Intuit's Outage, Customer Service Mistakes, IPswitch WhatsUp, Spitfire Predictive Dialers, Redcom

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David Sims
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Intuit's Outage, Customer Service Mistakes, IPswitch WhatsUp, Spitfire Predictive Dialers, Redcom

It's the great untold dirty secret of SaaS - you're not in control of your application's uptime.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Intuit officials were "trying to restore service to company websites affected by an outage that began Tuesday night."
Consumers and small businesses were left without access to online versions of the company's accounting and tax software, the Journal adds, noting that "Intuit's products include TurboTax, Quicken and the QuickBooks accounting program used by many small businesses. The online services associated with those products remained offline Wednesday afternoon."
Would this be a problem? Oh yes. The Journal reproduced some of the comments left on the Intuit online support forum: "Listen, if I am not able to process my credit cards before noon tomorrow, checks are going to bounce in my account." "I cannot write checks of any type."
Read more here.
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Customer support software provider Parature has written an interesting white paper on five big mistakes customer service teams make - and how to avoid them. Here's a quick re-cap of the main points:
The Mistake: Not Using Self-Service for Deflection. Customers have taken to Web-based self-service, handling everything from simple product registration to IT break/fix issues, in vast and growing numbers. More and more support organizations are opening up their knowledge bases to partners, customers and employees.
The Answer: Businesses should carefully consider which issues and tasks they entrust to self-service because some transactions are too complex to be handled by anyone but an expert, but simpler, repetitive issues such as password resets, warranty registration and a plethora of administrative tasks are low-hanging fruit for self-service channels.
The Mistake: Not Offering Integrated, Multi-channel Support. Self-service, though an increasingly visible and viable channel choice doesn't suffice as the only offering in a support organization's arsenal. Some customers simply don't take to self-service, preferring the more intimate experience they get from talking to someone on the phone.
Read more here.
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Marina Gil-Santamaria, director of product marketing for IPswitch's "WhatsUp gold" product line, was interviewed recently by TMCnet web editor Marisa Torrieri to discuss one of the most important concerns faced by service providers and enterprises today - network management.
WhatsUp Gold, the company's offering, is described by Gil-Santamaria as a "complete IT management product, simple to install and easy to use. It lets you discover and manage your network, your servers, applications, virtual resources, network traffic and other resources."
She noted that Ipswitch has been in the market for 19 years, and "that means that What's Up Gold has been tried, tested and proven on a network just like yours - over 100,000 of them, actually."
The product comes "basically in four flavors," Gil-Santamaria explained. "The first one is WhatsUp Gold Standard, which is our entry-level network monitoring and management tool for SMBs." 
Then there's Premium, which incorporates system and application management, and Distributed, which is scalable enterprise management for larger organizations with multiple locations. Finally, she said, they offer MSB, which is the "right product for managed service providers who want to deliver high quality network system and application management to their end customers."
Read more here.
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If you're looking for a communications platform meeting "mission critical requirements, "REDCOM might have what you're looking for, especially if you'd like something that the vendor says been shown to work in "the world's most challenging environments."
REDCOM communications platforms are specifically engineered for interoperability and durability - "with installations that range from remote central offices, to disaster recovery sites," REDCOM officials say, "from the intense humidity of tropical islands, the searing heat of the Sahara to the frigid temperatures of the Arctic."
In emergency situations, where dispatcher performance is crucial to establishing effective communications command and control, REDCOM is designed to provide the Link Command System. As company officials explain it, "a GUI package that offers call control and handling capability, the Link Command System provides dispatchers with a complete, user-friendly overview of their network."
Read more here.
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Stephen Sockett, who runs a home-based call center, recently wrote up a review of what he considers to be some of the top predictive dialer applications.
"I have had the privilege of trying a few different predictive dialer applications while running my home based call center," he said, adding "some are amazing (I am still using my Spitfire Predictive Dialer, I love it)." 
Not all is good, though: "One that gave me a hard time was EVS7's Dolphin Power Dialer. This one caused me to lose three days of work trying to get it to work. It turned out to be more or less incompatible with my operating system."
It wasn't a total loss: "On the bright side, they did refund all of my money."
So as Sockett says, "you'll need to research, understand the capabilities and sample a few out before deciding." To help with that, he's put together a list of what he calls "predictive dialer, power dialer, auto dialer or call center applications," acknowledging that "different people call them different things."
Read more here.


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