By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Peter Tosh and Mick Jagger’s ragged duet Walk and Don’t Look Back, from Tosh’s Bush Doctor album. One thing you can say for ol’ Mick, he’s done more good duets than most prima donna rock singers — witness this track, and his pairing with Peter Wolf on Nothin’ But The Wheel, from Wolf’s stellar Sleepless album:

 

Datacap gets coverage in First Coffee for two reasons — well, three: One, they’re in my general galaxy. Two, they’re located in Tarrytown, New York, where I grew up — hello McKeel Avenue. Three, they do cool things, like involve themselves in the third annual Cycle Faster, which raised more than $18,000 in donations for the Lance Armstrong Foundation and the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.

 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If you’re in the Greater CRM Metro area and you do cool stuff for charity, First Coffee’s happy to let you puff out your chest a bit. Cycle Faster B2B 2007, which involved nearly 100 riders and reached thousands of spectators, kicked off at the beginning of the cycling season — at April’s AIIM Expo in Boston — and concluded at the October ARMA Conference in Baltimore. Funds were raised throughout the cycling season.

 

“Cycle time” in the ECM industry refers to document processing time. Datacap’s Cycle Faster brings together major imaging, capture, and ECM vendors to benefit worthy causes. Sponsors compete in the cycling time trials, racing on a grueling one-mile virtual course to become the “Fastest Man” or “Fastest Woman.” Winners earn not just bragging rights, but Cycle Faster donations are made in their company’s name.

 

So congrats to the 2007 Cycle Faster Fastest Man at AIIM, Alexander Goerke from Kofax, the Fastest Woman at AIIM Sabrina Stratford of Captaris, and the Fastest Man at ARMA, a tie between Jack Kasperski of Kodak and Jaime Castillo of Canon. Special thanks to the Best Fundraiser, Sabrina Stratford of Captaris, who raised $1,000 in pledges.

 

“The breadth of support we have seen from our partners underscores the generosity and heart of the ECM industry,” said Scott Blau, Datacap CEO. “Just as an ECM product requires vendors to work cooperatively to help customers meet their document processing challenges, Cycle Faster gives us a chance to work together to raise funds and awareness for worthy causes.”

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Well done to CRM Insider for recognizing quality when they see it, and putting Paul Greenberg’s CRM blog at the top of the list of CRM blogs today. Thanks to Angela, the Excitingly Enchanting Expatriate English Rose, for pointing the list out to First Coffee, who was too busy watching the best documentary produced in years, The Great Global Warming Swindle to notice.

 

Kudos to the witty CRM guru and oenophile Dick Lee  and the classy, gracious Jim Berkowitz for receiving due praise for their CRM blogs as well. And First Coffee pledges anew to do his utmost for the highest goal of never allowing such plastic wordoids, such as “solution,” “leader,” “enable,” “utilize,” and “leverage,” or pretty much any unearned adjectives or adverb infest this column.

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CPM Marketing Group, a Customer Relationship Management vendor for healthcare, has released a white paper on its Patient Loyalty Study. This paper “explores CPM’s loyalty study and the benefits of identifying and measuring loyalty within a healthcare organization,” according to the CPMians.

Measuring patient loyalty can help determine a particular marketing campaign’s impact on an individual’s future behavior. Increased loyalty, so the thinking goes, equates to a hospital’s likelihood of retaining an existing or prospective patient. Therefore, long-term viability of any business lies in the retention of its customers. “Once a relationship is developed, patient loyalty is achieved, thus, capturing a higher percentage of the individual’s lifetime value over time,” CPM officials say.

CPM, in association with leading experts in market research, sought to create a loyalty index for its customers. Key components of the survey included, awareness, brand equity, perceptions of the organization, hospital choice, and likelihood to recommend.

 

To that end, then, information gathered through a loyalty questionnaire was administered to individuals who have been contacted as part of a hospital’s Customer Relationship Management program and its associated control group, who have never received CRM communications. The results for both groups were computed and cross referenced to determine the program’s effect on loyalty.

CPM Marketing Group is headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin and works the database development, intelligent healthcare marketing systems, and predictive market segmentation side of the CRM street.

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According to various press reports eLoyalty has lowered expectations for fourth-quarter services revenue to $20 million to $21 million, citing delays at “numerous” pending integrated contact projects, lower-than-expected consulting revenue, and potential delays in completing contracts before the end of the year.

 

The Lake Forest, Illinois-based management consulting company said it has completed a restructuring of its operations, whacking ten percent of its workforce of 406. ELoyalty said the employee reductions, as well as other expense control actions, will reduce the company’s cash expenses by about $9 million annually.

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IEnterprises, a global desktop and wireless customer relationship management (CRM) vendor, has announced that it has incorporated enhanced composite applications available on IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 into its desktop CRM, iExtensions CRM.

 

By using composite applications, the iEnterprisers say, small and medium companies can now “access, pull, and take action on precise information from heterogeneous enterprise systems right when they need to.” Such yogalike flexibility and heightened automation lets companies lower their total cost and better collaborate.

 

“Composite applications help companies create longevity for their technology investments,” said John Carini, chief software architect, iEnteprises. “Users are no longer confined by their job functions or by multiple systems. They can pull information whenever, and however they want it.”

 

For instance, sales representatives may want to retrieve sales quotas by geography while customer service representatives may need to pull a customer issue to see if it has been resolved. By configuring the composite application components, information is sent to the requesting person. Such accessibility to information “eliminates the need for duplicate copies” and “reduces inaccuracies,” company officials say.

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How does First Coffee keep going? Turkish wine and Exile on Main Street on the iPod. Try it at home and see. Results may vary. Batteries not included. Sea monkeys may die.

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DealerAdvance officials say they’ve converted three of their clients to a new and growing WebDA product, the latest iteration of  their CRM application.

 

WebDA allows automobile dealers to capture a customer’s purchasing requirements, and lets customers and dealerships personnel to search inventory at multiple locations, locate an appropriate vehicle in stock and print out the necessary forms. Through an integrated CRM app, the system sends tasks for prospect and customer follow-up and produces management reports to measure compliance.

 

The company stated that the original server based system is now being replaced in the almost 100 dealerships previously being served.

 

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