I recently had the pleasure of attending the ACUTA (Association of Information Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education), conference recently held in Denver, Colorado. ACUTA focused this conference on the topic of adopting unified communications (UC) across academia. A survey of ACUTA membership prior to the conference indicated that the campus constituencies most likely to benefit from UC include IT, help desks, and teleworkers. Benefits most often cited from deploying UC include enhanced collaboration, increased productivity and operational efficiency. So  how does this relate to customer service management?

UC tools help customer service personnel become more effective and efficient in performing their duties. Academia has become a competitive industry, and student retention is a key strategic metric followed by institutional leaders. Retention is greatly influenced by student satisfaction on every aspect of college life … IT systems, facilities, financial aid, course enrollment, and other student services. Combining the imperative of student satisfaction with the necessity to reduce costs, many institutions are consolidating student services into a single contact center for assisting students in addressing questions and concerns. SpiceCSM is specifically designed to accommodate organizational efforts to bring efficiency and effectiveness into the customer service management function.

SpiceCSM has targeted higher education as a key vertical for adoption of the company’s platform. We are also encouraging the development of an industry-wide open knowledge library of customer service issue resolutions. All higher education institutions have a similar set of departments and associated services, thus making the sharing of such a knowledge library a very feasible idea. To learn more about open knowledge projects in higher education, click here.

Best regards,

Mark Cornett, COO

SpiceCSM

Welcome to the first installment of Meet the Team. Friday, I had the chance to sit down with our beloved COO, Mark Cornett, and we discussed everything from his current work here at SpiceCSM to his family life. Below are the interview questions that we discussed.

Besides what’s implied by your prestigious title, what do you do here?

In short, I spend a majority of my time formulating and implementing the organizational strategy for SpiceCSM.  This includes everything from the product roadmap, focused target market research, overseeing the customer care for SpiceCSM, and much more.

Where are you from?

Owego, NY. Not Oswego. It’s a very small town near Binghamton, and everyone always assumes that when you say Owego, you just mis-pronounced Oswego.

Where were you before SpiceCSM

From 2000-2008 I managed Fused Solutions, an outsourced technical support and customer service contact center, the parent company of SpiceCSM. From 1988-2000 I was a faculty and admin for the Clarkson University School of Business. And from 1977-1988 I worked for Hewlett Packard in a few sales and sales management roles.

When you are not diligently working on making SpiceCSM the best CSM platform, what are you doing?

Well as you know, the life of a start-up doesn’t generally leave much time for anything else, but in my spare time I like to tend to my vegetable garden, I am an amateur arborist, and of course I attend and follow all my kids sporting activities. (Mark is the proud father of 6 children)

What excites you most about the current customer service market and the position of SpiceCSM?

There is a very interesting opportunity to transform the customer service function, and I think Spice can improve it and enhance it in two major ways. The first area is in the user and agent experience.  SpiceCSM’s goal and mission is to make the overall process not only more intuitive, but more efficient as well.  This is mainly done through our ability to integrate our unique guided process workflows with our ticketing system and with our self-service module. The second big transformation in customer service will come with our introduction of the Open Knowledge Community. The SpiceCSM open knowledge community will transform high level subject matter expertise onto our intuitive guided process workflow platform. It will be a true fundamental change in how organizations access and create knowledgebases.

Where do you see the customer service market in 10 years?

1. Convenient access to knowledge: any place, device, medium
2. Highly intuitive tools for resolving problems
3. Seamless process of engaging  a variety associated resources to resolve problems: self-service, mobile devices, video, chat, etc.
4. Geographic independence of resources: i.e. at home agents
5. Customer service apps actually embedded right in products and services.

What is your vision for the SpiceCSM community?

My vision is to have the open knowledge community really expand to cover all customer service and support areas, free up domain expertise to focus on the next new and exciting products and services, and to have all our customers plan out and act upon a customer service management strategy.

Thanks to Mark for being the guinea pig for our weekly team interviews. Next up on the chopping block is Pete Blackmer, lead software developer and creator of Spice HelpDesk.

Hey everyone,

In an effort to get you more acquainted with who we are, we wanted to take some time every week to introduce you to a member of the team. Starting this Friday, 6/12/09, and continuing every Friday following, we will be doing a short post about one of our team members.

Each post will hopefully bring you closer to knowing more about the entire SpiceCSM team. Each post will include information such as business experience, skills, areas of interest, what each member is working on at Spice, hobbies, and so much more. Sure some of that information is available on our About Us page, but this will get down and dirty with each member, no matter what their role or responsibility is. I will attempt to include a picture of each person, but no guarantees they won’t break the glass… just kidding we all having dashing good looks. Be sure to stay tuned for this Friday’s post about our COO, Mark Cornett.
Best,
Justin

From June 15-17, Jennifer Balaban and myself will be in sunny Las Vegas, NV for the Call Center Week 2009 Conference. Taking place at the majestic Bellagio Hotel, we are looking forward to meeting all those that are planning on attending. Unfortunately our booth # has not been assigned, but if you are there, please be sure to stop by and check us out. Just look for the red pepper back drop and our smiling faces. As always we will be there to answer any questions as well as give live demos to all those that are interested.

