The news as of the third cup of coffee this morning, we're well and truly wired by now, and the music is Neil Young's Live Rust, probably the best live album released by a major artist:

 

A recent survey from speech search specialist Aurix found that 70 per cent of complaints made to call centers are "not being heard." 

 

And that's serious: Over 96 per cent of respondents said they would consider switching to a competitor as a result.

 

Surveying over 100 consumers, the Aurix survey asked respondents whether they had ever made a complaint to a call center, and if so, whether that complaint was taken seriously by the agent.

 

Peter Rogers, CEO at Aurix, found that their snap shot survey "reinforces the message that customers are significantly more likely to churn to a competitor" based on a poor experience.

 

"In my opinion, it is these interactions which should be viewed as an opportunity to gain feedback and intelligence, as well as to deal with the customer's query -- take the chance to reinforce positive messages about your brand, not cause it any further damage."

 

It's well-known that how a company handles a negative customer experience is a great time to bond a customer's loyalty. We have companies we patronize over the competition because of how they treated us when we had a problem.

 

Look, folks, everybody knows you'll screw up once in a while. Your customers know that. They're not expecting perfection, they're expecting you to rectify the situation when it happens. If you do they'll respect that.

 

Rogers admits as much when he says "Technologies such as speech analytics provide a basis for identifying complaints and situations which could escalate. It is by acting quickly to remedy these complaints - improving processes and training for agents -- that call centers can convert unhappy customers into advocates, protecting and in some cases promoting your brand."

 

To enable call center managers to monitor the performance of their agents, and to identify how consumers are responding to them, Aurix has recently launched its desktop speech search and analytics product, Gopher-it.

 

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Sabio, a contact center services company, has won what company officials are calling "a major contract" with DAS, a UK legal expenses insurer, to design and implement a next generation contact center technology infrastructure to support its UK operations.

 

The new Sabio contact center is expected to provide DAS with a best practice customer contact platform, helping the company "develop and enhance its customer journey while maximizing the operational effectiveness of teams across multiple locations," DAS officials say.

 

Sabio will replace the company's existing platform with a virtualized customer contact infrastructure based on core Avaya, Verint and Sabio systems and applications. The infrastructure will support operations at the DAS Head Office in Bristol and dedicated Motor Claims operation in Bedwas, South Wales.

 

A key benefit for DAS, company officials say, will be "the effective virtualization of its contact center resources across these locations, enabling further performance and providing a single, unified view" of customer service activities.

 

"As our business grows, our claims and legal advice call volumes are climbing, especially from people who have lost their jobs or are worried about losing them during these tough economic conditions. So, it's vital that DAS is able to match this customer demand with the best customer service infrastructure available" commented Victoria Scott, Head of Claims and Assistance at DAS and a woman who hasn't heard an original "secret" joke since 1998.

 

"We needed to work with a strategic systems integrator that could help us select and implement the right technologies," she said, adding "that's why we've chosen Sabio as our strategic contact center technology partner."

 

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Smaato, a mobile ad optimizer and mobile advertising company, has announced new SDKs supporting iPhone and Android devices.

 

The SDKs will come with free analytics and a new reporting dashboard to visualize usage data and keep track of advertising revenues, company officials say.

 

The new SOMA SDK for Android, according to company officials, "grants access to 35 ad networks to serve display ads within apps and mobile Web sites on Android handsets." Smaato officials claim their metrics showed "a significant uptake in click-through rates from Android phones for January 2010."

 

New publishers that sign up during MWC will have a chance to win an Apple iPad if they use the easy registration at: www.smaato.com/signup with the promocode "ipad2010" as well.

 

Smaato is also announcing New York based adsmobi as the 35th ad network partner for the SOMA platform. Adsmobi will use the Smaato services already available to SOMA ad network partners. "More targeting data, better forecasting tools and media buying features will be made available in future SOMA platform releases in order to enhance the value for ad networks partners worldwide," company officials promise.

