By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is a Tom Waits gem I’d overlooked for years, the album Alice:
Salesforce.com, an on-demand CRM vendor, is
announcing that Dexterra, Inc., a vendor of mobile business software, has selected salesforce.com CRM and is using
applications from salesforce.com’s AppExchange for its data management needs.
Salesforce.com officials say AppExchange “unites all of
Dexterra’s on-demand applications, including CRM, Project Management, Time
Tracking, Professional Services, Bug Tracking and Product Management,” with a
single data model, single security model and a single user interface.
18,700 companies comprise salesforce.com’s customer base as
of October 31, 2005.
…
Dublin-based report vendors Research & Markets have
issued yet another report, this one on
the global market for consumer VoIP services.
It counts total VoIP subscribers worldwide to date at 16
million, and projects the market will grow to over 55 million in 2009. “But
despite an impressive 62 percent year-over-year subscriber growth rate in 2005,
few consumers have ever heard of the term ‘VoIP’,” they write. “This indicates
providers have to continue to educate the public, and that there is
considerable room for market growth.”
They find “competition in broadband access services” as the “key
driving force behind VoIP market development. In addition, multiple waves of
new entrants, ranging from broadband ISPs and cable MSOs, to Google and eBay
will play significant roles.”
The report, “Global VOIP Has Arrived; Just Not As Expected!”
finds that 73 percent of all VoIP subscribers worldwide have migrated to VoIP
without making a conscious buying decision to adopt the new technology. It also
says in North America and Canada, cable operators are aggressively expanding
their VoIP footprint, but are marketing VoIP as plain old telephone service.
In Asia, they find, South Korea will have the highest VoIP
growth rate, followed by Hong Kong and Singapore. In Europe, broadband ISPs,
such as Free Telecom (France) and FastWeb (Italy) are leading the way with
triple-play service bundles.
…
There’s a reason this column is called First CoffeeSM,
and in honor of the company which has contributed so much to the successful
production of this column we’d like to note that Starbucks has entered into an
agreement with the China Soong Ching
Ling Foundation to provide $1.5
million to support a program aimed at helping students in need – and their
teachers – in rural China.
Starbucks and China Soong Ching Ling Foundation have
actually signed a formal agreement which establishes a program described as “to
help improve access to education for disadvantaged youth and provide quality
training for women teachers in rural areas.” China Soong Ching Ling Foundation
anticipates reaching approximately 3,000 teachers and thousands of students by
the year 2010.
Many teachers in rural schools have little or no formal
training in how to teach. Three thousand female teachers from 1,000 primary and
middle school in five Western provinces will be given training during summer
and winter holidays to improve their teaching skills and provide them with
updated techniques to help their students learn.
In addition, three hundred schools will be outfitted with
books, computers, teaching tools and upgraded sports facilities.
This is the first effort funded under the auspices of the $5
million China Education Project, which Starbucks established in September 2005 with
Give2Asia, a US nonprofit organization founded by The Asia Foundation to
promote philanthropy in Asia, which will administer the Project grants.
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz noted that the company opened
its first store in China in 1999 and now has 220 outlets in 18 cities. “No
market to date potentially has the opportunities for us that China ultimately
will,” Schultz said, according to the Associated Press. “We have significantly
moved China up to the No. 1 priority in our company.”
…
Another happy
beneficiary from the sort of customer relationship management Caiman.com
practices writes in to share:
I have been going back
and forth with them for the past month! Always the same 4 template e-mail responses
from the infamous Claire. Finally I contacted Amazon, who seems to be aware of
the trouble with this seller (yet not doing much about it). I had ordered a
text book for a psychology course – have still not received it (nor have the
other 3 people in the class who also ordered from Caiman and are getting the
same runaround). Here is the current # for Caiman.com – (305) 262-4973. Address is:
6701 NW 7 ST Suite 125 Miami, FL 33126 and the Attorney General’s office of
Florida is: http://www.800helpfla.com/ccform.html
I finally talked to “Claire”
on the phone (after about 9 calls) and got the runaround from her. Once I
mentioned the Attorney General’s office she offered me a refund… the e-mail I
just received for the refund stated the reason as “lost in the mail,” somehow I
doubt it was ever shipped. I contacted the USPS and inquired about the shipping
time I was quoted by Caiman.com, and was told that for this time of year there is
next to no reason why it would take that long!
Bottom line, stay away
from them! If it’s too late for you, use the above information to get some
resolution, and I advise EVERYONE who experiences this with them to file a
complaint with both Amazon and the Florida Attorney General’s office… maybe we
can get something done.
This is CRM in real-life, folks, what we’ve seen with
Caiman.com ever since First CoffeeSM started tracking the issue last
year is what happens when a company relegates customer care to a low priority.
They lose customers. Hopefully, anyway.
…
Well, I guess there’s
a new wordoid we all have to endure: infotainment. Me, I’d say
this applies to the nutty guff you get from the MainStream Media, as its total
disconnect with reality, especially as it concerns anything actually happening
in Iraq, is pretty hilarious, but evidently it refers to what you get through
mobile technology. I think. As far as I
can tell.
There’s a new report
from Frost & Sullivan saying how “previously,” the lack of product
differentiation plagued the European Telematics and infotainment industry. But
now, in the glorious new dispensation, “the opening of the aftermarket has
brought in products from the consumer electronics industry, thereby making
differentiation more pronounced and has caused traditional suppliers to face
intensifying competition.”
“Portable navigation systems have caused a major shake down
in the European aftermarket with almost half of the total unit sales among all
applications in the infotainment industry,” Frost & Sullivan Transportation
Analyst Shyamsundar Anandhan says in the report titled “Analysis of the
European Aftermarket for Telematics and Infotainment Systems - Market Size and
Forecasts.” The popularity of hands-free telephony and media streaming, he
says, “will cause wireless technologies such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to
increasingly penetrate the market especially since Bluetooth and the iPod are
worthy marketing tools for in-car entertainment systems.”
The European Telematics and Infotainment systems market earned revenues of EUR
7.93 billion in 2005 and is estimated to reach EUR 23.02 billion in 2011, Frost
& Sullivan report. Of all the segments in the infotainment industry –
integrated systems, navigation systems, rear-seat entertainment systems (probably
different from the rear-seat entertainment we used to enjoy in high school if
they’re making an industry of it) and in-vehicle Bluetooth interface systems – integrated
systems are most likely to meet consumer demands.
Factors the report finds that could adversely impact the
Telematics and Infotainment systems market include high prices, low levels of
customer awareness and the burgeoning consumer electronics market.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
