Announcing the Spring 2009 Recognized Innovator Award Winners

This morning in my keynote address at our Technology Services World (TSW) event in Santa Clara, CA, I announced the winners of the Spring 2009 Recognized Innovator Awards. These awards are presented to partners of the AFSMI, SSPA, and TPSA for outstanding innovation; the categories for the awards change for each event. Winners are chosen by a panel of judges composed of association members, our industry alliance partners, and industry insiders.

Faced with an uncertain economy, AFSMI, SSPA and TPSA Research took a “back to basics” approach for the Spring 2009 Recognized Innovator Awards, identifying categories that enable operational and financial success for service and support operations. The Collaboration category looks for business value amid the Web 2.0 buzz; the Infrastructure category digs below functionality to identify how new and innovative technology platforms are contributing to success; the Revenue Generation category recognizes technology with a proven track record in boosting services revenue. Partners submitted applications, and for the first time, customer case studies showing real business value from the innovation was required. For more information on the categories, see this post.

The Recognized Innovators for Collaboration are:

• Citrix Online. The winner in this category is GoToAssist Corporate from Citrix Online, a comprehensive remote-support tool designed for use within support, IT and service delivery teams. Unique capabilities such as team collaboration, manager silent monitoring and advanced reporting allow businesses providing remote technical support to amaze their customers with fast, efficient support that ultimately leads to a superior customer experience. The latest release, GoToAssist Corporate Version 9, expands support capabilities out to Mac users and enhances support of users with multi-monitor configurations which are both fast-growing trends in business today. Some of the new features include Mac Support, Multi-Monitor Navigation, On-Screen Chat Enhancements, Reboot and Auto-Reconnect into Session (Password Privacy), Reboot and Auto-Reconnect into Session (Safe Mode), and Export of Recorded Sessions to Windows® Media Video file.
• Attensity Group. The finalist in this category is Attensity Group, who’s Voice of the Customer solution enables companies to drive business value from customer collaboration by transforming unstructured customer feedback into better customer service and products, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and decreased customer churn. Attensity analyzes any unstructured data, including case notes, satisfaction survey comments, forum discussions, email and chat conversations, etc., to gain critical insight into customer sentiment, early warning signs of issues, product innovation and quality, competitive analysis and customer trends. In addition to intelligent analytics and Voice of the Customer, the Attensity Group also offers technology for multi-channel service, self-service, and a full suite of knowledge management tools.

The Recognized Innovators for Infrastructure are:

• ISOdx. The winner is this category is ISOdx, whose solutions address two specific markets—IT help desk support teams and external customer service and support organizations. ISOdx Rapid Resolve (for help desks) helps teams transform their power to drive down costs, drive up efficiency, proactively prevent issues and rapidly solve problems. ISOdx Rapid Resolve OEM (for services and support organizations) allows businesses to differentiate their brand by providing better and faster customer support, which translates to increased profitability potential, enhanced customer loyalty and a more strategic approach to work. Leveraging open source software, SaaS, and even an “appliance on CD” deployment option, ISOdx offers a powerful infrastructure platform that reduces both complexity and ownership costs for enterprise customers.
• Citrix Online. The finalist in this category is GoToAssist Corporate from Citrix Online. Already recognized for their collaboration capabilities in the previous category, Citrix Online was also recognized for their innovative SaaS infrastructure used to deliver their popular remote support tools. GoToAssist Corporate is an easy-to-use Web-based service that can be hosted from any Internet-connected computer. Citrix Online provides 24/7 monitoring and maintenance, and there are no upgrade fees. There is no need to pre-install any software on the client computer and the support session can begin immediately. The GoToAssist Corporate user interface and workflow are designed to be very fast, simple and easy to use, so anyone can provide or receive support regardless of their level of technical sophistication.

The Recognized Innovators for Revenue Generation are:

• nGenera. The winner in this category is nGenera, whose nGen Sales Chat turns a Web site into a proactive marketplace and empowers the traditional contact center to become a profit center. By implementing proactive chat, nGenera CIM customers have been able to convert high-value customers to leads and engage them, execute up-sell/cross-sell campaigns, help close sales and facilitate sales conversion, reduce Website and shopping cart abandonment, enable effective real-time monitoring of customers, reduce agent call volume, and increase agent productivity. Customer success stories include a large online hardware retailer that generated $59.6M in revenue using nGen Chat, and a home products retailer that increased their number of repeat buyers by 300% and experienced double-digit growth in Web sales.
• RightNow. The finalist in this category, RightNow, offers CRM solutions that are easy to implement and give organizations a cost effective way to facilitate positive customer service interactions. If an organization can achieve superior customer satisfaction, they can increase customer loyalty and generate higher revenue. RightNow 8.2 gives customers the ability to turn the contact center into a revenue generating center with new features/capabilities including expanded collaboration options with a new co-brose feature, new survey and online chat features, topic monitoring with sentiment analysis, a Knowledge Syndication Widget, new proactive chat functionality, and enhanced product registration capabilities.

I’d like to thank the judges for this round of the Recognized Innovator Awards: Jim Chismar, Microsoft; Dennis Gershowitz, DG Associates; Bill Hall, Pretium Partners; Tom Johnson, Agilent; Cary A. King, Minerva Enterprises; Tim Matanovich, Value and Pricing; Lisa Ozkan, QAD; Ilyse Pender, Independent Industry Analyst; Grant Pulver, KCS Institute; Amanda Roberts, Randy Ross, and Krista Sanders, Stone Cobra; Steve Satterwhite, Entelligence; and Rajeev Shroff, Avaya. I appreciate your time and valuable insights.

If you are interested in being a judge for the Fall 2009 Recognized Innovator Awards, please drop me an email and I will add you to the list. If you would like more details there is a full article published today on our website with more information about the award categories and winners. Thanks for reading!

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Tags: AFSMI, innovation, Recognized Innovator Awards, SSPA, TPSA, TSW

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