By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An
Exhibition, Ravel orchestration, recorded in Berlin in 1990 by the Royal Concertgebouw
Orchestra under the direction of Carlo Maria Giulini:
Today at CommunicAsia
IP Unity
and Telekom
Malaysia are announcing
deployment of Home Prepaid Services. While not yet an enterprise
application, this new service rollout is a major VoIP and IP messaging effort,
and according to Telekom officials, “just the beginning of Telekom Malaysia’s
enhanced services expansion.”
This morning Telekom Malaysia is also “denying reports that
it had made a solo bid to buy a 48 per cent stake in Idea Cellular,” according
to PTINews.
A joint $390 million bid by Telecom and Singapore Technologies Telemedia for
47.7 per cent of Idea Cellular fell through after they failed to get the
required approvals in India.
...
SST Communications, a developer of RF
integrated circuits for wireless and multimedia applications, and a subsidiary
of Silicon Storage Technology, Inc. are announcing a Bluetooth power amplifier that increases transmission range with lower power consumption than is
currently available, according to company officials.
Targeting Bluetooth Class 1 applications like wireless USB
dongle and long-range pico-nets, the SST12LP00 increases transmission range by
40 percent with less than 100mA in current consumption. “Dongle,” “pico-nets,”
such colorful language.
…
Is “doing CRM” the same thing as being “customer centric?”
Financial services doesn’t think so.
According to the results of a recent
BusinessEdge study, the
financial industry thinks doing a good, efficient, clean job is being “customer-centric,”
skip the frills and froo-froo. The top three reasons for financial services
firms pursuing customer centricity include operations efficiency at 44 percent,
compliance at 24 percent and customer up sell or cross sell at 14 percent.
Across other sectors those priorities are inverted, as
customer up or cross-sell is the top reason for 52 percent of respondents, sales
force productivity for 28 percent and operational efficiency for 15 percent.
It reminds First CoffeeSM of when he was working
with Bob Thompson of CRMGuru.com and went out to see him in San
Francisco, and Bob asked him where he thought CRM was heading, and after an
answer involving technology Bob said something like “See? You answered with the
tools. Where is the concept going?”
Two recent studies, the BusinessEdge one cited above and a BenchmarkPortal
one discussed earlier, show that financial services have a different
concept of what good customer service is than most other sectors.
Frankly First CoffeeSM wouldn’t expect much in
the way of customer care from a financial services firm, but he would expect
the best financial services available at the price. That’d be a satisfactory “customer
relationship,” with or without the birthday card.
The BenchmarkPortal survey of small and medium-sized
businesses’ responsiveness to e-mail inquiries, one metric of customer service
puts financial services dead last in “customer service.” BenchmarkPortal, a
source of CRM best practices for contact centers, found that the financial services
and retail companies were the “least responsive,” with 72% and 60% respectively
not sending any response at all to e-mails inquiring about sizeable purchases.
And for quality of response, financial services again
performed the worst with 89% of the companies providing an inaccurate and/or
incomplete answer.
Yet the financial services sector leads the pack in
self-described “customer centricity project investments and expectations,”
according to the BusinessEdge study released by New York-based BusinessEdge
Solutions Inc., a business and technology consulting firm in the financial
services and insurance industries.
The study, prepared for BusinessEdge by Howard A. Rubin, Ph.D., professor Emeritus of Computer Science at
Hunter College of the City University of New York, a former executive vice
president of META Group Inc. and a former Nolan Norton Research Fellow, is
being billed as “the largest comparative financial services sector study ever
undertaken on customer centricity” by BusinessEdge officials.
The study finds that eighty-eight percent of the financial
services companies surveyed said they exceed $5 million in customer centricity
related investment, and 34% said they exceed $50 million. These companies
indicated that their expectation is that return on investment will exceed 200%.
By contrast, the general cross sector picture is one of
funding in the under $10 million range and includes approximately 59% of
companies surveyed, with ROIs roughly equal to the level of investment, the
study says.
A key to the discrepancy is the statement that “ROI is ‘key’
for business IT investment today,” says Dave
Schuette, BusinessEdge chief solution strategist: “However, our study shows
that while other sectors are treating customer centricity as an extended form
of CRM, the financial services sector fully understands that customer
centricity is more about high-value business benefits in the context of
operational efficiency and compliance.”
Hack through the jargon and he’s saying that sure, other
guys think “customer-centricity” means a bunch of marketing analytics, but here
in financial services we know it means doing a good, efficient job for your
clients and keeping your nose clean with the feds.
“Clearly customer centricity is far more than traditional
CRM,” says BusinessEdge’s Schuette correctly. “Customer centricity is a
relatively uncharted space. Those that have approached it as CRM-like are
missing its true value.”
…
Yesterday Siebel Systems issued a press release to
announce that… well, that its latest
products are doing just fine, thank you, in case you were wondering.
The release announced the “rapid customer adoption” of its
Siebel Incentive Compensation Management product. Company officials bill it as “the
only offering that provides integrated ICM, CRM, and partner relationship
management capabilities.”
The company gives a laundry list of customers who’ve bought
SICM 7.8, including Dallas Morning News,
Elan Pharmaceuticals, Equifax, IBM, JM Family/Gulf States Toyota, Northwestern
Mutual, Overseas China Banking Corp., TV Cabo and Vodafone UK, but those of us
here on The Siebel WatchSM
would have liked to have seen the actual figures of SICM adoption, or
statistics on whether adoption exceeded or fell below expectations.
…
The news came out late yesterday, so you might not have seen
that – despite the political uncertainties in the country – Five9 Inc.,
an America-based provider of hosted contact
center solutions, has chosen the
Philippines as the site of its regional headquarters in Southeast Asia,
according to the Manila Bulletin.
…
And for those of you heading off tomorrow morning to the Telluride
Bluegrass Festival – yuppie Colorado, fertile bluegrass music
country, uh huh – bring your PDAs and wireless laptops as you listen to such
noted bluegrass acts as Alison Krauss and Union Station, Earl Scruggs, Stanley
Clarke (ummm…), Bela Fleck, Jean-Luc Ponty (?), Jewel (?!), Bobby McFerrin(?!?)
and hopefully some working bluegrass musicians as well, since for the first
time festival organizers are providing
wireless Internet services for the 10,000 people who are expected to attend
the Festival.
ABEO, old hands at temporary and flexible wireless networks
got the contract.
Just turn your damn cell phones off during the shows if you
don’t want First CoffeeSM or a like-minded music fan dumping a beer
over it.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content placement, but “appreciates” a kilo of Jamaican Blue Mountain Peaberry
whole bean coffee.
