First Coffee

Obviously this isn’t the first time you’ve heard somebody tell you that customer satisfaction is critical to customer loyalty. Certainly we hope you’re aware that customer loyalty is a key contributor to profits -- pretty much any reputable study will show that customers are far cheaper to keep than to acquire, and get more profitable the longer they stay with you.

But it’s devilishly hard to quantify customer satisfaction, much less measure and track it.

Speech analytics leader UTOPY offers a way to measure customer dissatisfaction on any call, company officials claim, “by precisely and comprehensively analyzing all calls. UTOPY detects any indication of customer dissatisfaction within every conversation by accurately analyzing the entire interaction.”

Again, it’s measuring almost exclusively dissatisfied customers, since satisfied customers rarely call in to say what a great job you’re doing.

One advantage to the UTOPY approach is that it can link post-call customer surveys directly to the actual call so the actual interaction can be heard and the survey results be tied back to specific agents, call reasons, products or more.

Read more here.

Amdocs, a provider of telecommunications services, recently posted a blog that is more imaginative and interesting than most industry-generated blogs – gotta love any blog starting a post with “Imagine receiving a bill for $18,000 dollars.”

No, it’s not Rewrite John Lennon Day,  that really happened to one retiree in Dover, Mass., after a promotional no-limit data plan expired without warning.

Due to a new agreement between US carriers and the Federal Communications Commission, however, “mobile subscribers nearing their monthly limit for voice, text or data services will now receive an alert when they are in danger of being charged extra.”

Which does rather take the sport out of it, but we suppose, on balance, it’s a giant leap for mankind and all that.

Politicians pandering to their P.R. by jumping on such legislation, which helps 0.0003 percent of all Americans but looks like you’re taking A Firm Stand on An Important Social Problem, know their stuff: According to data released from CTIA, the American wireless industry association, there are now more wireless customer connections in the US (327.6 million) than people (315.5 million), the blog reports, adding that “as the number of connected devices grows, customers need to feel confident that their multiple devices won’t lead them down the track of financial ruin through unexpected charges.”

Read more here.

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PCI and information security experts are warning that “due to an increasing number of payment card breaches within both the merchant and service provider industries, organizations are now receiving increased pressure from acquirers and card brands to become PCI DSS compliant.”

The purpose of PCI DSS is to ensure that confidential cardholder data is always secure, which, of course, is what you want -- “the Payment Card Industry Security Standard (PCI DSS) Program specifies 12 requirements and uses a best-practice approach for securing sensitive information,” IT Governance company officials say.

And there’s a ready-made market for this.

GeoFluent Customizer is a product billed by its makers, Lionbridge, as being able to improve base language models by using your enterprise’s language assets for an enhanced customer chat translation experience.

Basically that means that while, yes, you can find free chat translation services out there, Lionbridge is betting you wouldn’t want to actually allow valuable customers to utilize them in fear of inaccuracies.  

How is Lionbridge GeoFluent different? It offers real-time on-demand custom translation in a cloud app -- automated machine translation technology, instantly translating content and communications into multiple languages.The GeoFluent platform accomplishes this, Lionbridge officials say, by integrating advanced cloud-based language tools with a real-time translation service, a statistical machine translation engine from IBM’s Watson Research Center.

The chat translation platform can also be customized using your content and configured for specific business processes for multilingual communication such as eSupport, forums, blogs, web pages, chat sessions and other such uses.

Read more here.

Soffront’s blog is one of the more interesting ones available, frequently touching on areas not of direct profit to the company, which makes it more worthwhile than most kept blogs.

One of its latest entries of interest is five of the best books for marketers. In addition to these, this reporter heartily recommends the 1995 book Where The Suckers Moon: The Life And Death Of An Advertising Campaign, by a New York Times advertising columnist, Randall Rothenberg. It details, step by painful step, the marriage of an old and decrepit automaker, Subaru, and a (then-) young, hip ad agency, Wieden & Kennedy.

Wieden & Kennedy won one of the most hotly-contested contracts of the year, despite the fact that their creative director hated car companies.

Industry insider Darryl Bolduc asks the good question: Why is advertising becoming more like customer relationship management still such a foreign concept?

“We see it at Moxie, and we see it across client work,” says Bolduc,  vice president, client partner Client Partner for CRM and direct response at Moxie, a digital-based ad agency, noting that “e-mail marketers have known of this potential for years, they've taken the lead from CRM systems, lists and strategies that drive loyalty, retention and re-engagement.”

Maybe that’s why, as Bolduc observes, e-mail media is “seeing a resurgence as budgets rebound, while digital media is benefiting from traditional marketers familiar with these data intensive environments.”

As Bolduc explains, online displays are using more behavioral and transactional advertising strategies: “We've got an amazing story being built for some of our most technically and digitally aware clients -- a CRM discipline, specifically micro targeting and dynamic segmentation, is being applied through online display.”

He calls this “a big change in the way online display operates, adding to complexities that already make online display tedious, like sizes, tagging and inventory management.”

“Tedious” being the nice word for that, of course. This is a family publication.

Read more here.