Dovetail Software Blogs

"BusinessWeek had a great article on customer vigilantes last week - Consumer Vigilantes. The inability of companies to provide decent customer service has become more and more of an issue in recent years. Partly this is due to off-shoring and cost-cutting, but I believe the stupidity of their information systems is even more to blame. Most large companies have no choice but to automate their processes - the number of customers and their geographical distribution makes any else impractical. Yet the systems they use to do this are, frankly, dumb. They capture information, store it in a database and regurgitate it when someone asks them to. These systems do nothing with the data they have, learn nothing over time and have no advice to offer customers or staff who must use them."

"The fact that so many CRM systems have been designed from the fixed mindset perspective, seeing intelligence about customers being predictable, supporting processes that are not flexible enough to allow either for tackling obstacles or allowing for negative customer feedback to percolate up an organizations' ranks needs to change."

"Ideally, business intelligence changes the corporate culture so that every manager is responsible for his own budget, every sales agent knows what he needs to do to improve his performance, and every employee knows how the company is doing on an almost-constant basis. Be careful, though: It's all too easy to get tripped up by technical, training or cultural issues."

"It's a business model that says, 'You can stick your customer service right up your anti-virus. We didn't get rich by having to talk to our customers in person. Wait on the phone and someone will get to you when we darned well please.'"

"In the past month, a number of analyst firms have adjusted their forecasts for IT spending in 2008. Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Inc. projects that purchases of IT goods and services in the U.S. will grow 2.8% this year, down from its previous forecast of 4.6%. Global spending will grow 6%, down from the previous forecast of 9%, according to Forrester. Also, Framingham, Mass.-based IDC forecasts that IT spending will grow 5% this year, down from 6% last year. It has forecasts similar to Forrester's for IT spending in the U.S."