Welcome to TSIA’s Newest Blogger: Michael Israel

I’m happy to report that there is a new voice of sanity in the service blogosphere, as our expert of field service operations, Michael Israel, has launched his new blog, Maintenance Matters.  Michael joined TSIA last year after years of being a partner of the AFSMI. His expertise on field service operations and technology has been a huge benefit for TSIA members, especially with our new emphasis on medical technology firms–all of whom have critical field service departments.

In addition to answering member questions on field service, Michael has also been tasked with the rewrite of the benchmark survey, updating old questions and adding in missing questions to make the survey even more powerful. Another of Michael’s projects was launching our very first Maintenance Pricing Survey, and his newest blog post includes highlights from the survey.  The Maintenance Pricing Report has just been published, and distributed to all participating members. The report is available for purchase by other companies.

Please bookmark Maintenance Matters, and stay tuned for regular posts from Michael on the state of the industry! Thanks for reading!

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Coveo Customer Information Access: Search is Just The Tip of The Iceberg

I admit to being pretty jaded about “new” technology. In the 9 years I’ve been an analyst, I estimate I’ve had over 2,000 vendor briefings, and unfortunately the majority of claims about unique technology turn out to be the same or similar as other products. So when I say I was blown away by something new and innovative, it means I’ve been introduced to something pretty special.

This week I had the opportunity to spend some time in Quebec with Coveo, an emerging “customer information access” vendor, whom I will never again refer to as a “search vendor.” Oh, Coveo does search. They do it extremely well. But that is just the tip of the iceberg for this company.

But let’s start with search, as that’s what brought me to Coveo. I am finalizing the evaluation criteria for my upcoming market overview of search, showing how the worlds of enterprise search, customer support search and social search are merging. Coveo is on the list of vendor partners included in the study, and I wanted to learn more about what they were doing. The product had shown up on last year’s TSIA member survey for intelligent search with high satisfaction marks, but Coveo wasn’t coming at customer service search the same way as the multi-channel vendors. Turns out Coveo has over 700 customer installations, across several verticals, including the customer service market. Tied to no single knowledge base or content management tool, Coveo’s platform does very creative indexing of all enterprise and customer support content (biggest library of packaged connectors I’ve seen) and enables additional attribution or meta data to be associated to the content–sort of sophisticated tagging.