The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music has rolled on to the Dave Holland Quintet:

Graham Technology, a provider of customer-oriented business software and services, has announced that it has been selected by Standard Bank of South Africa to provide a contact management product for its front-office contact center.

SBSA operates across 17 African countries and 21 countries outside of Africa. It is the largest South African banking group ranked by assets and earnings and employs more than 40,000 people worldwide.

The bank is currently undertaking an enterprise contact center consolidation program, and Graham Technology’s software will provide the bank’s front-office contact center with advanced contact management capabilities.

Mike Hughes, managing director, Graham Technology, said landing "yet another large international customer" is "another great validation of our company’s strength in the contact center CRM market."

As part of a joint project team, Graham Technology and global IT services firm, Dimension Data, will roll out the product in a phased approach, with delivery in the first quarter of 2007.

The deal also further cements the strong relationship between Graham Technology and Dimension Data in the South African market, and hopefully adds impetus to the recent trend towards improving customer experience in the country.

…

Tenrox, a vendor of workflow-driven Project Workforce Management products, has furthered its relationship with Microsoft after executing an agreement that allows Tenrox to offer the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 under the Microsoft ISV Royalty licensing program and Services Provider Licensing Agreement.

Under this new agreement Tenrox will release a new version of its Project Workforce Management software that uses the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 feature set for a product that can be hosted or deployed on premise.

"Tenrox Project Workforce Management for Microsoft Dynamics CRM is an integrated product that connects the sales team to the project and service delivery teams," said Brad Wilson, General Manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM at Microsoft.

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is John Prine's "Sweet Revenge:"

Auto/Mate Dealership Systems has announced the addition of Phone/Mate, what it's calling "a salesperson productivity tool" within its CRM module, Customer/Mate.

Available as an option, Phone/Mate is powered by Toll Free Edge, Inc., a vendor of voice software applications.

Phone/Mate is described by Auto/Mate officials as "a tool for tracking inbound and outbound sales calls," allowing the dealership sales management team to "create salesperson accountability, increase salesperson productivity, and measure advertising campaign results."

"One of the biggest problems dealers have is salesperson productivity," said Mike Esposito, President and CEO of Auto/Mate Dealership Systems and former dealership General Manager. "As all dealers know it's not what you expect it's what you inspect."

Must be a car industry thing.

Phone/Mate, he said, "helps managers identify areas in which the salespeople are effective and areas that require improvement. By implementing this knowledge on a day to day basis, managers can help their salespeople become more successful."

The way it works is throughout the day, managers can see that the salespeople are making their calls since Phone/Mate will automatically update call status within the manager's view on Customer/Mate CRM.

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the North Mississippi All-Stars' Electric Blue Watermelon:

Infor, a vendor of enterprise software, has announced that Folksam, a Swedish insurance company, has chosen Infor CRM Epiphany to implement its five-year CRM plan.

Infor CRM Epiphany will enable Folksam to "implement an advanced user interface for an ambitious CRM strategy that commenced in 2003," according to Infor officials.

The project's initial phase focused on data warehousing, analysis and process development. The deployment of Infor CRM Epiphany sales, service and inbound marketing will be "supported by one system with one comprehensive customer view, enabling Folksam to completely implement all defined CRM processes and realize the full benefits of the strategy," Infor officials say.

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Weather Report's Heavy Weather and Return To Forever's Romantic Warrior: Few...shun!

Lagan, a provider of enterprise software dedicated to providing public services to constituents, has reported a successful year-in-review from the City of Minneapolis' first year in 3-1-1 Call Center operation.   

You might as well know this is something First Coffee is in favor of, citizen contact centers designed to streamline interactions with municipal authorities, get actual potholes filled and garbage picked up with one phone call.

In such systems, put in place in Chicago, Albuquerque, Minneapolis, Hampton, Virginia among others, the city takes on the onus of making sure the call gets routed to the right department, instead of making John Q. Taxpayer run the maze of "Sorry, that's not this department's responsibility" calls all morning.

A 3-1-1 system lets you call in once, explain your problem, and the operator takes it from there. Chicago even gives out case tracking numbers, so you can call back to check on the progress of your complaint and any operator will be able to pick up the thread.

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Jim White's Wrong-Eyed Jesus:

Today's Fun Fact: It was on this day in 1849 that gold was discovered on Sutter's Mill in California, triggering the Gold Rush, the event that more than any other opened up the American West, supplied the North with the revenues to fight and win the Civil War, provided the San Francisco professional football team with a name and gave a business opportunity to a young Bavarian immigrant who figured out how to make tough canvas trousers for miners, who up until then had to make do with normal street pants which ripped easily in the tough terrain. His name? Levi Strauss.

