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Dovetail Daily Links 2008-04-03

Business Intelligence: A Technology Category in Tumult....Don't Make Business Intelligence Suck for Users....Business Intelligence Is Mission-Critical, for CRM and Others....There's No Stopping CRM....Master of Your Data....
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Permalink: Thursday, April 03, 2008 11:18 AM
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Filed under CRM, Customer Relationship Management, Business Intelligence, BI
Software Enables the Human Touch, Reveals its Power.

The acronym CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management”, and yet when it comes to the intangibles of customer service it has always been up against the prevailing slogan, “Conclusive Results Matter.” Salespeople have always lived by this mantra, they know that talk is cheap, that leads are nothing until closed, and that only performance counts. Added to this layer of first-time customer acquisition is the deeper and more subtle layer of customer retention, more bluntly called repeat business, and this is a world that salespeople don’t necessarily involve themselves in: the metrics of retention are often far removed from anything they can claim as performance. CRM software has developed along the lines of these underlying dynamics: the focus has been on customer acquisition. Changes in thinking that now lead the software into realms of service and support, and into providing a unique experience for each individual customer, derive more from the brutal facts of customer loss and subscriber churn than from any epiphany of good marketing. . . .
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Permalink: Friday, March 02, 2007 2:47 PM
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Filed under software, CRM, Customer Relationship Management, customer service & support, change
The Power of Widgets, According to IBM and Google

We told you that widgets were coming, and now two powerful icons of the online world and the corporate network – Google and IBM respectively – have combined in an agreement to share 4,000 Google Gadgets with millions of WebSphere users.

Widgets are small software applications that are little more than services – they perform nothing more than very specific tasks, certain routine computations or retrieving data from larger databases, for example. Google calls its collection of these widget services “gadgets”. Perhaps the most famous one right now is Google Maps. There is a bewildering variety of Google Gadgets.

The Web is the largest network in the world, and the perfect place for tightly specialized interest groups and individuals to generate these specifically focused services, and then offer them to public utility. The Web is now monetized to quite a degree of sophistication – with Google’s ad-serving capability as the forerunner and most obvious engine. This makes a great software market for the low scale of development involved in widgets.

The enterprise network is monetized differently, wherein all its users receive a paycheck to participate. To a great extent, the market economics required to generate widgets (with the Darwinist elimination of many failed concepts along the way, at no real cost to the network) can’t exist on the enterprise network. In-house IT can only create so many custom utilities. Both worlds need each other, and the corporate net can afford to buy the cream of the Web’s produce.
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Permalink: Thursday, March 01, 2007 1:00 PM
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Filed under CRM, Dovetail Software, Dovetail, Clarify, Customer Service and Support, CS&S, Customer Relationship Management, customer service & support, knowledge management, km
Daily Dovetail Links 2007-03-01

SOA - Almost As Good As Dovetail . . . . Service Management and the IT Infrastructure Library . . . . Amdocs Sells CRM to UPC Broadband . . . . Microsoft CRM Migration – Moving from one domain to another . . . . Calgary eLearning Network – PKM . . . . Identify High Value Relationships
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Permalink: Thursday, March 01, 2007 8:23 AM
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Filed under CRM, Dovetail Software, Dovetail, Clarify, Customer Service and Support, CS&S, Customer Relationship Management, customer service & support, knowledge management, km
Software Enables the Human Touch, Reveals its Power

The acronym CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management”, and yet when it comes to the intangibles of customer service it has always been up against the prevailing slogan, “Conclusive Results Matter”. Salespeople have always lived by this mantra, they know that talk is cheap, that leads are nothing until closed, and that only performance counts. Added to this layer of first-time customer acquisition is the deeper and more subtle layer of customer retention, more bluntly called repeat business, and this is a world that salespeople don’t necessarily involve themselves in: the metrics of retention are often far removed from anything they can claim as performance.

“Most revenue systems focus on current period costs and revenues and ignore expected cash flows over a customer’s lifetime.” Beyond risk and compliance: Driving customer value

CRM software has developed along the lines of these underlying dynamics: the focus has been on customer acquisition. Changes in thinking that now lead the software into realms of service and support, and into providing a unique experience for each individual customer, derive more from the brutal facts of customer loss and subscriber churn than from any epiphany of good marketing. All this because analysts have been begging corporations for decades to look closer at retention. . . . .
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Permalink: Thursday, March 01, 2007 12:39 AM
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Filed under CRM, Dovetail Software, Dovetail, Clarify, Customer Service and Support, CS&S, Customer Relationship Management, customer service & support, knowledge management, km
SOA - Almost As Good As Dovetail

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) resonates with executives throughout today’s business computing environment because it offers opportunities to improve business performance, with limited risk, incrementally, and at relatively low cost.

