Premise vs SaaS - Which To Choose?

Mitch Wright

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Cloud computing offers many advantages for today’s IT departments, yet businesses contemplating migrating must be aware of the many unique differences and potential pitfalls involved. Since FrontRange Solutions offers both premise and SaaS offerings, we would like to explore five essential points to ponder as you decide to make the switch.  

The cloud is an increasingly viable infrastructure deployment option for both the SMB and the enterprises, but is it the right choice for everyone?  Before you jump in head first into SaaS with your Service Management projects, you should understand there are fundamental differences between the available cloud offerings, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. 

To determine which model is right for you, check out the SaaS Decision Worksheet

CIOs' Top Technology Priorities

Mitch Wright

Friday, January 20, 2012

The well-known analyst firm Gartner has just released the outcomes of their CIOs’ priorities survey. Based on the results, Gartner U.S. IT budgets are expected to decrease 0.6 percent. The CIOs who responded to this survey said their top priorities for the year included increasing enterprise growth, attracting and retaining new customers, and reducing costs.  

The CIOs' top technology priorities were as follows: 

1. Analytics and business intelligence. (Last year's rank: 5)  
2. Mobile technologies (Last year: 3)  
3. Cloud computing, including SaaS (Last year: 1)  
4. Collaboration/workflow technologies (Last year: 8)  
5. Legacy modernization  
6. IT management (Last year: 4)  
7. CRM  
8. ERP applications  
9. Security  
10. Virtualization (Last year: 2)  

How to evaluate a service management solution

January 13, 2012

A perfectly tailored Service Management solution can be a beautiful thing, but one size does not fit all. It's important that companies find a solution that meets their business needs, and their implementation objectives, which means asking themselves a few basic questions like:

• What are the specific processes we need the new tool to support?
• What level of reporting do we need?
• Will it actually improve our productivity?

A good starting place is to determine if you need a help desk or a service management solution. This will depend on your level of IT maturity. If you are a mature organization with highly defined processes, you are probably at a point where you are now moving to become more proactive in how you manage your IT environment.

This means looking for a tool that can provide robust and flexible process automation improvement and control. If you are a small organization with high turnover and not a lot of process in place, your first step should be to look at help desk solutions that are easy to deploy, easy to configure and provide out-of the box remediation tools and reporting. There is no need to seek out the most robust, complex service management solution—just because you have a nail to drive into the wall and need a hammer, you don’t need to pick up the sledge hammer.

The more you can determine your organization’s requirements and goals, the better you will be able to evaluate the right solution for your company.

Finally, the biggest or most expensive tool on the market does not make it the best, while the smallest or cheapest does not make it the easiest to use...find a tool that suits you.

Holiday Preparedness for Customer-Facing Businesses

Ensuring your service is top notch during the holiday season

December 7, 2011

Most customer-facing businesses have already prepared for the high-volume holiday season, paying special attention to their customer service center. However, there are a handful of last minute items companies can do before and during the holiday season that will ensure your service is top-notch. These are taken from Software Advice, a great source for customer service and help desk software reviews.

1. Identify holiday FAQ's: What questions are you likely to get asked during the holiday season? Identify and train your staff on those to increase first-call resolution.
2. Cross-train staff members: Holidays are a very busy time, and therefore, you should have all hands on deck. Train all your employees on basic customer service, giving everyone a role in support.
3. Let customers know your availability: Customers are a needy bunch, especially during the holidays, but they know you need a break, too. Just be sure to communicate available/away time in advance across all customer-facing channels.
4. Support your agents: Your help desk and support center employees will be under a lot of stress during the holiday season. Put resources into supporting your staff with things like, bonuses, rewards, in-office massages, etc.
5. Evaluate your onboarding: Many companies hire seasonal employees to manage the holiday spike. Companies should use this time to examine the success of their training techniques to improve future seasonal and full-time onboarding.
6. Evaluate internal collaboration: The holidays are full of surprises. So, it's important that your departments are able to both communicate and collaborate on issues as they arise.
7. Manage peak load times: Your customer support team will be made up primarily of expert service agents and seasonal hires. “If you can figure out how to best distribute the work load between temporary versus full-time employees, you can experience a huge amount of savings and also provide a better customer experience,” says Assistly’s Senior VP of Marketing, Matt Trifiro.
8. Evaluate emergency response processes: No matter how much you prepare, bad things are going to happen. It's Murphy's Law. What is your plan for when things go awry? How effective is that plan? This evaluation can help lower spikes and make things run more smoothly.
9. Evaluate customer sentiment: It's not easy keeping customers smiling. Especially during the rush of the holiday season. So, monitor your performance by reaching out to customers and asking them how you did. This feedback is arguably more valuable than charts, graphs and metrics.
10. Keep calm and carry on: This is a lot to take in, and managing all of these things can seem intimidating. But remember, it's doable. And if you mess up, keep going forward. Mistakes are great because you can learn from them and avoid them next holiday season.

