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10/7/05 - Stand Up for Benchmarking
Feedback on the topic of benchmarking is running about 20 to 1 in support of my position. But I write this column to share different perspectives so today you will hear from those who don't agree with me.
One reader wrote, "I strongly disagree that there are insufficient reasons to benchmark. To deploy a successful CRM solution, you need to have quantifiable objectives. Examples would be 'Reduce new sale rep ramp-up time from 6 months to 3 months as measured by ...' or 'Increase the percentage of sales to qualified prospects from X% to Y% within 6 months of project launch.' In almost every example you need a baseline measurement. Without quantifiable objectives you cannot define your ROI, you cannot tell whether or not your project succeeds, and your project will not have the focus necessary for success."
I wholeheartedly agree that you need baseline measurements to measure improvements and calculate ROI but I don't believe you need benchmarks to create the baseline. Isn't the baseline a measure of your operation rather than the average of other operations?
Gary Lemke, Publisher
(Share your thoughts)
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TOP NEWS OF THE WEEK (more)
 FEATURE WEBCAST (more) |
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"From Tactical to Strategic: The Workforce Optimization Maturity Model"
Bill Durr, Principal Solutions Consultant, Witness Systems
Asking about the maturity of a contact center is certainly a delicate matter. But it is a question that has to be asked. In this webcast, we explore a maturity model that gives you new insights into your own organization and explores how you can make your contact center a change agent for the entire business. What you will hear will help you move from a tactical to strategic way of thinking, especially in the area of workforce optimization. So if you are dealing with the unprecedented pressures brought on by the Internet, hyper-competition, and voice over IP along with the familiar demands of cost-cutting and employee retention, this webcast is for you. Register now to receive your complimentary copy of Witness' latest white papers: "Reinvention of Workforce Management" and "Reinvention of Quality Monitoring."
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 Research Notes (more)
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Siebel + Oracle > SAP? - Oracle just announced to acquire Siebel. Technically speaking, this will make Oracle the number one CRM vendor in the world, even though the official legitimation has to wait until early 2006. There is however, another saying that SAP is catching up fast that she will likely replace Siebel as the CRM leader one day or the other. Would Siebel + Oracle > SAP in CRM in the coming years? We don't know yet. But it makes sense to have an individual review on each of them to see how they are doing so far and listen to what 443 survey respondents have talked about their image and product.(GCCRM)
|  | | Why Oracle CRM Is Only the 4th Choice - An Independent Survey and Perspectives from Global / China Experts on Oracle(GCCRM)
| | | How to Complete the Customer Self-Service Picture - Enterprise Reporting has become a critical component of Customer Self-Service. This is especially true in service businesses where customers place a premium on information and online information delivery, and account management is increasingly becoming the most efficient (and desired) way to interact with and serve them. (Actuate)
| | | Optimizing Online Service to Build Effective Customer Relationships - Customer service plays an important role in the shopping decisions consumers make across sales channels. As their satisfaction with online service wanes, online buyers turn to staff-intensive, phone-based service, and will make purchasing decisions based on past service experiences. Amid elevated stakes for high-value buyers, consumers are seeking improved access to knowledgeable service staff and speedy resolution of their increasingly prevalent service issues. Consumers will continue to find phone and e-mail to be the most satisfying channels for service resolution. (ATG)
| | | Microsoft Enters the Contact Center Market - One of the biggest challenges in creating a Contact Center has been the diversity of components needed to build a center.(Ventana Research)
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 White Papers (more)
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CEM Panel Discussion - Customer experience management (CEM) is garnering a great deal of attention in the CRM industry. A panel of industry experts discuss the importance of CEM to the enterprise and shed light on what it will take to successfully implement a winning strategy.(CRM Association)
| | | When Customers and Agents Make "Noise" from Surveying and How to Fix It - We have learned not to take things at face value. Naturally, we seem to question everything we see, read, observe and hear. How unnatural is it then that the management team does not question enough about its CUSTOMER Metrics? The inherent problem lies in the types of figures we are looking at without questioning.(Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C.)
