By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is The Best of Tony Bennett:
A tip of the coffee pot to Dan Taylor, just appointed to Scribe Software Corporation’s
board of directors. Dan’s the founder and former CEO of ManagedOps.com and
The Taylor Group, and the author of Integration Manager, the original standard
for integration with Microsoft Great Plains that is now part of the Microsoft
Great Plains offering.
...
It’s nice to get a different-sounding news advisory once in
a while, and Business Signatures Corporation is announcing that today
they’ve “emerged from a four-year
stealth phase” to “unveil an innovative software solution called Business
Signatures Customer Intent Suite.”
A four-year stealth phase! That’s a lot more bracing than
the usual “Acme Anvils is announcing the release of the revolutionary
innovative earthshattering epochal XP-49 Roadrunner Crusher dashboard add-on
solution…” drone.
Based on what BSC claims is “new data management technology,”
it’s “designed to help companies discern the intent of their online customers
in real time – and act upon it immediately.”
Business Signatures was founded in 2001 by three ex-Oracle guys
who set out to solve what they identified as “the three biggest challenges
facing online businesses today” – managing IT infrastructure for the best
possible customer experience, preventing online fraud and maximizing customer
profitability through personalized customer service.
To do this, company officials explain, they “focused on the
one problem not currently addressed by existing solutions: understanding
customers’ online interactions as they happen, at scale and at the individual
customer and transaction level.”
The product BSC is hawking here is designed to give companies
an “instantaneous” view of customer intent: what online customers are trying to
do in the moment. They think this will allow companies to “act immediately to
service, protect and, ultimately, retain their customers.”
Peter Relan, founder and CEO of Business Signatures says
discerning actionable customer intent in the online channel is a lot harder
than it is in a store, where you can watch the customer pick up a paintbrush, a
roller, drop cloths, price blue paint and scrapers, discern he’s going to paint
his back porch and go over and offer painting tips and suggestions and sell him
some extra sanders and a stepladder and keep him coming back as a Satisfied
Customer.
Can’t do that online. So BSC has developed the Business
Signatures Intent Processor, based on a new data management technology called “streaming
query.” Instead of the traditional “store first, query later” approach, it
takes a “query first, store later” approach that can “rapidly convert the
massive volumes of HTTP data streams generated by a transactional Web site into
chunks of immediately intelligible information,” according to company officials.
…
A while ago First CoffeeSM wrote about The Customer
Care Institute’s invitation to North American contact center
managers to participate in “a survey
designed to capture information for the ‘internationally renowned’ Global
Contact Centre Benchmarking Report by visiting www.customercare.com
before July 31, 2005.”
CCI Managing Direct Roger H. Nunley says that “U.S.
benchmarking alone is no longer enough,” what with offshoring and all “best
practices contact centers can be found in growing numbers of countries around
the world.”
Reading between the lines of their latest plea, the response
has been slightly underwhelming. They’re offering a free copy of the $1,500 in-depth
2006 report, which is supposed to provide managers with a set of benchmarks
with which to measure contact center operations.
Just a friendly reminder.
…
Everon Technology Services
LLC, a vendor of managed IT
services to small to medium size businesses, will be conducting a series of free webinars aimed at helping SMB’s use
technology.
This webinar, “7
Technology Habits of Highly Successful Small to Medium-Size Businesses,” will
be conducted nationwide via the Internet.
“Most SMB’s may be under-utilizing the capabilities of their
technology by as much as 50%” say Michael Cooch, co-founder of Everon and one
of the presenters. The webinar is designed to show viewers “how to get the most
out of their technology to increase productivity and revenue,” according to
Everon officials.
Non-profit technology experts David Liniado and Michael Cooch, founders of
Everon Technology Services, will provide specific examples, tools, and
recommendations for using technology. Attendees of this webinar will also
receive a free Systems Inventory Report, giving business leaders a snapshot of
the health and effectiveness of all their technology.
The Webinar
runs July 19, 2005 at 2:00 p.m. EST and July 21, 2005 at 2:00 p.m. EST. Bring
your own doughnuts.
…
Nasdaq-listed Internet Gold is claiming this morning that
it’s become the first Internet Service Provider in Israel “and one of the few ISPs in the world” to
support IPv6, the Next Generation Internet Protocol.
Having completed a year-long infrastructure upgrade process,
officials say, “the company has now begun supporting the use of state-of-the
art IPv6 services and devices by its business customers and will soon extend
the same support to residential customers.”
Internet Gold has deployed IPv6 on existing networks in
parallel with IPv4, the legacy protocol. Generally ISPs will simply install separate
new networks for IPv6. Arik Alster, Vice President of Technology and Service of
Internet Gold says IPv6 provides improved IP addressing, routing and
autoconfiguration capabilities, improving such offerings as Multicast and
Anycast.
One of the primary advantages of the IPv6 protocol is its
transition to a 128-bit IP address from the 32-bit address currently used by
today’s IPv4 protocol. This is expected to help cure the expected shortage of
IP addresses, allowing for a virtually unlimited number of IP addresses in the
future.
It also is one step closer to the geek heaven of “connect
everything” applications, such as the hellish “Smart Home” concept only a true
technonerd would think at all desirable a concept, where refrigerators communicate
through the Internet with supermarkets and appliances communicate with
maintenance services.
…
It’s Amazon.com’s tenth anniversary, and they’ve
listed their
25
top-selling authors. First CoffeeSM will ruin the
suspense and reveal that J.K. Rowling is the #1-selling author – who’dja think?
– but the list is heavily salted with
business and motivational authors. Matter of fact, at #2, snugly between
Harry Potter’s creator and Nos. 3 and 4 Nora Roberts and Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code), is Spencer Johnson, author of Who Moved My Cheese? and The One-Minute Manager.
Holding down #10, between Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye (the Left Behind series) and Dr. Phil, is Jim
Collins, author of Built to Last and Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make The
Leap… And Others Don’t. Ken Blanchard, Johnson’s co-author of The One-Minute Manager is at #15 and
Stephen Covey checks in at #17.
Marcus Buckingham, the employee productivity expert is at
#19, bookended by children’s authors May Pope Osborne and Lemony Snicket (the
good Dr. Seuss is #5). Leadership speaker (12
Irrefutable Laws of Leadership) John Maxwell is at #21, and Rich Dad, Poor Dad author Robert T.
Kiyosaki is at #23.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content. None, zip, nada.