 

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From Canandaigua, New York, comes the news that a day after Google's blog entry saying the company was looking to set up an ultra-high speed network, Axcess Ontario is announcing it wants Ontario County to serve as a Google test site.

 

When we lived in D.C. oh so many years ago we had a girlfriend from upstate New York, near Syracuse, and we used to know how to pronounce that town name. We've forgotten, but we remember it's not an intuitive pronunciation.

 

Axcess Ontario, the public-benefit corporation overseeing the development of the County's 180-mile, open-access fiber ring, started the official application process on behalf of the county government hopes to complete it early next week.

 

The blog post said Google is seeking trial locations for ultra-fast broadband networks. The company issued a Request for Information to communities nationwide seeking test sites for an experiment "to make Internet access better, faster and less expensive for everyone," Axcess officials said, adding that the Google networks "will deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today over 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections."

 

Axcess Ontario President and CEO Ed Hemminger said Ontario County should be at the top of Google's list of potential test sites -- "we've been working on this project for seven years. And with the 180 miles of fiber scheduled for completion by the end of the year, Ontario County is perfectly positioned for Google's experiment."

 

A rural/suburban community outside Rochester, Ontario County has committed $12 million to its fiber ring project. Approximately 60 miles of the fiber ring are complete and currently being used by service providers such as Verizon Wireless, tw telecom and Finger Lakes Technology Group.

 

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Ken Congdon, Editor In Chief, Healthcare Technology Online, has written an editorial column noting that while "everyone knows the healthcare industry is inundated with inefficient paper processes that inflate administrative and operational costs," to date, "most of the focus on fixing this problem has been on digitizing the patient record."

 

While this initiative will "put a huge dent in eliminating paper costs," he thinks, "it could take years of complicated technology implementations and integrations to see any significant impact."

 

Health insurance companies and healthcare systems spend billions of dollars a year mailing paper statements, explanation of benefits, welcome kits, and appointment notifications to patients because, "unlike other industries, the healthcare market has yet to significantly adopt e-mail, SMS and social media platforms as a means to interact with clients," he contends.

 

This must be what it first sounded like when somebody suggested typing up patient records instead of writing them out by hand, or when somebody said "Hey, why don't we pick up the phone and call them instead of sending letters?"

 

Congdon says one major reason for the lack of adoption of such messaging services in healthcare is "how unorganized patient contact information is stored within most healthcare payer and provider enterprises." Ouch -- now we're getting close to the problem.

 

"Unlike financial services, where client information is treated like gold and stored in a centralized fashion, patient contact information in payer and provider environments is scattered to the winds," says Scott Brown, senior VP and GM of Coldspark, an electronic messaging delivery and automation company. "Healthcare organizations are likely to have 1/3 of patient email addresses stored in one system, 2/3 stored in another, and mobile phone numbers stored in yet another repository."

 

Obviously not a situation lending itself for a smooth transition to SMS or social media.

"Healthcare organizations that have been able to launch SMS and e-mail messaging initiatives using these technology platforms or through their own internal centralization efforts have seen dramatic cost savings, particularly when applied to patient welcome kit and notification and statement delivery initiatives," Congdon says.

 

He gives the example of Kaiser Permanente, which "recently embarked on an SMS deployment in an effort to reduce the number of missed appointments it experienced. At $150 a pop, missed appointments cost organizations like Kaiser millions of dollars per year. The organization implemented an SMS solution to send patients that opt-in to the program paperless appointment reminders directly to their cell phones. The one-month pilot showed that SMS reduced the number of no-shows at a single clinic by 1,837 -- resulting in a cost savings of more than $275,000."

 

If you're concerned about the potential Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act ramifications -- i.e. compliance -- of distributing information in this fashion, Congdon calls that "a valid concern," pointing out that many of the messaging technology platforms on the market "provide full encryption capabilities that are fully HIPAA-compliant, ensuring patient information remains private."