By doing all of these things, not only will you experience smoother contact center operations during the hustle and bustle of the holidays, but you will have a better idea of how your organization is performing. This can inform your service strategy going into the new year.

For more holiday prep, check out the rest of Software Advice's Holiday Customer Service Series.

Customer Service Assessment

Take FrontRange Solutions' customer service self-assessment. It's designed for professionals who want to get a real handle on how they can use technology to optimize customer service. We'll ask you a series of questions about how technology is currently being used in your customer service organization, which will take a few minutes. Your responses will generate a personalized assessment packed with pragmatic tips and suggestions on how you can use technology to run a more efficient customer service organization. The personalize report will be emailed to you.

Mobile, cloud computing spending to take off in 2012

Decline of the PC set to continue, says IDC

Reposted from silicon.com

Businesses will invest heavily in mobile and cloud computing in 2012, according to an analyst report, as companies and consumers continue to turn away from the PC.

Global spending on tablets and mobile phones will surpass that of PCs in 2012, according to the IDC Predictions 2012: Competing for 2020 report. Meanwhile mobile app downloads will hit 85 billion in 2012 - generating more revenue than the mainframe market - while mobile data network spending will also exceed fixed data network spending for the first time.

There will be a move to make cloud the default platform for business software in 2012, with 80 per cent of new commercial enterprise apps being deployed on cloud platforms. Increased use of cloud services by business will allow the major platform holders to begin generating revenues in excess of $1bn, with IDC predicting that Amazon Web Services cloud services business will hit this level of return next year, followed by Google's cloud based Google Enterprise services within 18 months.

And as the volume of digital content being generated grows to 2.7 zettabytes in 2012, up 48 per cent from 2011, new systems that offer rapid analysis of large datasets, such as in-memory computing, are expected to gain traction.

Investment in cloud computing, mobile, social networking and big data analytics will account for at least 80 per cent of IT spending growth between now and 2020, according to the report.

"Even though the IT industry will follow along the same transformational path as it did in 2011, the events, the choices, and the stakes will be very different in 2012," Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC said in a statement. "The urgency to act - and to make the right decisions - will dramatically increase."

Reposted from an article by Nick Heath on silicon.com

Find out more about FrontRange Solutions' cloud product at www.frontrange.com/saas.

ITSM Tool Comparison: The Support Applications Your Business Needs

Reposted from CompareHelpDesk.com

IT service management: it is the focus that keeps your IT processes operating according to your business initiatives. This discipline is often considered to be a contrast to the standard, technology-centered approaches to business interaction and IT management. Yet, it has been proven to deliver value to the organization. As you conduct your ITSM tool comparison, consider the leading vendors in this space and examine the features they offer that support your IT initiatives.

Identify Your Needs in an ITSM Tool Comparison 

Prior to the completion of any ITSM tool comparison among select vendors, you will first want to identify the applications that are a must-have for your IT service management. Leading providers in this space will offer a common architectural platform that will include features such as business processing automation, reporting, an analytics dashboard, multi-tenant data structure and integration. Also look for a Configuration Management Database (CMBD) to ensure that all of your IT business processes are directly accessible to your enterprise service model and any shared IT asset repositories.

