A recent white paper titled “Five Ways to Put Your CRM Data to Work for You and Your Customers” provides the basics in sharing and using information from CRM systems to improve customer service.

Since a whole lot of a business’ customer contact comes via the phone, integrating an IVR with CRM is crucial.

Empower your customers: Organizations that use IVR applications with their customer service functions understand that one key to generating a positive caller experience is providing self- service options, or providing callers with fast and efficient phone-based interactions to automatically deliver real-time information at their convenience. Simply put: the best way to serve your customers is to have the information they need, when they need it.

Personalize the customer interaction for more efficiency: Yankee Group estimates that live telephone conversations still account for 77 percent of customers’ access to enterprise information, and that telephone interaction will remain the dominant form of access for years. Phone-enabling CRM systems for the contact center provides an environment for decreasing costly live agent time while increasing the overall customer experience by shortening the call transaction length and providing personalized menus and options.

Read more here.

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Think of the ways technology has transformed your car. Today it’s practically your mobile office, isn’t it? You get in and program the GPS to show you where to go, a synthetic voice reads your emails to you, and your reply is dictated with speech recognition software, “telephone calls are made and messages sent, without you being distracted or even taking your eyes off the road or hands off the wheel.”

According to officials of Loquendo, there’s a whole lot more possible with voice synthesis and voice recognition technology when it comes to your car. They can see a world where you can use voice commands to adjust the air conditioning, control the radio and search for certain songs “simply by expressing yourself naturally.”

There are on-board vehicle safety systems using TTS which read out information such as the level of fuel consumption, Loquendo officials said. With Loquendo’s voice synthesis and recognition technologies that have been created for the automotive environment, you can create applications that are easy to use for navigation, reading emails and text messages, and having voice access to telephone directories and multimedia content, the company website reveals.

Loquendo officials are indeed correct when the say that one of the main areas of use of voice technologies for cars is navigation: “The integration of voice synthesis and voice recognition in satellite navigators, be they portable or integrated into the car, allows a more accurate and complete navigation service for reading directions and other dynamic information, and for users to enter destinations directly by voice.”

Read more here.

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As screwups go it’s nowhere near as bad as Sony’s, but also not as clever as the brilliant Pop-Tart Cat hack of PBS, either.

Yet for the faithful denizens of Intuit Community, it was disaster: From Wednesday and into Thursday, Intuit’s QuickBooks Payroll service went on the fritz, meaning small businesses couldn’t pay workers via direct deposit.

Word is Frank McCourt blamed the outage for having trouble meeting payroll for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

According to industry observer Larry Dignan, Intuit got the direct deposit working again by Thursday, but now “there’s a recurring credit card payment glitch for businesses that upgraded from QuickBooks 2008 to 2011.”

First the direct deposit snafu: In a “critical payroll” notice emailed to customers, Intuit said “You may be aware of a service disruption today with your QuickBooks Payroll service that may have prevented you from processing your direct deposit payroll.”

Read more here.

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Bill Allen, director of marketing of Minuteman UPS/Para Systems, a provider of power protection technologies, makes an excellent point in a recent blog post that is surprisingly overlooked today: As a network manager, you should be thinking about your customers’ power supply as much as the rest of their computing needs for power protection is of the utmost importance.

It’s all about IT today, and IT is all about good ole’ electricity; no business of any consequence can function without computers, physical and IT security, and dozens of other electrical devices. Therefore, power problems become security problems, production problems and – worst of all – financial problems.

What you need – and what you need to convince your customers they need, because they do – is an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), a form of power protection.

Read more here.