Notes from the Services Research & Innovation Initiative Symposium

Yesterday I attended the Services Research & Innovation Initiative (SRII) Symposium, held at the Santa Clara Convention Center.  As one of the founding partners, the SSPA is in good company with our sister association TPSA, as well as IBM and Oracle.  Around 200 attendees met for a day of presentations and discussions about the current [...]

noHold InstantSupport: Intelligent, Conversational, Virtual Agents

I wrote a while back about the return of the chat bot…only this time they work. But I completely overlooked an early entrant in the intelligent advisor space, noHold.  Having just had an update briefing with Diego Ventura, noHold’s founder and CEO, I wanted to correct that oversight with some info on what’s new with [...]

RightNow Connect: OnDemand Integration Made Easy

One of the early criticisms about OnDemand technology was that it was harder to integrate with.  I don’t know that this was ever really the case, and I wrote a case study on RightNow’s CTI integration at Belgacom while at Forrester back in 2003 to prove the point.
But I do think it is true that historically, [...]

SAP’s Acquisition of Wicom Builds Contact Center and OnDemand Credibility

Yesterday SAP announced that they were acquiring Wicom Communications of Finland, a  multi-channel IP telephony vendor.  With Wicom Communications in the Netweaver stack, SAP will be able to offer a multichannel, all-IP, end-to-end contact center solution, integrating interaction routing processes into customer service.
Why does a CRM/ERP vendor need telephony, when they have successfully integrated with [...]

Live from the SSPA Best Practices Conference: Tuesday Highlights

Our Spring 2007 Best Practices Conference came to a close yesterday after another day of strong, member-led breakout sessions, the announcements of our Spring 2007 STAR Awards, and a closing tribute to our retiring founder and Executive Director, Bill Rose.
The winners of the 2007 STAR Awards for Best Practices are:

Live from the SSPA Best Practices Conference: Monday Highlights

Our 2007 Best Practices Conference, which opened Sunday night, kicked off yesterday morning with over 600 attendees for a full day of main stage keynotes, partner presentations in the Technology Services Expo, and an afternoon of breakout sessions. 
Here are some highlights of the keynote presentations:

Stephen Smith, Executive Director, SSPA. Though Steve joined us just three [...]

Announcing the Spring 2007 SSPA Recognized Innovator Awards

This morning at our Best Practices ConferenceI announced the winners of the Spring 2007 SSPA Recognized Innovator Awards as part of my keynote presentation. The categories for this round of awards were:

Analytics/Business Intelligence. Companies began embracing CRM’s “360˚view” a decade ago, and now have massive stores of customer history and interaction data, but what is [...]

Live from the SSPA Best Practices Conference: Opening Day Highlights

What a beautiful day in San Diego!  Our 2007 Best Practices Conference kicked off today, with 4 SSPA Training Day Sessions, a meeting of the SSPA Advisory Board, and the opening of our Technology Services Expo.  Here are some highlights for you.
This was my first Advisory Board meeting, and although no one likes to spend [...]

Mark Angel to fill post as KANA’s SVP of Strategy and Corporate Development

Maybe Mark Angel didn’t invent Web 2.0, but in my opinion, he is responsible for bringing Web 2.0 to the CRM and eService world.
As founder and original CEO of Kanisa, Mark took his expertise in real-time analytics and brought it to customer service.  As Kanisa grew, he assumed the CTO role, and continued in that [...]