Include FrontRange in Your ITSM Tool Comparison 

FrontRange is making waves in this industry, offering nine different modules, as well as CMDB, to meet the IT needs of your organization. The list of modules includes a service catalog, self-service module, release management, change management, configuration management, service level management, inventory management, problem management, incident management, availability management and knowledge management. This comprehensive portfolio of lifecycle and service products should be included in your ITSM tool comparison, and it is positioned as an ideal applications suite to enable your company to improve productivity and service levels, while delivering standardization and service desk best practices across your IT department.

ITSM Tool Comparison – Include Axios 

Make sure your ITSM tool comparison includes a closer look at Axios. While not as comprehensive as FrontRange, Axios still offers some powerful service desk applications to equip your ITSM team with the necessary capabilities they need. The tools offered by Axios include comprehensive ITIL support, service catalog, enterprise-class Configuration Management Database, self-service portal, business rules modeling and powerful workflow management. The easy integration of this ITSM tool comparison provider allows you to leverage other best-of-breed applications. Axios and FrontRange both offer the required architecture to support robust ITSM capabilities, with Axios focusing on functionality depth and simplicity in the management of your IT infrastructure.

ITSM Tool Comparison Includes the Lesser Known Beetil 

ITSM software providers with the best marketing departments tend to dominate the search results, yet Beetil is one application to consider when doing an ITSM software comparison. Again, this solution is not as comprehensive as that of the FrontRange solution, but it could offer a viable alternative for those with a tighter budget. The main elements of ITIL are addressed in this ITSM platform, including incident management, release management, problem management, configuration management and change management. Dig deeper into your ITSM tool comparison and you’ll also find that Beetil offers messages, a self-service portal, time tracking and reporting that is easily customizable.

Any ITSM tool comparison should include a drill down into the different modules and capabilities offered by providers in this space. Make it a priority that ITIL is supported and that your specific needs can be met with the offered portfolio. Demo the product and measure its results for the ideal outcome to your ITSM tool comparison.

Reprinted from CompareHelpDesk.com's article.

Four Tips to Make Your Holiday Help Desk Shine

Reposted from Lauren Carlson's article on Software Advice's blog

I looked at my calendar today and was appalled to see that Thanksgiving is a week away. And that means Christmas is right around the corner. It seems like just last week I was sporting shorts and sunglasses. (Actually, it was just last week because I live in Texas.) The point is, it’s officially holiday crunch time, and businesses everywhere are feeling the heat.

The holidays typically signal two things for consumer-facing businesses: 1) a startling spike in customer inquiries and requests; and 2) the end of one year and the start of a new one. At this point in the year, many companies have already made preparations for the high-volume holidays, paying particular attention to the customer support and help desk. But there are a few last-minute prep items you can do to ensure your company is ready for the spike.

This is the first of a two-part holiday series. For part one, I will outline four quick fixes that will get your help desk and support center holiday ready. But be sure to check in next Monday for our part two, where I reveal how you can use the holidays as a “stress test” to better prepare for the coming year. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves – on to the tips!

Quick Solutions for an Even Happier Holiday Season

A week from Friday, the #1 retail day of the year will hit – Black Friday. Despite the ominous tone, Black Friday is a huge revenue boost for many companies, particularly retailers. It is also a stressful time for customer support. Smart businesses have already taken care of the essentials – hiring seasonal support agents, verifying server capacity, etc. But there are some quick checklist items that, if done, can prevent potential chaos and better prepare your agents to handle the spike. This translates to happier customers during the holidays, who will turn into repeat customers once the wrapping paper has settled.

I made a short list (and, of course, checked it twice) of some quick to-do’s that will better prepare your support center for the traffic spike during the holidays.

