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10/11/05 - Benchmarking - Our Readers Speak Out - Part II
We continue today with more thoughts from our readers. One person wrote, "The reasons people benchmark today are not the reason that benchmarking became a useful tool. Benchmarking is comparing your processes/practices to another organization to understand why/how that organization is able to achieve the results it does."
The reader goes on to say, "Benchmarking should facilitate the adoption of best practices, not lure companies into thinking that they are performing at an acceptable level because they are as good or better than the average of whatever survey. Benchmarking, in its truest sense, without understanding the business processes/objectives is a waste of time."
Two things I want to point out. First, benchmarking should never be solely about data comparisons. It must include knowledge of the business processes behind the data. Second, benchmarking to averages will simply make you average.
Gary Lemke, Publisher
(Share your thoughts)
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TODAY'S NEWS (more)
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Citrix Systems announced Citrix GoToAssist 7, the next generation of remote technical-support and professional-services solution that enables organizations to provide best-in-class support over the Internet, on demand and securely.
Westbury announced that Scope4mation's product ICM will be embedded in Westbury's Inventory Lifecycle Management solution. This solution will unify, categorize and combine the gathered data, compare it against data in the CMDB and selectively or automatically updates attributes of and relationships between CI's in the CMDB of HP OpenView Service Desk.
Mercury Interactive announced Mercury Performance Center 8.1, a part of Mercury BTO Enterprise. The new version of Mercury's application delivery optimization center allows customers to automate application load testing and helps verify that applications will meet business performance requirements.
The Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA) announced it has joined with The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania to offer a new management education and certification program beginning in the first quarter of 2006. The new joint program will result in SSPA management certification.
UniPress announced that FootPrints has received the TMC Labs 2005 Innovation Award from Customer Inter@ction Solutions magazine.
RightNow announced that both its CEO Greg Gianforte and its flagship RightNow CRM solutions have been honored by CRM Magazine with 2005 CRM Leader Awards. Gianforte was named one of six Influential Leaders, and RightNow CRM was named one of four Midmarket Suite CRM Leaders.
Firstwave Technologies announced it has signed formal agreements for the co- development, distribution, support and sales of products with M1 Global Solutions. "We believe that this expanded strategic relationship with M1 Global should create substantial value for our customers, shareholders and employees," said Richard Brock, CEO of Firstwave Technologies.
Siebel announced that Hormel Foods has selected Siebel Business Analytics and Siebel Consumer Goods to improve its customer relations, productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness of marketing investments. The Siebel solutions will help the direct sales team supporting the Hormel Foods Consumer Products Sales group unlock valuable customer insight to help the company better serve its retail partners.
Empirix announced that it has been issued U.S. patent #6,944,799 for its Multimedia Synchronization System, a key element of its testing service for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology environments involving products from leading vendors such as Avaya, Cisco, Genesys and Siebel.
MicroStrategy announced that Herbalife has selected the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform to facilitate sharing of pertinent information. With MicroStrategy's zero-footprint Web interface, Herbalife employees will have vital information at their fingertips from consistent data sets, which will provide them with greater insight and improved analysis capabilities.
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 FEATURE WEBCAST (more) |
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"CRM's Secret Sauce - Everything You Need to Know About CRM"
Gary Lemke, Founder and Publisher, CRMAdvocate
Ah CRM . . . So much investment, so little return. Even today, a great divide exists between the promise and the benefit of CRM. Why? The answer is a paradox of simplicity and complexity - that is, the straightforward desire for customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention against an unyielding realization that not all customers act the same. Nor are all customers valued equally. This webcast is the first in a series on a single strategic focus and metric that can catapult your organization to the next level of revenue growth and profitability. Listen now to learn more.
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| CRMAdvocate Stock Index |
| CRMSI | 41.26 |  | -0.43% |
| Dow Jones | 10,238.76 | | -0.52% |
| Nasdaq | 2,078.92 | | -0.55% |
| S&P 500 | 1,187.33 | | -0.72% |
| Top Gainers |
| Sykes | 14.05 |  | 0.50 |
| West Tel | 36.87 | | 0.48 |
| eLoyalty | 6.78 | | 0.26 |
| Top Losers |
| Verint | 37.38 | | -0.88 |
| salesforce.com | 22.25 | | -0.56 |
| Tekelec | 18.41 | | -0.47 |
| Complete Stock Index |
| As of close 10/10/05 | |
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Former PeopleSoft CEO Joins Salesforce.com's Board - After fighting Oracle for more than a year, PeopleSoft's board fired then-CEO Craig Conway a year ago, saying it had lost confidence in his leadership. PeopleSoft was sold to Oracle for $11.1 billion two-and-a-half months after Conway's departure. Conway has kept a low profile since his firing.(CRMDaily)
|  | | U.S. Small and Mid-sized Businesses Find Value in Converged Communications Solutions - Small and mid-sized businesses in the United States plan to increase their usage of converged voice and data communications solutions over the next 18 months, new research commissioned by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) reveals.(CRMToday)
| | | On-Demand Benefits for the Call Center - According to Karen Moser, an analyst with research firm International Data Corp. (IDC), the market for Web-based applications will reach $1.5 billion within one year. You can be sure that the same trend will soon catch hold in the contact center.(Contact Center Today)
| | | Dashboards -- Not just for executives - Frost Bank IT executive Louis Barton is the driving force behind a new effort to bring executive dashboards out of corner offices and into cubicles. Barton, executive vice president in charge of data warehousing and business intelligence at Cullen/Frost Bankers Inc., a $575 million bank holding company based in San Antonio, is one of more than 300 employees at his company using dashboards from Cognos Inc.(SearchCIO.com)
| | | Building Relationships Beyond the Hand-off - A recent post on CRMAdvocate notes that with help-desk outsourcing contracts, an improper hand-off is what kills a lot of deals. It's true that any problems with a deal become apparent during the handoff, but it's not the handoff itself that's the problem. There are any number of issues that can sour a relationship, including poor expectation setting and lack of trust. Following are three examples of issues that we've encountered in our 20-plus years of delivering outsourced technical support to companies around the globe. The good news is, for each issue addressed, we have lessons learned - expertise in dealing with these types of situations has helped us turn many difficult situations into spectacular results.(TechTeam Global)
| | | Customer Disservice? - Critics say the promised savings from offshoring come at too steep a price, while companies say very little at all.(CFO)
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"OUR TAKE"
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