Proactively monitoring the blogosphere: What are customers saying about your products?

On Tuesday I caught up with KM thought leader Blake Cahill who is now in the Brand Monitoring space, serving as VP of corporate marketing for Visible Technologies. I admit to being a bit jaded about new service and support products, having seen so many startups reinventing existing technology.  But I was pleasantly surprised to have a briefing about [...]

Catch up with eGain: New Applications Released in Version 7.6

I have known some of the folks at eGain from the early days.  eGain got their start with email response management systems (ERMS) back in 1998, and I believe my first meeting with eGain was in 1999 when Clarify was interested in partnering with an ERMS vendor.  During my Giga and Forrester days, I was [...]

MidMarket CRM Spending Remains Strong: Salesforce.com Update

One of the findings of our 2006 SSPA Member Technology Survey was that the largest percentage of spend planned by mid-market (under $1B) technology companies in 2007 was for CRM:  35% of small to mid-size enterprise (SME) members have budget for CRM this year. This is great news for mid-market CRM vendors, who 5 years [...]

Daylight Savings Time Emphasizes The Daily Battle of Complexity

 
It is Sunday, March 11, 2007.  Do you know the correct time?
One of the top issues at the SSPA is how increased technological complexity is impacting today’s consumer and enterprise support organizations, with our benchmark metrics showing service levels dropping as complexity ratchets up.  Much of my research targets how innovative service and support technology [...]

BI Acquistions Off and Rolling: Oracle’s $3.3 Bid for Hyperion

I’ve been saying that 2007 would be the year of business intelligence (BI), and it appears my prediction is coming true already.  Here’s a recommendation from my 2007 Service and Support Industry Trends:
Invest in analytics. A common refrain emerged from the last Customer Service Executive Summit: more business intelligence is needed. Companies are collecting massive [...]

KM 2.0: Knowledge Retrieval Beyond the Firewall

Last week I did an SSPA webcast with Chad Wolf, President and co-founder of eVergance, about the impacts of Web 2.0 on knowledge management (KM).  Of course, we always need a new name for a new concept, and KM 2.0 is the moniker in popular use already. If you’d like to view an OnDemand version [...]