Create a holiday-specific FAQ list. The types of questions your business receives during the holiday will likely vary from the day-to-day inquiries you’re accustomed to. To prepare, hold a brainstorming session with your staff to identify what questions will likely come up. For example, many customers will want help with shipping times and getting items on or before Christmas. Others will want to know about gift wrap options. Come up with an FAQ list. Post the simpler questions up on your site to avoid spending time on those calls. Then, educate your staff on the more complicated ones. These FAQ’s should serve as the foundation of your holiday help desk training because they will enable agents to resolve a majority of issues on the first call. They will also prevent your team from scrambling around two days before Christmas trying to figure out if the sparkly gift wrap is extra.

Cross-train your staff. Many companies will hire seasonal employees to handle the increased calls and requests during the holidays. According to Matt Trifiro, Senior VP of Marketing at Assistly, another option to reduce the need for seasonal hiring is to cross-train all employees. Much like athletes cross-train to improve the whole body, companies can train every employee – from receptionists to accountants – to be a support agent, improving support across the entire organization. “Cross training provides more touch points and really allows your system to be more resilient to the stress you’re going to have over the holiday,” Trifiro explains. First, you should equip all employees to answer basic questions customers may have. Then set up an escalation procedure for common situations that require additional steps or expertise. This tactic is particularly useful on the highest volume days like Black Friday and the day after Christmas when it’s all hands on deck and everyone has to play a service agent role.

Communicate unavailability ahead of time. Businesses need a holiday, too. Your customers know that, and they will be understanding of that fact as long you clearly communicate when you will be unavailable. Alert customers on every possible medium (website, Facebook, blog, Twitter, voicemail) of your seasonal hours and availability. Communicating this clearly will help avoid confusion and, more importantly, dissatisfaction.

Develop a plan of agent support. Help desk and support center employees will be very busy and likely very stressed during the holidays. Savvy companies will invest a lot of energy into supporting their agents via rewards, bonuses, in-office R&R, etc. This is a great perk organizations can offer to let employees know they are valued. “These people are your front line customer service agents,” Trifiro says. “So just recognizing the stress they’re going to be under and doing things to relieve that stress can make a huge difference in overall performance.”

Each of these to-do’s should take up to a few hours time at the most, but that’s a small investment when you consider the greater benefits in store. The work doesn’t stop here, of course. Once the holidays hit, it’s time to start monitoring and measuring performance, but we’ll discuss that in the next post.

Do you have any other quick holiday help desk or customer support prep suggestions for us? Please share them in the comment section below.

Reprinted from Lauren Carlson's article on Software Advice's blog.

Read part II of Lauren's post here. 

MSP Supports Fortune 500 Clients’ Technology Needs with FrontRange Solutions SaaS2 Service Management

November 21, 2011

Mitch Wright

Managed service providers (MSPs) face a unique customer support challenge. They must track and support issues specific to each client and do so against service-level agreements that vary with each client.

Such was the challenge at Milestone Technologies, Inc. (MILESTONE), which supports critical technology functions at its client companies. Leading companies like Facebook and Procter & Gamble turn to MILESTONE for technology products and services that help keep them running smoothly.

When the company looked at how best to provide responsive service, it sought a single solution that would allow it to track the unique requirements of its many different clients. Up to that point, MILESTONE used a mix of service management tools.

Unified, Hosted Solution with 99.97% Uptime
MILESTONE chose FrontRange SaaS² Service Management as its hub for service and support. The solution brings together the capabilities of FrontRange’s service management offerings in a secure application built for the cloud environment.

With SaaS Service Management, MILESTONE can track and support each client’s specific service requirements with the peace of mind of 99.97 percent uptime with FrontRange Solutions’ SaS70 Type 2 certified hosting facility.

“When we looked at how best to support our customers, FrontRange SaaS² Service Management provided the high level of reliability we needed combined with world-class, flexible service management features to support our customers’ specific requirements,” said Tony Silveira, executive vice president, MILESTONE.

Phased Rollout to MILESTONE Clients
With support from FrontRange Solutions Professional Services, MILESTONE implemented and went live with the three modules of the SaaS solution in just a few weeks.

• The Incident module enables full tracking of every issue that comes in, ensuring appropriate routing and responses within set time limits.
• Knowledge Management provides a searchable database of answers that is configurable to be specific to each MILESTONE client.
• The Self Service module lets MILESTONE customers log and check on the status of their requests online.