At its annual conference to report full-year fiscal results, SAP AG has revealed further details, but not many, about what they call "a next-generation product and an additional business model" that will, company officials promise, "reshape the way midsize companies purchase, adopt and finance software applications."

At the conference, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann outlined plans to introduce what company officials characterized as a new midmarket product offering "breakthrough innovations" in "faster, lower-risk implementation, continuous adaptability and easier user adoption."

Complementing SAP's existing portfolio for midsize companies, the product will use what's being described as a new "enterprise service-oriented architecture by design" platform and will be available to customers through on-demand and hosted delivery.

SAP officials say they want to more efficiently reach untapped midmarket segments, and this new product is how they want to do it.

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a great rendition of "Don & Dewey" from It's A Beautiful Day's Creed Of Love live album. Pretty muscular guitar and bluesy harp for a late '60s/ early '70s San Francisco prog band:

Back from a long research weekend in Florence, great city if you enjoy running into a lot of American expat English teachers, the only recommendation I'd make to anyone going there is if you're looking for a great home-style trattoria for dinner, run literally by Mom and Pop, where all the focus is on the reasonably-priced food and wine and not chintzy décor, try Trattoria La Burrasca on the Via Panicale near the Mercato Centrale.

I've never had better tortellini anywhere at any price, and my friend, who's lived in Italy for years, said it was the finest lasagna he's had.

Okay, so what's been going on since I've been out of action…

Datelined "Lisbon, Portugal" comes the announcement that Altitude Software, an independent contact center vendor, has announced the availability of Altitude uCI 7.5, the latest release of the contact center suite.

The Altitude uCI 7.5 is the latest release of the contact center software with fifteen years of service. The latest release enables contact centers to" embrace change, profit from virtualization, increase productivity and grow proactive customer service practices," according to company officials.

According to a recent study published by tech researchers Gartner, multisite organizations in industry verticals such as the financial services sector are "consolidating their use of contact center technologies -- focusing on improving service delivery, while optimizing the costs associated with customer interaction."

This has evidently driven a focus on "more effective use of established technology through improved desktop applications delivery, better initial call screening, more use of scripted customer interactions, self-service automation and multichannel contact management," according to their "Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure, EMEA, 2006" report written by Terry Wright, Steve Blood, Bern Elliot last March.

The uCI 7.5 release has native IP supports for distributed operations -- including home-based and remote agents -- and streamlining IT investments and optimizing human resources, company officials say, adding that the tool gives managers the tools to "centrally design and implement flexible service-delivery models that profit from increased agent productivity."

Company officials break down the suite's benefits in a couple areas:

Virtualized operations.

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Clash's Sandinista!:

INeoMarketing has announced the release of its new suite of lead management automation (LMA) products, a package that includes the PluraPage, PluraCom, and PluraPage+ software applications.

These applications provide customized marketing communications delivered through personalized microsites that "nurture customer relationships" and serve to "increase the quality and quantity of leads for sales departments," according to company officials.  

According to Laura Ramos, a vice president at Forrester Research, B2B marketers "can no longer afford to emphasize lead volume over lead quality. This practice reduces sales efficiency, increases costs, and fuels the gap between sales and marketing."  

To develop its lead management tools, that gauge the buying stage of the customer and act accordingly, iNeoMarketing produced its iNeoMarketing software suite consisting of the PluraPage, PluraCom and PluraPage+ products.

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the late Slim Dusty's "Losin' My Blues Tonight." Dusty's by far the most celebrated musician in Australian history, and his country sound is best described as what Jimmie Rodgers might sound like channeled through Hank Snow with a good country-rock bar band behind him. Much better than you'd probably expect, it's a shame this man never hit it big in the States:

Here's an interesting bit: First Coffee's seen CRM verticalized for just about any industry you can name off the top of your head, sport -- as in the athletes themselves -- is a new one.

Australia's New South Wales Institute of Sport will "embark on a new information race starting this week, with a new customer relationship management (CRM) system which will link the sporting data of more than 700 athletes in 28 different sports from across the state," according to industry observer Penny Jones.

Signing with Sydney-based Australian sports performance start-up Athletic Logic, Jones reports, "the institute will do away with two disparate systems instead putting all its money on a AU$50,000 customized CRM system called Athletrak."

Americans use CRM to track fans, ticket buyers and targets of sports merchandising. Using CRM to track the athletes themselves, well, if this is happening in America I haven't heard of it.

Last summer CRM vendor Sage announced that the Buffalo Sabres National Hockey League team implemented Sage CRM to automate ticket sales, customer service and marketing activities.