| | | Quality and Value with Home-Based Call Center Services - Remember when "outsourcing" just meant sending your call center services to an off-site facility? Then, as costs began to rise and labor markets became saturated, off-shore outsourcing to countries like India and the Philippines became popular. While some calls will continue to be sent offshore for cost-cutting purposes, transactions that involve a premium customer, a sale or involved customer service issue are returning to U.S.-based call centers in droves.(Alpine Access)
| | | CRM Integration Across Marketing, Sales and Service - Many companies fail to appreciate the importance of developing specific, well-defined, and integrated business processes focused on the customer. This paper covers eleven key customer-focused processes and success factors associated with implementing process change.(Siebel)
| | | Hammering the Siebel Communications Server - To a Call Center agent, "Siebel" really means a desktop and everything that supports it (application servers, databases), a phone and everything that supports it (switches, routing, IVRs and telephony infrastructure), and the link between the two worlds - Computer-Telephony Interface, or CTI. CTI is not manufactured by Siebel but the perceived health of your "Siebel" application is intimately related to the health of the CTI integration.(Empirix)
| | | Application Management: Optimizing Your Contact Center Technology Investment - In the aftermath of heavy technology spending, contact center managers are no longer looking to expand their portfolio of technology investments but rather explore methods for exploiting those in which they have already invested.(DataMonitor)
| | | Montgomery Research White Paper - Defying the Limits: CRM: The Key to Superior Business Performance - In a daily ritual known to thousands of service professionals, in a wide range of industries, corporations lock themselves into a time warp by using traditional solutions - all in the hope of providing superior customer service - and while facing a tidal wave of requests. The lack of solutions that provide access and visibility into customer all interactions and integrate pre- and post-sales customer interactions - Web self-service, email, chat, telephony integration and knowledge management - for cross channel support services makes achieving superior customer service, loyalty, and retention virtually impossible.(Talisma)
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Siebel Insists CRM OnDemand Will Continue - "If Oracle got rid of CRM OnDemand, it would be really foolish," said Yankee Group analyst Sheryl Kingstone. She pointed out that during every acquisition involving a rollup strategy, rumors begin flying about which products will be axed. But in this case, Oracle has stated that one of the reasons it wanted to buy Siebel was because of OnDemand. (CRMDaily)
| | | Goofing up Global CRM - The biggest threat to global business is the Income Statement. Think of the top line entry: Revenue. And if you're a company doing business globally, that means global revenue. You want it. And your markets are bursting with possibility. Look at China, India, South Africa, Australia, the EU (hey, no constitution yet, but still they're consuming frantically).(CRMToday)
| | | Microsoft Warms Up Telephony Plans - "What they want to do ultimately is own the interface," says Irwin Lazar, an analyst with Burton Group. "They want to provide that client on the desktop, the mobile phone, the softphone regardless of the backend [voice] system." (Contact Center Today)
| | | Going Rural: An Alternative to Offshoring - More large companies are considering a range of options because offshoring is such a complex process, says Frances Karamouzis, research director at Gartner. Outsourcing labor to towns in rural parts of the country is particularly attractive given that many state governments are giving tax breaks to employers who move jobs there, she says.(Contact Center Today)
| | | EAgency Bolsters Wireless CRM Offering - In a two-month pilot, insurance company Aflac has replaced paper day planners and cell phone calling lists with the RIM BlackBerry 7520 PDA and access to eAgency's Nice Office service. Aflac gets the usual BlackBerry instant e-mails, but also can access Aflac customer forms and a variety of company reports in the field as they work with clients and prospects, without having to return to their offices. (CRMDaily)
| | | Customer Disservice? - Critics say the promised savings from offshoring come at too steep a price, while companies say very little at all.(CFO)
| | | Building Relationships Beyond the Hand-off - A recent post on CRMAdvocate notes that with help-desk outsourcing contracts, an improper hand-off is what kills a lot of deals. It's true that any problems with a deal become apparent during the handoff, but it's not the handoff itself that's the problem. There are any number of issues that can sour a relationship, including poor expectation setting and lack of trust. Following are three examples of issues that we've encountered in our 20-plus years of delivering outsourced technical support to companies around the globe. The good news is, for each issue addressed, we have lessons learned - expertise in dealing with these types of situations has helped us turn many difficult situations into spectacular results.(TechTeam Global)
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 Case Studies (more)
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Kronos Incorporated with Citrix GoToAssist - Citrix GoToAssist interfaces with Kronos' internal products and provides a strong support solution for Kronos. Key benifits that Kronos sees include reduced costs while improving quality of service, increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, improved first-call resolution, measured success with comprehensive reporting functionality, and Citrix can have someone up and running within 48 hours with no additional infrastruction needed.(Citrix Online)
| | | Barrie Hydro Adds Energy to its Help Desk with LiveTime - The implementation of LiveTime Help Desk has allowed Barrie Hydro to benefit from built-in reporting.(LiveTime)
| | | Bank of America with IEX - Customer satisfaction scores have exceeded the bank associates goals as a result of using adherence scores as an incentive for identifying behavior that exceed team goals.(IEX Corporation, a Tekelec Company)
| | | Witness Helps 4 Wheel Parts - By deploying eQuality ContactStore for IP within its Cisco converged voice and data environment, 4 Wheel Parts has been able to achieve the following results * Increased agent monitoring efficiency by 30 percent * Increased sales and order volume by eight percent * Enhanced training and development program.(Witness Systems)
| | | MessageOne Improves Salesforce.com with InsideScoop - Sales users are no longer spending time to copy and paste date into Salesforce.com. Instead, they get all the research they need for companies and contacts right at their fingertips.(InsideScoop, Salesforce.com)
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Nov 7-9, 2005: The Customer Contact Conference - Join the Customer Care & Services Forum (CCSF) and DCI at the Scottsdale Plaza Resort in Scottsdale, AZ, November 7-9, 2005, for the premiere of the Customer Contact Conference: Turning Strategy into Action.
| | | Oct 9-12, 2005: SSPA Conference - The conference remains on the very same dates with the same amazing program in the city where anything is possible, Las Vegas. The conference hotel is the Mandalay Bay. Please register for the conference as soon as you possibly can. By registering early, you can assist us in finalizing the numerous logistics required due to the quick transition to Las Vegas and the Mandalay Bay. **There is no need to register if you already registered for the conference when the location was in New Orleans.
| | February 27 - March 01, 2006: Linking Customer Feedback to Business Results - Looking for new ways to get more actionability out of your customer data? Interested in innovative ideas for responding to your customers to drive business improvement and profitability? Welcome to IIR's 10th annual Linking Customer Feedback to Business Results.
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| CRMAdvocate Stock Index |
| CRMSI | 41.43 |  | -0.61% |
| Dow Jones | 10,287.10 | | -0.29% |
| Nasdaq | 2,084.08 | | -0.91% |
| S&P 500 | 1,191.49 | | -0.41% |
| Top Gainers |
| Sykes | 14.11 |  | 0.69 |
| Sento | 3.24 | | 0.59 |
| SPSS | 23.71 | | 0.46 |
| Top Losers |
| Tekelec | 19.03 | | -0.72 |
| Witness | 19.55 | | -0.67 |
| HP | 26.89 | | -0.58 |
| Complete Stock Index |
| As of close 10/06/05 | |
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