The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is "Drunken Medley" from the Dust Rhinos' live CD. My particular corner of heaven will be an Irish pub -- pouring Harp, not Guinness -- with a rock band much like this one playing traditional Irish tunes rock-style. Electric guitar and pennywhistle, bodhran and bass:
Yes, goodbye Steve Irwin. It's rare to find someone who's so genuine about enjoying what he does for a living so much, that was what First Coffee's family thoroughly enjoyed about your shows -- it was patently clear you loved animals, you loved showing us how wonderful and amazing you found them, you loved your wife and kids and you just loved life. When you live that way you've lived a full life, no matter when you die.
Resource Dynamics, a vendor of add-on software and solutions for ACT! since 1995, has announced that Tele-Support HelpDesk supports the new ACT! by Sage 2007 (9.0) contact and customer management product family from Sage Software.
Tele-Support HelpDesk tracks calls, from inception to resolution. Users can track inquiries from inception to resolution. Features include priority escalation with e-mail notification, knowledgebase, customer status lookup, contract tracking, known issues database, inbound/outbound html e-mail processing and reporting.
Tele-Support HelpDesk runs over a LAN or over the Internet from any workstation.
"Tele-Support HelpDesk is designed to help expand an ACT! user's customer service and support capabilities by enabling additional efficiencies for help desk and call center focused activities," said Brandon Balsley, senior ACT! product manager, noting that it's one of over sixty products ACT! Add-on partners have designed.
ACT!, introduced in 1987, is used by over 2.5 million registered users and more than 35,000 corporate customers, according to Sage officials.
Maintaining what is the world's finest coverage of the New Zealand CRM Contact Center awards anywhere, First Coffee, who wouldn't turn down an offer to cover the gala in person next year, would like to announce that The Mitsubishi Motors Customer Care Center has won top honors in the Automotive category of the 2006 CRM Contact Center awards.
The Mitsubishi center won against other finalists Honda And Toyota. Others in the automotive category included oil companies and vehicle distributors.
Call center performance is assessed by mystery shopping scenarios via e-mail and phone calls. A series of these were carried out during June and July.
"We have a nine-strong team in our Call Center who handle customer enquiries, deal with service bookings, after sales follow up and handle any questions or issues customers raise," Peter Wilkins, Mitsubishi Motors general manager of sales and marketing said.
"They are a very active and customer-focused team and we are delighted that after having been a finalist last year they have taken the top award for 2006."
Building on the Treo 700 family, Palm, Inc. has announced the availability of the Palm Treo 700wx smartphone running Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone Edition, adding another Palm EvDO product to Sprint's product offerings.
The announcement marks the availability of Sprint's first Windows Mobile Treo smartphone on the Sprint Power Vision Network, complementing the Treo 700p smartphone running on the Palm OS platform.
The Treo 700wx smartphone supports Good Mobile Defense for security and fleet management, as well as Good Mobile Intranet, giving users access to web-enabled enterprise systems, including sales force automation (SFA), customer relationship management (CRM) and corporate intranets.
The product's Windows Mobile Messaging and Security Feature Pack, which includes Direct Push Technology, native S/MIME support, certificate-based authentication to all Exchange data, and remote and local device wipe, is available out-of-the-box for automatic wireless updates of e-mail, calendar items, contacts and tasks.
The product delivers real-time access to push-based email, calendar items, contacts, notes and tasks.
Tim Roper, vice president, U.S. region, for Palm, Inc. said the product release is part of a strategy to "extend Palm's reach into the enterprise market."
Company officials point to the product's built-in Dial-up Networking capabilities, allowing the Treo 700wx to have "broadband-like EvDO download speeds on their laptop computers" by using the new smartphone as a wireless modem via USB technology.
This out-of-the-box functionality offers an alternative to WiFi, officials say, "enabling users to access a high-speed connection in coffee shops, airports or hotels."
On this day in 1957 was published one of the most overrated novels of the 20th century, Jack Kerouac's On the Road. A badly-written, incomprehensible mish-mash of completely pointless people and actions, it was proclaimed a great novel by The New York Times, which later endorsed Walter Mondale for president and printed faked photographs from southern Lebanon during Hezbollah's attack on Israel.
Actually, let's say it's the single most overrated novel of the 20th century. Ulysses comes a close second, simply for the big joke it was on academia for most of the century, but academia doesn't get jokes, so that takes some of the fun out of it. On the Road has street cred, it's the hipster's Bible, the literary equivalent of keeping last season's ski passes pinned to your jacket, the book you most want to be seen falling out of your backpack in the coffee shop, but one you rarely see real people really reading with anything but a dull, glazed look.
Sanako has teamed up with customer care products vendor Softcom Customer Care to launch a new range of end user service offerings.
Softcom has been selling customer service products since 1992, and will help Sanako "launch its new customer care line," according to Softcom officials. Sanako will eventually make such a service available to customers globally.
I know, you're asking "Who's Sanako?" by this time. So am I. They're Finnish, that's about all I can tell. After reading the "Company" section on their site I still have no real clear idea what they do or sell, what their business is.
Their site says they "are confident that through education and specifically equality of access to learning we can increase opportunity for all and foster a more tolerant and understanding global society," which sounds great, I guess, but isn't much help. They do some sort of education technology, from what I can gather.
Anyway, their cooperation with Softcom will come on stream by the end of 2006 and will allow Sanako to "enhance its after-sales services with value-added elements such as a Helpdesk service for its new Study line of teaching software."
The service will be launched initially to customers in the EMEA region -- where evidently the need for a tolerant and understanding global society is most critical -- and rolled out in other regions on a phased basis.
Sanako Sales Director Juha Merinen said this is "a vital phase in our global business development efforts, which helps us to reinforce our position as a strong force in the educational software market."
Softcom has provided customer care services for many large companies with pre-defined service processes and products, such as Dell.
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