Smalltalk Wins Dynamic Language Shootout Competition

Proves Superior to Ruby, Python, Perl and Other Dynamic Programming Languages

Smalltalk won the 2008 Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) Dynamic Language Shootout competition, held in Munich, Germany. Sigs-Datacom, in conjunction with the German magazine JavaSPEKTRUM, organized the contest for the OOP 2008 conference.

The OOP is one of the most well–established IT conferences in the European software community with a history dating back seventeen years. The conference addresses the whole spectrum of software-development topics including information on the latest trends and applications.

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Why Authors, Musicians and Politicians seek the Colbert Bump

Louis Columbus, Cincom

ColbertbumpcStephen Colbert’s ComedyCentral show The Colbert Report regularly hosts authors, ... Read More

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How CallRIGHT Changes the Daily Life

The attached chart compares how a sales rep using CallRIGHT, a new prospect management technology, outperforms a sales rep using traditional prospecting techniques.

Download how_callright_changes_the_daily_life.doc ... Read More

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Managed and Hosted Contact Centers on the Rise

According to the "InfoTrack for Enterprise Services Program," a research program of the Telecom Intelligence Group, between 2004 and 2007, during the past three years, the percentage of contact-center decision makers who are planning to consider managed and/or hosted contact-center solutions has risen from 8.4 percent to 20.1 percent.

In a managed contact center model, the enterprise typically purchases the asset and the vendor provides wrap-around services, including administration, management and maintenance to help ensure reliability and resource availability. In a hosted contact center model, the vendor provides contact center functionality from its own data center, ... Read More

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The Marriage of Sales Force Automation and Marketing Process Automation

It is fascinating to watch how growth oriented businesses are putting automation to work to drive business strategy. Two players worth watching: salesforce.com is driving sales force automation and Eloqua is driving marketing automation.

Both companies offer hosted technology solutions that integrate with one another, giving marketing and sales management unprecedented ability to manage prospects through the entire buying cycle. What I love about the marriage of these two is that they hold the potential for finally getting these two often competitive departments to work together as one.

Chicago-based Aon Insurance was looking for a way to pull together efforts in various product lines and ... Read More

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ATG Technologies Enhances Customer Web Experience

On demand e-commerce technology firm, ATG, has joined a partner network of Web 2.0 industry veterans, to assist customers with website enhancements. Through media-enabled interfaces and social computing capabilities, it is hoped that consumers shopping ATG-powered sites will find it easier and faster to discover the products they want, evaluate them using realistic graphics and user-generated content, and complete the checkout process. The partnerships complement the robust features available in the ATG Commerce Suite, whether delivered OnDemand (hosted), or via licensed software. <more>

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Is CRM the same as CEM?

Chris Graham has an article on CIO Today that I have a slight argument with — mainly because it crosses for me an important distinction. Is CRM the same as CEM?

Chris writes:

So the CRM becomes CEM, a Customer Experience Management system. The technology needs to be facilitating, responsive, manageable and easy to maintain.

There is a relationship between CRM and CEM, but CRM does NOT become CEM. They are different. Those of us who care deeply about customer experience marketing do not need to carry the negative baggage of CRM.

CRM is technology-driven. It is all about sales force and ... Read More

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New Whitepaper: The Unified Agent Desktop / Cincom

Putting a single view of the customer on contact center agent desktop …

The unified desktop takes the power behind every point solution and application that powers a modern business, and places it all behind a single interface.
This efficient and cost-effective strategy provides the best of both worlds – an agent desktop built on the same key functionality that already powers your business but delivered through any web browser.
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Software as an Experience

Over at the Gilbane Group blog, there is a good discussion on how enterprise search impacts customer experience, particularly for Software as a Service vendors. Good advice for SaaS, but actually good advice for any software purchase. These are many of the areas in which Cincom does its best to deliver in a quality manner … it is the heart of delivering a great software experience. So I pass them along for your consideration.

Here is Gilbane’s list of vendor weaknesses:

  • Lack of understanding by company representative how their software works
  • Failure to really understand prospect needs, environments, and requirements ... Read More

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How to Select a Contact Center Vendor

According to Datamonitor, by 2008, the global market for managed and hosted contact center services will have more than doubled, reaching a value of more than $5 billion. My partner Randy Saunders writes about it along with a checklist of things to consider when selecting a contact center vendor. ... Read More

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TeaLeaf Improves Customer Experience for Haven Holidays

TeaLeaf has been adopted by Haven Holidays, the UK’s largest caravan holiday operator, to ensure that its new website offers potential holiday goers the optimal online customer experience by making its search facility and booking process is easy to use as.

Haven Holidays’ website, which attracts up to 25,000 visitors a day, is due to be re-launched this month. TeaLeaf will be instrumental in highlighting potential usability problems before they reach the customer and will help to identify the most profitable routes to conversion. TeaLeaf will also play a key role in Haven Holidays’ customer online support service by enabling customer support representatives to retrieve the online session of any visitor and use it to offer real-time support with the customer ... Read More

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