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.

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

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.

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

In case you have not had the chance to check out the blog at OpenCSM, I wanted to give you an update of the recent activity, and let me tell you, there has been a lot.  If you now go to www.opencsm.org/download, you will find the latest code for download.  Each project has been updated, so if you are following any of the projects and were looking for a bug fix or feature upgrade make sure to check it out.

Last Friday, Mark Cornett, our COO, made a blogpost titled, New Releases Announced, which outlines all the work and changes that have occurred.  The news includes everything from license changes to new features, so be sure to check it out.  Also, I’m glad I was finally able to convince our great developers to open up a little and make announcements about each of their projects.  Each of their posts are available at the OpenCSM Blog, so be sure to check those out as well.

We have been working real hard lately to bring the latest in CSM technology to both the SaaS and open source communities. Thanks to everyone that has given us their input and we look forward to more. Be sure to continually check beack here for the latest in technology, industry news, and best practices, and if your interested in our open source efforts make sure to check out www.opencsm.org

Not interested in managing an open source version, Spice Help Desk is currently available on-demand for your convience. If you have any questions about our products be sure to give us a call at (866) 3311-CSM or shoot us an e-mail at sales@spicecsm.com.

I was reading Donna Fluss’s post, Seven Trends Driving Contact Center Innovation, and couldn’t agree more with her assessment.  I especially agree with her second trend…

2.Customer churn plagues most industries in good times, running between 5 percent and 30 percent, and is a greater issue during recessionary times It is more challenging to find and more costly to acquire new customers when fewer people are spending money. The contact center plays a crucial role in retaining customers throughout the customer lifecycle, particularly at the pivotal point when a customer is reconsidering the value proposition of the company’s products and services. If agents are well trained, empowered to act, and have the necessary systems and data to determine the right actions, they are able to retain at-risk customers by meeting or exceeding their expectations.

Even if times are not tough, it is always important to retain the customers you have, because its cheaper to sell/retain a current customer than it is to bring on a new one.  And using the right tools can make all the difference. Gone are the days of replacing poor customer service with a low price.  Newsflash, everyone has lowered their price, so it comes down to value for retaining customers, and the best way of doing that is by satisfying your customer.

If you gain a reputation for exceptional service and support, it will translate into good PR and buzz which will actually help to increase the number of new customers. Each new customer becomes an advocate for your service, driving home more and more value to your bottom line. Managing the customer service experience may be considered a cost center, but if you do your homework and establish a system like the one in Donna’s post, it quickly becomes a revenue center. Now what manager can argue with that.

What the heck is this CSM thing all about anyways?

Well, it’s our way of differentiating the process of managing the customer service and support from the rest of the CRM and business functions.  CSM stands for Customer Service Management, and entails everything from supporting customer complaints to solving problems.  In today’s economy, this business function is gaining more and more attention and deserves to be seriously looked at. Not just as a side project.

Each organization has its own policies and procedures when it comes to customer service, and it’s our mission to make it possible for all organizations, small and large, to care about the customer service that they deliver.  We have a long history in customer service and support and want to make that knowledge and wisdom available to our community.  This is where the Spice application suite comes in.

Whether it’s through the use of our innovative process engine and business rules or in the ticket and case management, Spice Help Desk is designed to revolutionize the way businesses offer support.  If you have any further questions we would be glad to answer them. You can email us at info@spicecsm.com or sales@spicecsm.com or give us a call at 1(866) 3311-CSM.

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