SOA offers increased flexibility, improved use of assets, alignment with business objectives, and reduced integration costs, but its adoption within the enterprise is by no means simple.

“Butler Group believes SOA represents a transformation in the way the organisation operates, and executive sponsorship is therefore vital, as seen from many successful SOA implementations. Internal politics is often a major contributor to difficulties with SOA, especially as services and resources are now shared” SOA Will Transform the Way IT and the Enterprise Interact by 2012, Says Butler Group

Corporate executives know that their primary mission is to keep the machine producing revenue, all the while that new courses of innovation and change are laid in. The upgrade or overhaul of major parts of the enterprise computing environment is a weighty matter, where miscalculation could conceivably bring the machine to a halt.
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Permalink: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 12:50 PM
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Filed under CRM, Dovetail Software, Dovetail, Clarify, Customer Service and Support, CS&S, Customer Relationship Management, customer service & support, knowledge management, km
Daily Dovetail Links 2007-02-28

Daylight Savings Time (DST) Impacts Clarify Database . . . . Congress won’t patch your CRM system… . . . . Extraprise Introduces First Onshore CRM Support Center . . . . Customer Service Champs . . . . Are CRM and Proper Development Mutually Exclusive? . . . . Meeting the SaaS Security Challenge
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Permalink: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 6:56 AM
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Filed under CRM, Dovetail Software, Dovetail, Clarify, Customer Service and Support, CS&S, Customer Relationship Management, customer service & support, knowledge management, km, daylight savings, daylight savings time, daylight savings time clarify
Daylight Savings Time (DST) Impacts Clarify Database (and Rest of World)

Those who have called Daylight Savings Time a folly from the beginning may snicker at the Congressional decision to alter the dates, but those who have anything to do with software aren’t laughing. Changing the dates of the Daylight Savings Time active period, for the first time in decades, will throw a lot of clocks out of sync.

Dovetail engineer Steven Weintraub has compiled a list of dates affected by the new law, and instructions to update Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the Clarify database

“This requires a good knowledge of CLARIFY database setup and SQL. This is a problem. I am sure Clarify is providing a solution for those using Clarify support – but this does not help the many customers who have stopped paying support.

“For those customers (and this blog post is for you) – they have to know how Clarify stores daylight saving time. There is a table daylight_hr that stores daylight saving start and stop time per year per timezone. First you need to delete the records for the USA and Canada timezones from 2007 on. Then you have to add an entry for each to each US and Canadian timezone (make sure you include ‘Eastern Indiana Standard Time’ but not ‘Arizona Standard Time’). The times for the start and stop dates from now to 2049 are at the end of this post. If you do this right you will delete 387 records and insert 473.” . . . .
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Permalink: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 11:26 AM
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Filed under CRM, Dovetail Software, Dovetail, Clarify, Customer Service and Support, CS&S, Customer Relationship Management, customer service & support, knowledge management, km, daylight savings, daylight savings time, DST
Daily Dovetail Links 2007-02-27

Weatherproofing Customer Service and Support . . . . Too many companies are like bad marriages . . . . Meeting the SaaS Security Challenge . . . . Why Do Retailers Need Our Data? . . . . ERP and CRM: More mainstream for the medium-sized . . . . InvisibleCRM Marries On-Demand Sales Offerings with Desktop Applications, Nucleus Research Finds
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Permalink: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 7:39 AM
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Filed under CRM, Dovetail Software, Dovetail, Clarify, Customer Service and Support, CS&S, Customer Relationship Management, customer service & support, knowledge management, km
Weatherproofing Customer Service and Support

Within the field of CRM, customer service and support (CS&S) often shows itself to be a fair weather friend: when the storm hits, the system fails. The recent customer experience delivered by Jet Blue, stranding travelers in storm conditions, has received significant deconstruction in the industry, in part because the airline has been noticed in the past for its canny deployment of CRM.

In Jet Blue’s situation, their infrastructure proved inadequate to their system – in the crisis they didn’t have enough phone lines to manage all the information trying to flow. Business rules couldn’t advance cases, and management intervention couldn’t rewrite inadequate protocols on the fly. In the crunch, the company lacked sufficient agility.

”’One bad experience washes away a lot of good ones, and in this case, we are seeing what airline CRM is like,’ Denis Pombriant, managing principal with Stoughton, Mass.-based Beagle Research, wrote in an email. ‘In airline CRM you get all the buzzwords and none of the follow-through.’ In the travel business, the limited number of carriers on specific routes makes airlines compete on price. They are unafraid of losing customers, according to Pombriant, making customer attrition a revolving door.” Is there a CRM lesson in JetBlue’s snafu? . . . .
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Permalink: Monday, February 26, 2007 11:35 AM
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Filed under CRM, Dovetail Software, Dovetail, Clarify, Customer Service and Support, CS&S, Customer Relationship Management, customer service & support, knowledge management, km

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