First Coffee

Hm, it appears the Brits don’t much fancy mobile banking.

Not that they’re unaware of it. According to industry observer Gill Montia, KPMG’s latest Consumer & Convergence Report found that UK consumers and businesses are actually “ahead of the curve when it comes to adopting new technologies.”

These are not the technologically faint of heart, these British -- “both online shopping and the use of social media are more widespread in Britain than in other parts of the globe,” Montia says.

When they do indulge in mobile banking, however, they’re generally smartphones owners.

Let us know if this sounds familiar: A company decides to adopt Customer Experience Management, they get all kinds of feedback, sit back and think “Okay, now what?” What to actually, you know, do with all this?

As a good recent blog post from NICE put it, “there is a long road between the first step of the CEM journey and the end goal of world class practice.” In fact, almost nobody gets there without some help along the way. If you can, well, our hat’s off to you. Consider yourself part of the real one percent.

NICE offers help for the rest of us in the 99 percent, with Fizzback.

End customers are increasingly aware of what CRM systems are capable of. So says industry observer Ian Whiting, who adds that in 2012, customers “will be even more insistent that businesses deal with them as they expect.”

Writing in CIO magazine, Whiting offers some CRM trends CIOs should watch for in 2012.

Anywhere, anytime.

First, evaluate your call center footprint. According to the paper, multilingual real-time chat capabilities can be utilized to revamp your call center strategies, since agents don’t need multilingual capabilities to provide support in multiple languages. This might be a trifle difficult to believe at first, but the fact is, one English-speaking agent can conduct several simultaneous chat sessions in multiple languages.

Second, take a holistic approach. You’ll need the right technical foundation for this, but once you have it multilingual online chat translation can be “just the start of a broader global support strategy,” since you can do things like translate knowledge-base content, and work with online support forums, emails, Web pages and more.

Isn’t capacity planning for cash and equipment a good idea? You’d think so, but you’d be outing yourself as a dinosaur, evidently.

According to LiveVox’s recent blog post, it’s time to keep an eye on “the ability of contact centers to get financing for capital investments like new technology” over the coming months, since as they see it, “corporate lending for capital improvements is still difficult to secure, especially in the small-to-medium business (SMB) space.”

Nobody knows when such funding is coming back, LiveVox says, warning that while “otherwise stable companies might be caught in macroeconomic forces when it comes to raising capital,” one option is to turn to LiveVox’s area of specialty, cloud contact center platforms.

Read more here.

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Kindle’s library-style loan capability is one of the more attractive features of the Kindle, but it appears there are still some kinks to be worked out.

Penguin Group (USA), a sizeable publisher, has suspended putting e-editions of new books out for loan on the Kindle, citing “new concerns about the security of our digital editions," according to Penguin officials.

As PC Magazine explains, “Amazon formally launched its library book lending program in September, which allows Kindle and Kindle app users to borrow e-books from more than 11,000 libraries in the United States.”

Kindle users can search for the book they want on the library, check it out using a valid library card and select the "Send to Kindle" option, when they must sign in with their Amazon account.

According to the Associated Press, the publisher “did not cite any specific titles in its release and did not immediately respond to requests to clarify its security concerns.”

Read more here.