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10/17/05 - Benchmarking Delusions
One reader wrote, "Very closely related to benchmarking is a manager's delusion over caller satisfaction numbers. Time and again I hear a manager speak proudly of perhaps a 75% caller satisfaction score and I want to respond with: Wasn't a 75% a low "D" in school? What's so positive about annoying one caller in four? And when you add the common perception that "satisfied" is a positive (which it is not), and we see managers continuing to delude themselves about the quality of service.
The reader goes on to say, "Over reliance on benchmarks and trust in the companies that promote them isn't a service solution. The very "guru(s)" who have made a career out of reliance on these measurements have probably done more to foster mediocre service than they have done to improve service quality."
While I don't believe that the organizations that help provide industry benchmarks intended to promote mediocrity, it does make me wonder what role the benchmark firms play in helping call centers really achieve best in class business processes.
Gary Lemke, Publisher
(Share your thoughts)
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TODAY'S NEWS (more)
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Mercury Interactive announced Mercury Quality Center 8.2, a part of Mercury BTO Enterprise. The new version of Mercury's application delivery optimization center allows customers to automate software quality management across a wide range of application environments, provide visibility of quality projects, and align the priorities of quality assurance professionals with the requirements of the business.
Christian Children's Fund (CCF) has chosen Cincom's Socrates Call Center Advisor solution to help improve the accuracy and messaging of its call center personnel, offering quick, standardized, and complete information.
RightNow announced the resounding success of its annual user conference, held last week in Big Sky, Montana. With record-breaking attendance, the growing size and scope of customers' implementations, and the impact those implementations are having on customers' business performance, the conference underscored RightNow's continued ascent in a rapidly changing CRM market.
VoiceGenie Technologies and Nuasis Corporation announced that Tuition Management Systems (TMS) is reporting dramatic contact center improvements with the combined Voice Genie IVR and Nuasis IP contact center application.
InStranet is celebrating the first anniversary of the deployment of Contact Centers In-Line for SFR Customer Service. With more than 16 million customers and a market share of 35.8%, SFR is the second largest wireless operator in France.
Unica announced an alliance with Information Services International-Dentsu (ISID). As a result, ISID will launch a new enterprise marketing management solution to power event-driven marketing solutions--based on Unica's Affinium Suite--helping Japanese businesses deliver customer-centric marketing operations.
PresenterNet announced extensive plans for integrating its interactive media technology with Salesforce.com applications. According to PresenterNet CEO Douglas Wolfgram, the company is responding to its many customers who already use PresenterNet's data capture to populate contact data bases on Salesforce.com.
Alpine Access announced the appointment of Garth Howard as chief executive officer. In this role, Howard will be responsible for leading the company through a period of accelerating growth, and continuing to build on its foundation of operational excellence and sales leadership within the industry.
Webcom is pleased to announce that Cray has selected the Webcom WebSource CPQ solution to simplify its sales quoting process.
Empirix announced that it is the first software vendor whose solutions meet the standards established in Siebel's new Customer Experience Blueprint (CEB). Siebel Systems endorses Empirix's automated software testing and performance management products and services for ensuring the quality of Siebel Systems contact center and Web applications.
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 FEATURE WEBCAST (more) |
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"CRM's Secret Sauce - Everything You Need to Know About CRM"
Gary Lemke, Founder and Publisher, CRMAdvocate
Ah CRM . . . So much investment, so little return. Even today, a great divide exists between the promise and the benefit of CRM. Why? The answer is a paradox of simplicity and complexity - that is, the straightforward desire for customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention against an unyielding realization that not all customers act the same. Nor are all customers valued equally. This webcast is the first in a series on a single strategic focus and metric that can catapult your organization to the next level of revenue growth and profitability. Listen now to learn more.
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| CRMAdvocate Stock Index |
| CRMSI | 40.80 |  | 0.80% |
| Dow Jones | 10,287.34 | | 0.69% |
| Nasdaq | 2,064.83 | | 0.85% |
| S&P 500 | 1,186.56 | | 0.82% |
| Top Gainers |
| SAP | 43.31 | | 0.64 |
| Witness | 19.79 | | 0.49 |
| Vignette | 15.61 | | 0.48 |
| Top Losers |
| NICE | 42.62 |  | -0.40 |
| Sento | 3.05 | | -0.35 |
| ICT Group | 11.5101 | | -0.21 |
| Complete Stock Index |
| As of close 10/14/05 | |
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 White Papers (more)
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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)
| | | 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)
| | | 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)
| | | 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)
| | | 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)
| | | 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.)
| | | 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)
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"OUR TAKE"