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September 15, 2011 SpiceCSM’s CTO Wins InContact Coder Royale Award Salt Lake City Utah- Pete Blackmer current Chief Technology Officer wins an award for outstanding API use. Partner, InContact announced its “2011 InContact Coder Royale” winner at their annual user conference this last week. Pete competed against several submissions to this contest many of which were outstanding. Winning Ideas: Click to Call: Using the API this functionality allows the agents to call a customer using the phone number field which will actually push a call out of the InContact agent. Real Time Queue Management: Give your Supervisors and Management the ability to change skill, priority and agent from within the SpiceCSM application using the data pulled from within InContact in real time. Event Injection: Using our callback functionality, when the customer is scheduled to be reached again SpiceCSM will push

SpiceCSM is proud to be a bronze level sponsor of the 2011 InContact User Conference. While we are attending this action packed event our CEO, Michael Ryan will be on the agenda to deliver a stunning presentation about “service level differentiation”. This will be done in coordination with two other speakers from other companies. InContact has defined this as “The proliferation of interaction channels today means that customers have an ever increasing variety of choices for how they can obtain customer service. Companies that don’t have a strategy in place to optimize their mix of self-service and agent-based support risk alienating valuable customers and destroying customer value. And companies that recognize the unique attributes that each customer carries and differentiate service to customers based on those attributes have an important competitive advantage.” We are looking forward to showing how successful we are at delivering the best strategy while using a best

InContact Integration for the NG Platform! SpiceCSM is proud to announce a full telephony integration with the inContact NG platform. This integration provides many new features including:

• Click to Call! Outbound dialing made easy! Through the use of the inContact integration any valid phone number found in the CRM or case histories can be "clicked" on to initiate the outbound dial, no need to manually enter the phone number.
• Call Metric Data! Easy access to vital statistics! Call metric data can be tied directly to a case response, allowing for quick access to key metrics such as queue time, talk time, etc.
• Call Recording Access! Download and listen! - Call recordings can be tied directly to a case response allowing for easy review of agent interaction even with multiple responses and agents.

Look at the graph below. Why are so many people angry? Customer service today is being viewed differently with Social Media, and so many modes of communication it’s hard for people not to get the word out. When someone has a problem with something often times they will call support and are already frustrated. Then to make matters worse they get someone who is having a bad day, no lunch, under paid or under trained. Not a good mix.

June 2, 2011 - The cost of overnight staffing for a limited amount of customer interactions has lead many companies to turn support duties over to third party organizations. In order to reduce internal staffing requirements while still being able to maintain high quality of service with a "co-source" support model, a large regional Internet Service Provider has selected SpiceCSM for Customer Service Management and Guided Agent Services Software. SpiceCSM allows both the ISP and their outsourced support provider the ability to accurately determine the nature of a customer's issue, all while taking care of the problem and enabling extensive documentation. The VP of Customer Care said "Choosing spice was a 'no-brainer'. The ability to provide best practice Guided Processes to our agents was a key but the fact that we could use it to co-source with an outsourcer allowing us to eliminate the need to internally staff 24X7

So you've decided to use "cloud-based" helpdesk / CSM software to provide your callcenter agents with a guided process with which to work from. The question written on the brick wall most people hit at this point is "Where do we go from here?" The answer to this question really depends on a number of characteristics about your organization, and how you will provide support to your customers. One of the large differentiations here that can send you on vastly different paths towards success, is whether your company is a "startup", or if you are an existing company that has been (or has contracted a company to be) providing support to customers previously. A company that has experience supporting their customers will in many cases have a more clear direction as to what issues occur most frequently. This gives a starting point as to what guided processes will need to be developed

May 25, 2011 - Major Mid-West University selects SpiceCSM for its internal helpdesk. The idea started as a solution to fix the problems that occurred with using student workers. Limited hours caused stress amongst the workers when they could not easily find the information that they were looking for. SpiceCSM and the unification of multiple systems and guided processes with embedded iframes reduced training time, allowing the University to hire students who can work limited hours. The CIO stated, “My customers, the students, faculty, and university leadership demand flawless support. I am constantly reminded that, we are in a competitive environment and that social media can kill our reputation as a tech savvy institution. SpiceCSM allows me to meet my leadership’s directive to employ students in our help desk and provide terrific service in a cost effective manner. SpiceCSM has reduced training time and allowed us to

With gas prices sky rocketing and the costs of everything else following why not help yourselves and your employees by allowing them the freedom of working from home. I know crazy right? There are many mixed feelings on this. I aim to tell you the good, the bad and the ugly and how it really can be a good situation for everyone. How can I trust my agents? Monitoring and using cloud based programs allow you to view what your employees are doing and how well they are doing. With the proper use of reporting and supervisory roles, anyone can be anywhere. You can easily see how your employee’s metrics look. Things such as wrap time, pre call, hold time and agent states all will give you total visibility. Your quality experts and supervisors can still listen to calls also either archived or live.  When people know these things and are being

“The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.” So what does this mean for you? Well take your most common & frequent issues (20%) and track and analyze these. Soon enough you will have found 80% of your problems.  “ Microsoft noted that by fixing the top 20% of the most reported bugs, 80% of the errors and crashes would be eliminated” This is a significant number of case and calls not coming into your customer care center ultimately, saving you money. Tracking the common & frequent is not difficult. What you need to do is an analysis of what the brunt of your cases