In the future, MILESTONE can extend FrontRange SaaS² Service Management to add other IT support functionality, such as problem, release and configuration management.

MILESTONE planned a phased rollout of SaaS Service Management to extend service through the application to each of its clients, including Procter & Gamble, Highway and Stella & Dot. The company custom-configures the response levels and routing for each client, and can see and manage the issues for just one client at a time.

MILESTONE also has the flexibility to extend the “client manager” role to some clients, rather than a MILESTONE rep handling this. In that case, the client manager has access to only the incidents, customers and the knowledge base for their business, with that information secure from other MILESTONE clients.

Responsive Support = Stronger Client Relationships
MILESTONE clients trust the company with a core part of their business—their technology infrastructure. With a comprehensive service management solution, the company can better provide the level of support its clients demand to keep their environments running effectively. Providing responsive support not only fosters better relationships with those clients, but enables client companies to serve their own customers better.

“We pride ourselves on the level of service we deliver to our clients, and FrontRange SaaS² Service Management supports us in providing an expedient response – helping keep our customers’ IT environments running flawlessly,” said Michael Jose, service desk and IT operations manager, MILESTONE.

Signs of Stage Two Recovery

November 18, 2011

Mike Heberling

As we look for signs of improvement of the third leg of the economic recovery (employment) we see signs here and there that stage 2 (Main Street) is closer to being strengthened.

For instance, Bill Smead, CEO of Smead Capital, reported on CNBC that “The U.S. household debt-service ratio has fallen to 11 percent in 2011 from a peak of around 14 percent in 2007, according to data from the U.S. Federal Reserve.” and that "The United States consumer has done an amazing job... they've [brought] historically high debt-service ratios down to within a few quarters; we're going to have debt-service ratios in the United States comparable to 1982 and 1992 which was the beginning of five to seven year prosperity periods."

Five to seven year prosperity periods – doesn’t that sound good?

A de-leveraged U.S. consumer means that while they may not yet have a lot of confidence in the economy, they will be able, and probably will need to spend on household goods to refresh and replace aging appliances and various other consumables. Business to Consumer Service and Help Desks will be prime targets for the productivity chasm as more demand for services are required before the adjustment to new sustainable business levels have been completed.

As compared to previous downturn and recoveries, these Service Desks have the advantage of a new class of software and delivery methods.

In past recoveries, Enterprises looking to prepare for the production chasm had to rely on Premise based Service Desk software solutions. These applications had to be acquired and resources, specifically time, had to be secured for purchasing the software and servers, allocating rack space, installation and testing.

Utilizing Cloud Technologies and Software as a Service (SaaS), solutions have been designed and architected with the Internet as a foundation. Secure locations are prepared to be ready and able to deploy Service Desk software on an as needed subscription basis enabling the Enterprise to quickly react to Service Desk volume increases driven by economic improvements. They are well placed to take advantage of the business opportunity provided by the de-leveraged U.S. Consumer.

From fixed to frictionless enterprise

October 27, 2011

Reposted from Phil Wainewright's article on ZDNet.com

Summary: You have to look beyond the technology and see the bigger picture of business transformation enabled by the automated connectivity of the cloud. Enterprise is going frictionless.

When people have asked me over the past year or two what’s the next big thing in cloud computing, my answer has always been, business transformation. Now I have a new, more specific answer: Frictionless Enterprise — also the title of a book I’m working on to publish next year [see disclosure].

I’ve always said it’s a mistake to focus solely on the underlying mechanics of the cloud. The bigger picture is the massive change in society and business enabled not just by cloud computing but by every aspect of the Web and its interplay with all of today’s incredible, connected, intelligent electronics. By far the most exciting aspect of this wider cloud of automated connectivity is the way it helps individuals and enterprises break down barriers, find new ways to interact, and create innovative new lifestyles and business models.