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The New York Dolls' "Fishnets and Cigarettes." Yes I know I slagged off the Dolls' 1973 debut yesterday as unmitigated tripe, or something like that, thanks to Meri Bishop for writing in and encouraging me to give the band a second chance.

So to be fair I downloaded a song from the reconstituted 2006 Dolls lineup, the aforementioned "Fishnets and Cigarettes." It's kind of hard to compare the this New York Dolls to the '73-'74 Dolls, since four members of the original Dolls have died, but frontman David Johansen and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain are back with a pretty good, tight band and this song does sound good. I might have to listen some more.

Saying they're "responding to customer requests for tighter integration between front- and back-office data," FrontRange Solutions has announced the general release of GoldMine Plus Accounting 4.0. This add-on to the organization's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) product allows users to draw information from Inuit Inc.'s QuickBooks, and see it alongside the standard GoldMine data in order to "gain a unified view of all transactions that relate to a given customer account."

Updates can also be sent from GoldMine back to QuickBooks.

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Beatles' Rubber Soul:

"We said last summer that Titan will be out in summer 2007 and it will," promised Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM as That Little Ole Software Company From Redmond announced that it is previewing the next major release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM -- code-named "Titan" -- with what company officials said was "a broad range of partners through the company's Technology Adoption Program."

The new version introduces an advanced multitenant architecture, and uses a single code base to support on-premise deployments as well as software-as-a-service deployments through hosting partners and through the upcoming Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM service.

As industry observer China Martens writes "Titan, which will probably be officially known as Dynamics CRM 4.0, will be the first Microsoft CRM release based on a multitenant architecture and using a single code base to support three types of usage -- on-premise, hosted by partners or Microsoft."

Company officials say the Titan release is an evolution of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 product, and will offer "a smooth upgrade path" for existing on-premise and SaaS customers. It's seen within Microsoft itself as a continuation of  the vendor's long-term ambition to provide customers with the option of on-premise or SaaS deployments and access to CRM capabilities within Microsoft Office Outlook, through a Web browser, and from mobile devices.

Wilson said Microsoft's partners will get look at the upcoming release, as well as the upgrade path it will provide to current customers. With early access to the new release, he said, partners "can develop common offerings that span the deployment options -- on-premise, partner-hosted or Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM."

The Titan TAP program includes approximately 300 partners in the first quarter of 2007, and will include over 1,000 partners in the second quarter of the year.

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's "Somewhere Over The Rainbow/ What A Wonderful World:"

Dealer Technology Group has announced that DiversiForm, a vendor of service department retention marketing and CSI products and services, will begin to market DealerLOGIX, DTG's customized sales process suite.

The integration of the companies' products is intended to create a "total service-drive sales product for the retail automotive industry," according to DTG officials.

"In most cases, automotive dealers do not have formal sales processes for the service advisors on the service drive. That's where DealerLOGIX comes in," said Mark Brandon, CEO and founder of DTG, adding that combining DealerLOGIX with the DiversiForm’s TRAX Services "will now provide a complete up-selling product to their customer base as part of their total CRM package."

Most dealerships build their businesses through marketing and customer feedback, Brandon says, "leaving out the most important piece -- a sales process." The DealerLOGIX Suite has what are called "Service Advisors" with a PC, or Tablet PC-based sales tool which "allows them to maximize sales with each customer visiting the service department."

DiversiForm already provides marketing and feedback services through its customer retention programs, ScanTRAX, PhoneTRAX and ReminderTRAX. DealerLOGIX will allow the company to include a sales-driven method, "which will complete the full circle of service CRM capabilities," DTG officials said.

DiversiForm designs and delivers printed forms and customer retention services to the automotive industry.

…

Dubai-based Cyber Gear has announced the launch of customized Web-based SMS gateway products "for organizations in the region." Organizations that need to communicate via SMS to their clients and prospects can directly send personalized SMS messages from their Web site.

According to Sharad Agarwal, CEO of Cyber Gear, the Web-based SMS product "allows organizations to communicate with their clients using our SMS gateway.

By David Sims

[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is, above the sound of sirens rushing past my window, the theme song of First Coffee -- "Ol' Milwaukee's Best," by Adam Carroll:

Recently First Coffee heard that salesforce.com was getting into call centers. Intrigued, I sent some questions to Rich Caballero, the call center czar over there, and he kindly took time to answer some questions, excerpts reprinted here. Thanks to Chris Nguyen for facilitating the conversation.

FC: Salesforce.com isn't known as a call center vendor, why do you want this to become part of the company's identity?
 
RC: Today, call centers are the primary way that companies develop and sustain long term relationships with their customers, and therefore are a key component of any CRM strategy. If you think about your own experience, 80 percent of interactions with your utility company, phone company, bank or other vendors are focused on service.