Verint Systems announced the acquisition of privately-held Opus Group, a provider of performance analytics solutions for contact centers and back office operations. Verint Systems has acquired the business of Opus through the purchase of certain assets and liabilities of Opus Group LLC for $12 million cash at closing and additional earn-out payments over two years based on certain profitability targets.

Parature announced that ATI Technologies has successfully deployed Parature's Enterprise Edition to service their 6 million global customer base. ATI has implemented Parature's solution worldwide to manage their call center, email, and Web support.

RightNow announced that Susan Carstensen, CFO will be presenting at the ThinkEquity Partners 3rd Annual Growth Conference on September 13, 2005 at 2:30 p.m. A live audio webcast will be available on RightNow's Investor Relations website at http://www.shareholder.com/rnow/medialist.cfm/.

Entellium announced that Prepared Response has chosen Entellium over Salesforce.com after an extensive side-by-side "bake-off" between the two applications. Prepared Response will deploy Entellium eSalesForce for sales and marketing, in addition to Entellium eCustomerCenter for customer support.

3Com announced that it is expanding its Convergence Applications Suite with the introduction of the new 3Com Internet Protocol (IP) Contact Center module. The 3Com IP Contact Center module is a feature-rich contact center application that routes customer contacts -- phone, email, web and fax -- to customer service agents located anywhere on the enterprise network.

TeleTech Holdings announced that it is proud to be part of a coalition of national businesses to support the American Red Cross efforts to aid the victims of Hurricane Katrina. TeleTech will provide infrastructure, phone support and employees to take donations from callers during the Red Cross telethon Friday, September 2, 2005 from 8:00 pm to 12:00 am EDT on NBC.

Business Objects announced that it has strengthened its position as the leading business intelligence (BI) vendor in Western Europe, according to the report "Western European Business Intelligence Tools, 2004 Vendor Shares" (IDC #LT06M, July 2005) issued by IDC. The report positions Business Objects as the leader throughout Western Europe in the overall business intelligence tools market, as well as the End-user Query, Reporting, and Analysis segment.

StayinFront announced that it will feature demonstrations of StayinFront SIMS 9.2 at the 15th Annual PDMA Sharing Conference, September 19-21, at the Omni Orlando Resort at ChampionsGate, Orlando, Florida.

Webcom announced that its first client summit will be held September 22-23, 2005 at the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The event will highlight customer success stories, as well as provide a forum for customers to share ideas, innovation and best practice with each other.

  "OUR TAKE" (more)

9/6/05 - Forcing Customer to Use Self Service Last week I asked for stories about good incentives gone wrong. The stories keep coming in but I still want you to send me your "good incentives gone wrong" story.   In the meantime, many of the stories follow a common theme - forcing customers to use self service. More specifically, using technology to direct more customer inquiries to the IVR by making it more difficult to reach a live person. One person wrote: "A manager was given a raise by increasing the percent of inbound calls handled via IVR vs. the company agents. How'd she do it? By making it harder to opt out to an agent. Frustrated customers calling back to try and game the system caused the numbers to spike. And of course caller satisfaction went into the toilet, but that wasn't what she was measured on."   In general, operational efficiency metrics can be awesome in terms of creating behavior that saves the company money but those operational gains should not be stealthily applied on the back of customer satisfaction. Do you have an IVR story to tell?   Gary Lemke, Publisher (Share your thoughts)