The unifying theme at the heart of all this potential for transformation is the simple absence of friction. In the cloud, on the Web, there’s no distance to slow us down, no custom infrastructure we have to build, no paperwork to get lost. We can make connections, harness resources and start interacting without ever having to wait for physical stuff to happen first. This on-demand access to information and resources has already transformed long-established industries such as bookselling, classified advertising and music publishing. And that’s just a foretaste of what’s yet to come.

Frictionless enterprise marks a total reversal from classic theories of the firm, which held that resources had to be contained within the enterprise because it incurred too much friction and cost to go outside for them. Today, the opposite is true. It takes too much time and expense to acquire or build stuff in-house if it’s already available on-demand from the cloud. The most successful, efficient organisations are those that can easily connect to and harness those cloud resources.

That’s why we see enterprises embracing social computing, so that they can interact more freely with customers, partners and employees. It’s implicit in enterprise adoption of smartphones and tablets, so that employees can access business resources and collaborate with colleagues wherever they happen to be. Frictionless enterprise is driving the proliferation of cloud applications and services as organisations seek to access more adaptable, convenient and cost-effective business resources. It’s encouraging the rise of more flexible, iterative and self-service approaches to business technology implementation, development and support.

One of the most interesting harbingers of the rise of frictionless enterprise is the emergence of what’s been called the subscription economy. Many of the ingredients of frictionless enterprise have come together to create the modern online subscription business model. A pay-as-you-go service like ZipCar would not be economic without smart devices, mobile communications, self-service web pages, a distributed workforce, real-time information updates and a cost-effective cloud infrastructure for automatically processing bills and payments. With all of those ingredients in place, many innovative new businesses become possible across a swathe of industries, all building on the game-changing foundations of frictionless enterprise.

That’s why you have to look beyond the technology and see the business transformation it enables to really understand the bigger picture today. I think Denis Pombriant put his finger on a crucial point in a blog post yesterday about the End of the On-Prem Paradigm. At a cursory reading, the post is about the impending, post-peak demise of the conventional on-premise software model. But I felt a broader resonance when I read his assertion that “the businesses with the smart money are getting out of on-premise and trying to figure out the models they need to survive as cloud companies.” It isn’t only software vendors that have to figure this out. It’s every player in every industry. The successful modern business is one that is not fixed in place, contained within its own ‘prem’. It has to transcend physical walls and boundaries, harnessing the cloud to share information, co-ordinate resources and interact with customers wherever they are. The new paradigm is frictionless enterprise.

Reprinted from Phil Wainewright's article on ZDNet.com.

Accomplishing the ITIL v3 preferred outcome with VoIP Service and the Multi-Channel Interaction Queue

October 28, 2011

Mike Heberling

Aligning the needs of the Enterprise to the goals of the Service Desk is a preferred outcome and reason to implement ITIL v3.

In light of this, in last week’s post we reviewed using multiple interaction channels to improve the performance, perception and the efficiencies of the Service Desk. We specifically looked at e-mails and how utilizing a single multi-channel, skills-based routed queue can benefit the Enterprise.

This week we will look at how VoIP services and the multi-channel interaction queue, and how it can be used to help accomplish the ITIL v3 preferred outcome.

Back in 2004, Gartner Research identified that application integration and workflow communication facilitated by VoIP services can provide the highest return on investment.

If we align the efforts of the Service Desk to the Enterprises’ applications, business services and workflow, we will have gone a long way to realizing the goals of ITIL v3

The risk, as outlined in this chart by Gartner, is that the closer we get to integrated functionality between VoIP enabled application integration and workflow communication the higher the risk of failure.

The main reason for this is the lack of standards in the software and telephony industry to provide deep and meaningful functionality when telephony and software services are required.

For decades we have had standards based connectivity to the Public Switch Telephone Network. Since the early 2000’s we have seen the rise of standards based SIP connectivity enabling similar standards based supported devices to communicate with one another no matter the manufacturer.

But from a software perspective we were left with TAPI or JTAPI or other similar types of standards that were in the whole incapable of providing the type of deep integration and functionality that could actually be considered as sufficient Workflow Communication or Application Integration to meet the requirements of ITIL v3 which will result in the alignment of the Service Desk to the needs of the Enterprise. Lacking any meaningful standards required a significant investment in middleware by each company with Professional Services to create the connectivity between the phone system and the software.

