Cloud CRM Myths, More Call Center Benefit, Enterprise Password Management, Teen Social Media Usage

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Cloud CRM Myths, More Call Center Benefit, Enterprise Password Management, Teen Social Media Usage

What would your biggest customer service myth be? Is it one of these three decisively refuted by officials of Soffront on their blog? Chances are it is.

“Price trumps quality.” Oh man, if we had a dollar for every time we’ve heard this one... Soffront officials cite a recent article in Business Insider, where Shep Hyken referenced two studies showing that “regardless of the industry, customers are willing to pay more for what they believe to be a better customer service experience.” You’d think there wouldn’t be any need to keep proving this, over and over, but hey, old myths die hard --  ask yourself, do you buy brand name products over lower-priced generic alternatives.

Quality of service, as the Soffront blog concludes, is not the only factor customers and businesses use in making purchasing decisions, but “it cannot be ignored. If you offer inferior service at a lower price, the negative impact on customer satisfaction will outlast the temporary boost in sales.”

Or how about this one: “No complaints means happy customers.” You might have heard it as the “no news is good news” myth.” Rarely is it true. As Soffront rather pithily puts it,”no news more often means that a business isn’t in tune with what is happening.” Your customers simply leave without saying goodbye.

Read more here.

Are you tapping all the potential of your contact center? LiveVox recently put up a blog post on the fact that globalization has been one of the biggest trends in the call center space over the past decade -- “multi-site, multi-source, multi-shore contact center environment has become the norm.”

The potential efficiency benefits are huge, but “are they fully realized?” LiveVox asked. Or to put it another way: How much are you using the cloud?

It’s a fair question. On the one hand you think man, look at all the capability we have. But as LiveVox says, “workforce, workflow, and technology are significantly harder to manage in the multi-site environment.” And don’t get us started on the integration challenges in a more complex landscape.

What really hinders an organizations ability to adapt, LiveVox officials say, is the proprietary voice and data integration of contact technology hardware combined with site-premised switching drive complexity and limit control. The results can be dire -- “at its worst, this configuration creates multi-site silos.”

Site-premised technology, as they say, constrains efficient workflows instead of enabling them. As a result, yes: Your contact center can be falling short of realizing the full potential of a global operation.

Read more here.

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In a majority of cases, many IT administration teams have plenty of sensitive files that are not securely stored. This probably includes private key files, SSL certificates, network configuration information in Word Documents / Excel and the like. TMCnet recently featured an article discussing how the issue of enterprise password management is growing in importance, as some companies have already learned their lesson the hard way for not focusing more attention on this issue.

 

Since these files are often stored on individual engineer workstations, or are stored on a file server somewhere, can you really guarantee who has access to these files? How well can you control who sees the information and who doesn’t? Are they being backed up?  Has anyone taken copies?  What should be changed when staff leave? How long after termination does an employee still have access to the files?

Software vendor Thycotic has multiple products that can help with maintaining business and professional security.

The company allows for a way to easily manage multiple users passwords included in Group Password Management, which offers products to allow administrators to assign users to groups and manage them using the Group feature: “One user can be assigned to multiple groups, and different permissions can be attributed to each group,” Thycotic’s website states.

Read more here.

Some surveys hit it right on the nose: A recent Fox Business survey found that... get ready... young people use social media such as texting and mobile video more than their elders.

Shocking, we know. Here, we’ll give you a few moments to recover.

Nielsen's recent survey, "Kids Today: How the Class of 2011 Engages With Media," looked at the social media tech habits of 12 and 17-year olds, finding that they out-text all other age groups: “Those between ages 13 and 17 send an average of 3,364 texts per month, more than double the rate of 18 to 24-year-olds.”

Certainly true based on our personal observations here at home with our own members of the demographic in question. Rarely do we see them talking on the phone, always texting.

Scott Brown, senior vice president of Global Communications, Client Insights and Strategic Relations at Nielsen, said many youths have been shy and reserved, “and not really good communicators in the traditional sense, so this opens up a new horizon for them."

In what’s probably overall a good sign, this same group watches less T.V. than the general population, an average of 23 hours and 41 minutes per week as opposed to 34 hours and 39 minutes a week for the average American.

Read more here.



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