OUR TAKE -  Grow to Greatness     Recent Editions of CRMAdvocate 06.29.09    Credibility Buster or Credibility Maker 06.26.09    No Established Norms 06.25.09    Wearing Transparent Clothing 06.24.09    Taking a Transparency Hit 06.22.09    Not From Around Here 06.19.09    Hoosier Hospitality     Lasting Impressions: You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give. - Kahlil Gibran Today marks the end of the first half of the year. Many of you have faced challenges in the first half like you have never seen before. Perhaps you hope you never see them again.   Six months down. Six months to go. I'm not in a position to say if matters will improve or by how much they will improve. But what I can say is this. You have endured. You are still standing. Of course, there will be more challenges ahead.   So take a moment to catch your breath and think back on what you have learned during these unprecedented times. How is your opportunity different today? What are the new rules of customer engagement? Consider how you can use your recent experiences to "push the rock up the hill."   Now is the time to grow again. Remember, no one ever shrunk to greatness. That's my take. Do you agree? What's your take?   Gary Lemke, Publisher          Action Center         Free Subscription         Submit Content         Industry Events         Webcasts         Archive   Stock Ticker Rainmaker 1.35      0.14 Epicor 5.24      0.42 Pegasystems 26.55      1.85 Selectica 0.4      0.02 ClickSoftware 6.38      0.31 HP 38.98      1.37 LivePerson 4.19      0.14 NCR 12.04      0.37 ATG 3.93      0.12 RightNow 11.54      0.32 NetSuite 11.71      0.3 NICE 22.72      0.56 SAP 40.61      0.89 Amdocs 21.38      0.41 Oracle 21.5      0.26 Vignette 13.16      0.08 Jacada 2.11      0.01 Tekelc 16.84      0.06 Astea 2.51      0 CDC 1.5      0 Salesforce 38.91      0 Convergys 9.17      -0.01 Sykes 18.05      -0.04 Teletech 14.37      -0.07 SPSS 32.94      -0.26 Unica 5.54      -0.08 SupportSoft 2.17      -0.05 Chordiant 3.83      -0.13 APAC 4.89      -0.28 Interactive 12.42      -0.73 ICT 9.05      -0.6 eLoyalty 8.31      -2.08 As of 3:59 p.m. on 6/29/09         NEW IN CRM   News:    Kana Introduces New Era Of Customer Service With Kana 10 KANA announced availability of KANA 10, a service experience management (SEM) platform for managing the customer service experience. This new solution has been selected by online travel service provider priceline.com. Developed in conjunction with IBM and KANA customers, KANA 10 is a Web services-based solution that fuses the IBM service-oriented architecture (SOA) portfolio in a Web 2.0 platform. With KANA 10’s Web services architecture, customers’ existing technology and resources are linked into a single application, providing an experience that can be managed by executives and easily accessed by customer service agents (CSRs). (Kana )   Article:    Crafting a Strong Sales Contract Imagine that for 10 years, you have sold goods to a customer with nothing more than a call and a handshake. Your customer, in turn, sells your goods to the end user. For as long as you can remember, your customer and the end users have been very happy with the performance and durability of your goods. However, the goods in your most recent shipment are not holding up well, and the end users are demanding their money back and taking their business elsewhere. Now your customer is suing you, and the relationship which had been so profitable for so many years is threatening the very existence of your business.(DestinationCRM )   News:    Birst Powers RightNow Enterprise Analytics RightNow and Birst announced the availability of Birst within the RightNow solution as RightNow Enterprise Analytics. This integration of CRM and analytics became available for customer purchase with RightNow's May '09 product release.(Birst )   News:    Study Measures Success Of Customer Satisfaction Initatives A new national study conducted by The Gantry Group, LLC, Customer Satisfaction Business Impact & Diagnosis , reveals that 58% of study respondents rationalize their investment in customer satisfaction initiatives based on customers satisfaction scores, suggesting less strategic leveraging of customer satisfaction data. The study showed that the most effective initiatives at resolving customer satisfaction problems were formal, periodic customer satisfaction surveys to pin point specific problem areas (63%). However the impact of this initiative on several customer satisfaction metrics was reported to be only partial. Lower sales and loss of market share were partially impacted at best by 52% and 48%, respectively. Long contract renewal cycles were not at all impacted by corrective customer satisfaction initiatives for 55%. (Gantry Group )   Article:    CrowdService: A Clear and Present ROI for Social CRM Now here's the kind of problem a lot of companies would like to have, especially in this sour economy. A company had set a goal to drive the fast-growing e-marketing vendor to one million subscribers, but then realized their plan didn't compute. Because handling all those new subscribers using the current customer support processes would mean hiring another 2,500 people. Oops. The company decided they needed a social media solution that would enable users to help each other and also work collaboratively with their assisted support processes. (CustomerThink )   Didn't read the last edition of CRMAdvocate? Click here to see what you missed.

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