At the recent ITEXPO East 2011 in Miami, TMC’s Patrick Barnard had the opportunity to interview Aidan Connolly, Idiro Technologies’ CEO.
The company works in predictive analytics, specifically social network analysis. According to Connolly, the company analyzes the behavior of online communities, identifying “patterns of communication” between people, and how this affects the adoption of products and services.
It’s a hot area now, and Connolly said they particularly focus on telecoms, since there are rich social networks there, and “it’s a monetizable customer base as well.”
It’s one of the primary ways that organizations can get to tap into a large pool of customer data. There’s a lot of value in terms of discovering what customers’ patterns are, and what their likes and dislikes are, which of course is the coin of the realm.
Read more here.
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From Qmatic, the company that introduced Customer Flow Management to the market, and GMT Corporation, which sells enterprise workforce management and performance optimization, has arisen a partnership intended to provide “a holistic view of service delivery and efficiency in face-to-face service environments.”
More specifically, officials of both firms say, this partnership is intended to improve the customer experience in bank branches, hospitals, retail outlets and government departments that provide face-to-face service.
If they can improve the face-to-face service at the DMV they deserve every product of the year award there is.
Qmatic officials explicity eschew what they call the “rear-view-mirror approach.” As they explain it, historically, “improving branch service effectiveness was largely a rear-view mirror exercise, analyzing prior events in an attempt to improve future service delivery.”
Read more here.
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Mark Gibbs -- whose business card says “consultant, author, journalist, columnist, blogger” -- has a good question for you:
“Let's say you've built a Web application that streamlines your business processes and you'd really like people to use it rather than go through your customer service reps. The problem is that if your customers are used to calling your company and your telephony front end offers something like ‘please go to www.mysite.com or press 3 to speak to a representative’ you know they'll just press ‘3’ and carry on as usual.”
You recognize the scenario, of course. Given that you'd really like to front-end your Web application, as Gibbs says, so ‘speak to a representative’ isn’t such an immediate option. “Where do you start?”
Oh, and there’s a catch: This is the real world, so bear in mind “the expense of undertaking a serious development project because of the cost and time involved,” Gibbs says. So now where do you start?
As Gibbs says, “Why not bolt an online telephony service onto your Web application?”
Read more here.
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Britain has just witnessed the launch of what its developers are saying is the country’s first hosted business software “designed specifically for small to medium sized enterprises.”
That’s Cocentric, developed by Cheshire based Triangle Software, which says the release has “sparked a wave of interest from entrepreneurs around the U.K. and further afield... Business owners from towns and cities across the country, one from South Africa and several from the USA are now trialing Cocentric.”
Trial versions of Cocentric are “regularly downloaded” from the company’s site, by “businesses across the country,” company officials noted.
We’re not sure what exactly would differentiate a specifically British method of hosting business software, the beauty of the business model is that it’s almost instantly applicable anywhere, maybe it has auto-reminders for David Beckham’s birthday, but if it’s introducing the U.K. market to the benefits of the technology, then well done, lads, down to the pub for a pint.
Read more here.
