The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a random play of the 102 Rolling Stones songs on my iPod. Current selection: "Midnight Rambler" from Let It Bleed:

Advisor Products, a financial advisor technology and marketing company, and CRM vendors Redtail Technology have announced the integration of Redtail's flagship Web-based CRM system and Advisor Products' Personal Client Portals.

Personal Client Portals, which uses Web 2.0 technology, is designed to give a client of a financial advisor a financial Web page "complete with live feeds from portfolio management, financial planning, and CRM systems, as well as market data, an advisor blog, and personalized financial content," according to company officials.

Using XML feeds, client activity information can be pushed from Redtail CRM to the client-facing product. Advisers can make notes of work done for clients and display this in each client portal's To-Do Manager. Company officials note that this feature is "especially valuable to fee-based advisers for validating their fees, since most of the work advisers do is often unseen by clients."

The product also lets advisers assign tasks to clients directly through their CRM system. "If an advisor notices that it's time for an annual meeting with a client, he can assign a reminder to the client directly," says Redtail Technology CEO Brian McLaughlin.

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The Black Hawk County, Iowa, 9-1-1 Service Board has announced that the Black Hawk Consolidated Public Safety Communications Center has become the first 9-1-1 Call Center in the country to receive text messages sent directly to 9-1-1. 

The approach uses Short Message Service to establish a text conversation directly between the "caller" and the 9-1-1 operator. While SMS was not initially developed for use in public safety, it has gained widespread acceptance by the Speech and Hearing Impaired Community, as one might imagine. Currently it's in restricted test mode with plans to go live in early July.

"It's important to note that a voice call remains the best way to contact 9-1-1," Black Hawk County officials say, adding that texting to 9-1-1 "should be limited to use in situations where a voice call is not possible."

Proponents of the technology say this allows those with speech and hearing impairments to use text messaging to communicate directly with a 9-1-1 operator in an emergency. Many communications companies, including Intrado, i wireless, Positron Public Safety and RACOM Corporation, worked to support the move. Currently people with speech and hearing impairments must communicate with 9-1-1 operators using a relay center or a specialized communications device.

Richard Ray, chair of the National Emergency Number Association's Accessibility Committee, urges public safety agencies to "accelerate the deployment of this technology and to encourage, support and celebrate efforts such as this."

Increasingly, says Chief Thomas Jennings, chairman, Black Hawk 9-1-1 Board, text is "becoming the way people communicate and public safety must be able to support 9-1-1 text messaging."

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Innoveer Solutions, a customer strategy consultancy, has announced that it has partnered with Suffolk Construction, a privately-held building contracting firm, to develop and implement customer relationship management (CRM) to "serve as the foundation for the firm's new nationwide sales program and business development process."

Suffolk is interested in CRM because they want "a centralized customer view with better pipeline and forecasting accuracy and management," company officials say. "CRM enables us to remove many manual and siloed processes, reduce the amount of time that our business development team spends on administrative tasks and better manage contacts and opportunities," says Corren Collura, Chief Information Officer, Suffolk Construction. 

 

Collura says Suffolk's system automates "many of our executive reports that track leads, opportunities, pipeline and customer wins," and has "reduced our time to create reports from one full day to a few hours" with increased accuracy.

"Innoveer's consultants worked with Suffolk on a phased CRM implementation, which gave them the time and focus necessary to understand the CRM system and its benefits, address their concerns, and focus on adoption," said Steve Noone, vice president, US Operations, Innoveer Solutions. "The team at Suffolk committed to understanding their overall business process first and then selected the appropriate technology to support that process. As a result, they now have a CRM system that the entire company follows, and they are poised to achieve their goal of nationwide growth."

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Salesforce.com has announced that Advent Software, which sells software and services for the global investment management industry, has deployed Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform throughout the company for what Advent officials say are "hundreds of sales, marketing, professional services, customer support, IT, finance, and executive management employees."

 

Belinda Rodman, Chief Information Officer, Advent Software, says that "cloud computing has delivered rapid time to value and has been widely adopted by our employees."

Advent uses Salesforce CRM as a central data repository to "help sales and customer service better understand customers," Advent officials say, adding that its high adoption rate among users "ensures that customer data is consistent and reliable," and that the company "benefits from custom forecasts and dashboards that provide real time views of key opportunity and deal metrics, and make it easy to compare historical data."

In addition to Salesforce CRM, Advent is developing project management and other custom applications on the Force.com platform, using what Advent officials describe as "multiple Force.com sandbox environments" for developing and testing new customizations and applications before deploying them.

As of April 30, 2009, Salesforce.com counted its customer base at 59,300 companies.

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Helpstream, a vendor of customer service communities, has announced HelpExchange, a community designed to "facilitate sharing best practices for customer service excellence." It's supposed to give companies a "one-stop shop" for more than 40 articles on topics such as "Attracting Members and Evangelizing Community" to "Selecting and Deploying Technologies," according to company officials.

"A customer is a terrible thing to waste. Companies have poured huge sums of money into products that focus exclusively on solving customer problems at the lowest possible cost," says Anthony Nemelka, CEO of Helpstream. "Unfortunately, these investments have done nothing to help companies extract the true value from its customers. We believe engaging customers using social customer service communities helps companies use customers' expertise to not only solve problems, but also to identify new market opportunities, defend the brand and stimulate referrals to new customers."

He described HelpExchange as "a first step in stimulating a forum for ideas, success and learning in this area."

HelpExchange is a customer service best practices community allowing practitioners and community managers to "share experiences and ideas" on how to get the most from customer service communities, company officials say. The site includes original Helpstream Community Best Practices content, a discussion forum, IdeaStorm brainstorming channel, portals to outside community resources, and customer service-focused ideas and blogs, all free and licensed under Creative Commons attribution license.

"A best practices community focused on customer service communities is greatly needed," says John Ragsdale, VP of technology research for the SSPA, AFSMI and TPSA organizations. "The majority of our members now offer customer service communities, but an understanding of key success metrics, target performance benchmarks, and overall best practices is sorely lacking."