There are some companies and visionary leaders that have understood this shortfall and corrected it by utilizing Standards based SIP functionality and embedding that into the Applications that they publish allowing customers to utilize decades old Standards based connectivity to the PSTN and new and emerging software development tools to provide rich, functional workflow adapted to serve the need of the Enterprise.

Along with companies like Microsoft and Oracle, FrontRange Solutions, with early Executive leadership by Michael McCloskey understood the benefits of VoIP enabled workflow communication and application integration.

Because of this vision, FrontRange Solutions has:

1. Eliminated the need for middleware
2. Provided rich workflow and application integration
3. Eliminated nearly all of the risk described in Gartner’s report
4. Reduced the Professional Service requirements to installation and call flow design, with no additional development requirements.

So when you are considering the preferred outcomes of ITIL v3 and are contemplating how to align your Service Desk’s multi-channel interaction queue to the needs of the Enterprise it will be important to consider SIP standardization and applications and workflow engines that support that VoIP standard.

Multiple Channels for Service Desk Interaction

October 21, 2011

Mike Heberling

One of the key considerations in preparing a methodology for crossing the production chasm is to make sure you do not put in place something that makes your situation worse. Sometimes you might have to discard what would normally be a great idea in good or more stable times, or you might find it necessary to modify the implementation of that great idea to fit these more volatile times we now live in.

Having multiple channels of interaction with the Service Desk is not only a great idea in good times but can be a saving grace in these volatile times. Implementing a plan that allows your customers to communicate with you when and how they want to will not only drive higher levels of customer satisfaction now but will pave the way for return business in the future as Main Street returns to higher productivity and business volumes increase. Customers are always more likely to return to do business with someone who treated them right when they needed their help and support most.

Besides the telephone, e-mail is the lowest hanging fruit in the interaction tree. Everyone has it; it is available on their business and home computers as well as their smart phones. It is truly available anytime, anywhere.

Some of the concerns about e-mail might be:

1. How do I receive it?
2. Who is going to receive it?
3. How do I audit the trail?
4. How do I confirm the response?
5. What does it do to my overall interaction volume?

The first four are straight forward, but what might not be so obvious is that e-mail can actually significantly increase the interaction volume of the Desk and add to, not reduce, the burden on the Service Desk.

The Help Desk Institute reports that for every e-mail that is received by the Service Desk, approximately 2.2 telephone calls will be spawned from that interaction. So we need to make sure the proper workflow is in place to handle this increased volume and we might need to consider a modification in the workflow to help us cross the productivity chasm.

We would expect that when an e-mail is received by the ticketing system an Incident or Case would be immediately opened thereby creating an audit trail. The ticketing system will automatically generate a response and confirm the receipt of the e-mail.

The e-mail interaction workflow should include a multi-channel queue allowing the queuing and skills based routing of the e-mail generated Incidents and Cases, this skills routing enables the most competent people to work on that particular Case or Incident.

Here is the slight modification to the workflow that should be considered. Make certain that ownership of the Case or Incident is identified, then combine the e-mail and the voice queues together which will allow you to balance the priority and ensure the integrity of all the responses to your patrons. Once ownership is established, you can skills route (based on Owner field) all the interaction types (telephone, e-mail, web, chat,) to the owner, creating consistency and value in each of the interaction that the requester has submitted.

With this slight modification in place you can more profitably handle the e-mail interaction channel and the increased volume of telephone calls that will follow or are currently following these interaction types.

Check out Mike's article from last Friday: How Service Desks Are Weathering Economic Recovery.