If you are planning on attending and would like to setup a time to meet privately with Jen or myself, please email either one of us at jgroden@spicecsm.com or jbalaban@spicecsm.com.  At the least, be sure to stop by and grab a “stress pepper” which we are giving away.

Cheers,
Justin

Calling all Call Center Managers, Help Desk Managers, and Customer Service Directors… Spice needs your help!

We are always interested in knowing what our customers and potential customers think about our products so we are asking for a favor. We want to hold a focus group for our customers and potential customers to say whats on their minds. We will talk about current features, the product roadmap, pricing, and much more.

We understand we can’t be everything to everyone, but ensuring that our products and services are aligned with your needs and initiatives is very important to us. We are in the midst of rolling out a new pricing scheme and with your help it will be fine tuned for the market.

If you are interested in taking part (which we greatly appreciate) please visit the following link to sign up. This will be a virtual focus group and should last approximately one hour. We will be limiting the attendance, so be sure to register as soon as possible.

https://spicecsm.ilinc.com/register/czwkjxm

-Justin

Announcing the latest product update to SpiceCSM!

IE Compatibility

We’ve fixed the issues with IE, optimized for IE 7+. This requires IE users to install the Microsoft Silver Light plug in.

Database Held Process Files

We’ve modified the Process Editor/Reader to hold the process files in the database instead of a flat file system. No worries though, as we did not remove the ability to save or load a file in the editor. By adding this functionality it has allowed us to achieve the following.

• Implement basic revision control functionality including saving a process in a ‘Pending’ status and the ability to ‘roll back’ to prior versions.
• Implement a ‘bug tracking’ feature for process content that ‘flags’ the node in the process and gives visual ques on nodes that have outstanding issues in the editor.
• Implement a security hierarchy that allows for individual agent access (for editing) to allow for collaboration.

With this new feature it becomes much easier to manage and optimize your process content.

Pete Blackmer

Senior Application Developer

Judging the quality of customer service can be a hard thing to do. There are almost an unlimited number of factors that go in a customer service score and the score alone can mean many things to many different people.

In an effort to find out what piece of the customer service pie is the most influential for providing the best customer service, we have created this very short and simple poll below. There are obviously a lot of other factors that come into play, but to keep the list from becoming 5 pages long, we have kept it to the following answers.

If you are interested in finding out the results of the poll, please click on the link above in the Poll widget. (Thanks to PollDaddy for providing such a great service and tool) Also, please feel free to send this to friends and colleagues. More responses only result in better data analysis.

Over the last two weeks we have been working very hard in developing and delivering some good quality video and webinar content.  The first video demo, which is available for your viewing pleasure HERE, is a high level overview of Spice HelpDesk, our ticketing and knowledgebase engine.  There will also be some follow-up video demos that detail each section of the product.  Last but not least, will be an example of a support agent taking a phone call and using HelpDesk to resolve the problem.

Informational and training Webinars are also in the works. We would like to begin offering weekly and even daily webinars, showcasing the features and functions of Spice HelpDesk, and the rest of our products as soon as they are ready. On top of these weekly webinars, we will also be releasing a set of training courses that dive into the “in’s and out’s” of everything Spice HelpDesk, to help you make your support organization a leaner, meaner, problem solving machine.

We would greatly appreciate any comments or feedback in regards to the types of webinars and demos that we create. Our goal is to provide the content that is most important to you, our customers. Feel free to contact us at any time if you are interested in a one-on-one demo or to have any questions answered. Our phone number is (866) 3311-CSM (for those of us with blackberry’s the last three digits are 276) and if you prefer email, then please send all requests to sales@spicecsm.com.

Thanks,
Justin

For everyone that was at the show, we would like to thank you for stopping by the both.  We had a phenomenal time meeting and learning about everyone’s individual situation.  Hopefully we were able to provide you with some value-add information about Spice to take back to your respected organizations.

Congratulations to the winner of the Asus Netbook that we gave away. There were certainly a lot of great prizes up for giveaway so hopefully everyone was able to walk away with something.  It was also good to see that our “stress peppers,” were a big hit, we will make sure to order some more.

As we mentioned at the event, if you are interested in signing up for a free trial of SpiceCSM, please visit the following page: http://spicecsm.com/resources/free_trial.html.  Also we are glad to answer any questions that you might have. You can reach us at sales@spicecsm.com or if you would like to get back in touch with myself (Justin) or with Jen you can reach us at jgroden@spicecsm.com and jbalaban@spicecsm.com.

Thanks,
Justin

The following is the slideshow I used for my presentation at the 2009 ATA NY Metro Tech Forum. Though the event was small there were a lot of great speakers and we were glad to be there. The official title was, “Utilizing a Multi-tenancy and a Shared Agent Environment to Reduce Operating Expenses.” Quite the mouth full, huh.