditional time-based subscription billing models, company officials say, CashBox lets online merchants support pricing plans based on usage, such as paying for specific numbers of downloads of a movie service, as well as more complex metering capabilities, such as auto refill of game tokens.
With this release, merchants also have the ability to create payment processing routing rules, auto-cancel subscriptions if chargebacks occur, and optimize sales tax calculations based on billing or shipping address information.
"Building and maintaining a loyal, satisfied customer base is job one for all online merchants," said Gene Hoffman, chairman and CEO of Vindicia.
The latest version of Vindicia CashBox is available immediately, with the exception of the metering support which is in limited beta and will be available in January. Pricing starts at $2,000 per month and is based on transactions processed and total online revenue.
ComScore has released October 2008 data from the comScore Video Metrix service, reporting that U.S. Internet users viewed 13.5 billion online videos during the month, representing an increase of 45 percent versus year ago.
In October, Google Sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property with nearly 5.4 billion videos viewed (representing a 40 percent share of all videos viewed), with YouTube.com accounting for more than 98 percent of all videos viewed at the property.
Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 520 million videos (3.8 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 363 million (2.7 percent), and Viacom Digital with 305 million (2.3 percent).
Hulu, a joint venture of NBC and Fox featuring full-length broadcast TV programs, ranked sixth with 235 million videos viewed (1.7 percent).
More than 147 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 92 videos per viewer in October. Google Sites attracted a record 100 million online video viewers, or more than two out of every three Internet users who watched video during the month. Fox Interactive ranked second with 60.8 million viewers, followed by Yahoo! Sites (45.2 million) and Microsoft Sites (30.7 million).
The survey also found that 77 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video, the average online video viewer watched 274 minutes of video and more than 80 percent of the 18-34 year olds watched online video, higher than any other age segment. The average 18-34 year old online video viewer watched 4.8 hours of video during the month, also ranking above all other age segments.
About 100 million viewers watched 5.3 billion videos on YouTube.com, let's see if you can do the videos-per-viewer math yourself. The duration of the average online video viewed at Hulu was 11.6 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.
Voxify, a vendor of speech technology, has announced that it handled 100 percent more calls for its retail and e-commerce customers on Cyber Monday, December 1, 2008, compared to the daily average call volume for the year.
Did you know there was a holiday called "CyberMonday?" Neither did First Coffee. Although, thanks to my New Zealand-purchased calendar book, I do know that December 1 was Westland Anniversary. That's why all the banks in London were shut, no doubt.
Online consumers are major drivers of call volume into retail and e-commerce contact centers, using the phone for various follow-up activities, including confirming order status, adding or canceling items, checking point balances in loyalty programs and asking if they can get it in cranberry since they were sure they told their husbands they wanted it in cranberry, mauve doesn't do a thing for them, so they know they told their husbands cranberry but there he sat with his eyes glued to those blasted Red Wings and he said he heard her but now she knows he really didn't, and this kind of thing happens all the time - all the time, honey, you wouldn't believe, why just last week we're driving...
Voxify has deployed speech self-service products to service the most common retail caller requests, with the idea that this allows contact center agents to be used more efficiently. For example, the order status product relieves live agents from the labor-intensive tasks of identifying the caller, asking for order search information, querying backend systems, and reading back order details including estimated delivery dates. You can get a computer to do that, but you can't pay a computer enough to sit and listen how he got mauve instead of cranberry. The union has laws against that sort of thing.
The Voxify self-service products handled increases in calls for order status, order capture, catalog requests, and store location information. Offered as a managed service, Voxify's speech products are judged by their completion rates (percentage of the desired tasks achieved by the customer), a much-watched performance indicator for customer satisfaction.
"In today's market, the key to survival is keeping your customers," noted John Gengarella, CEO, Voxify. "After significant investments to attract consumer spending, retailers can't afford to drop the ball when it comes to fulfillment and post-sale communications."
The Voxify product deploys inbound and proactive outbound speech applications as well as intelligent, personalized customer interaction products.
The company's clients include Continental Airlines, Hammacher Schlemmer, and Wyndham International.
