Dovetail Software Blogs

SAP to Increase Maintenance Fees ''SAP announced today that it will increase maintenance fees for customers on its lower-cost support option, moving them to an enhanced support offering that will cost 22% of their net licensing fees by 2012. The change affects about 17,000 customers on SAP's Basic Support, offered at 17% of net licensing ...

Amdocs and IBM Team to Offer Open, Standards-Based Service ''Tim Greisinger, vice president, Communications Sector Industry Solutions, IBM Software Group said, 'We believe the Amdocs and IBM Service Fulfillment Solution is the only service fulfillment offering that currently meets the full SOA attributes and that supports the TM Forum ...

A new theme in customer service is emerging in the contact center. First call resolution – closing a case and satisfying the customer in the first contact – challenges both current technology and an embedded layer of management assumption. But with customers so annoyed with call centers today, this may be the only way to keep them from ...

Dovetail Software Blogs: Agile Development: Dare to Fail “In many striking ways, agile development, with its short bursts of speculative iteration – saying in effect, does this work? – resembles nothing so much as an outright challenge to fail. Or to succeed, as the case may be. But either way to produce feedback quickly, so ...

Dovetail Software Blogs: Alignment Means Results “We can begin to conclude (1) that alignment is not achieved at the expense of technical efficiency; (2) that alignment is necessary, and a crucial strategic goal for every enterprise; and (3) that alignment alone means nothing, the traditional task of IT still remains. All ...

We’ve discussed before the digitization of the contact center, and the increased levels of customer service and support (CS&S) that improved software can bring to the customer experience. The sea change behind the evolution of the contact center is a shift from cost-containment to longer term, strategic actions that ...

In the great march towards perfect customer service – and thus perfect customer loyalty and retention – companies find that there is much they don’t know about their customer. Software and systems attempt to fill the knowledge gap, tracking and analyzing customer actions and preferences. Some of the task reverts back to the ...

Self-service customer support has a long way to go to be perfect, but as we saw yesterday, support self-service is making rapid gains. Service is increasingly being offered through self-service mechanisms, using automated voice and speech-recognition systems over the phone, and Web-based portal systems with ...