Buyer's guide: Top six tips to improve your organisation's social media CRM strategy

October 17, 2011

Reposted from article on computerweekly.com

Although social CRM definitions vary, all share some common distinctions. They all centre on customer-centric interactions through social media. Competitive intelligence (CI) professionals - inherently customer-focused marketers - recognise the value of social media in learning about and connecting with customers. Photo: ComputerWeekly.com

Here are six top tips for building social CRM strategies:

1. CRM starts with a socially populated customer database
2. Social CRM requires strategic social planning
3. Early experiments show promise
4. No end-to-end technology exists today
5. Social CRM requires data analysis capabilities
6. How to implement a social CRM strategy

1. Social CRM starts with a socially populated customer database 

In its most technical form, social CRM combines social media and CRM databases. Before diving into the strategic aspects of social media, CI professionals who are evaluating social CRM can think about it from a database perspective. Today, customer databases contain traditional fields such as name, phone number, and e-mail. But by adding social content to the customer database - such as a customer's Twitter handle, recent blog post, or LinkedIn profile. Adding social media data to the customer database involves cross-channel customer recognition challenges, a working relationship between IT and marketing, a high level of comfort with data analysis, and a deliberate plan around handling customers' conversations. But underneath all of this, the databases must be capable of handling social data and businesses must ensure they're on the safe side of their customers' privacy concerns.

2. Social CRM requires strategic social planning 

Many firms today resist social CRM due to the technology limitations. But adopting social CRM involves a new way of thinking for many brands. Social CRM means accepting and understanding social media as a valid source of customer data. Building social media into the customer database takes technology assistance, but also requires a strategy. Teams must decide why before how. Social CRM can drive customer support, sales, market research, engagement marketing and more - but each of these objectives comes with a different a different strategy and with a different execution.

3. Early experiments show promise 

Although most of the conversation around social CRM is primarily hype, some of the buzz comes from businesses' early success. For example, Procter & Gamble uses online communities to gain insight on customer demographics - then targets product development and marketing around these insights. One financial services firm populates its customer database with information learned through social networks and then segments its database for an informed customer support function. The early adopters share a key similarity: They stick with basic business goals. Advanced targeting, increased sales, or improved customer support are traditional business goals - early adopters didn't change their goals for social media, but enhanced their approach with social CRM.

4. No end-to-end technology exists today 

No matter how many vendors tout their social CRM capabilities, today's social CRM isn't something that you can buy from a single supplier. To feed social media content into a customer database, there needs to be cooperation and integration from CRM systems and social data aggregators or listening platforms. To enable the action on this data, you need a connection between databases and marketing suites or other outbound communication tools like customer support dashboards or social engagement tools. Although no full social CRM platform exists today, many vendors will compete for this business in the coming years. Because social CRM relies entirely on a functioning CRM system, the traditional CRM vendors have a leg up in building the desired platforms. In the meantime, prepare to combine data sources from disparate social channels, integrate complimenting technologies, and automate the data flow from online conversation to action.

5. Social CRM requires data analysis capabilities 

Managing the vast influx of social data, mapping information to customers, deriving customer segmentation that incorporates social behaviours, and informing outbound actions may seem feasible on a small scale. But for many companies - with large consumer bases - there will be too many customers to track and too much online discussion to manage.

Achieving a functioning social CRM practice takes ample expertise: customer segmentation, database management, look-alike modelling, advanced data mining, and deep data analysis. The mantra around Customer data - capture, manage, analyze, apply - will guide social CRM from online conversation into action.

6. How to implement a social CRM strategy 

The buzz around social CRM will grow through 2012, as social media continues its rampant spread through businesses. But for all the hype, expect many companies to find innovative ways to apply social CRM strategies and boost their business performance.

Forrester recommends that before diving into social CRM, determine if you're prepared to manage the new data source. Establishing a functioning customer database can be an arduous process - fortunately, social CRM shouldn't replace existing CRM systems, it should add and integrate to what's already in place.

Next, begin collecting data. Social CRM is not possible without social media data, so firms expecting to integrate social media data into their customer databases must begin by accessing that data. Today, most firms turn to listening platforms for data sourcing and analysis. To feed data found in listening initiatives, many of the listening platform vendors offer API integrations with some of the large customer databases. But this integration is relatively simplistic, and many companies emphasise how hard it is to consistently connect to primary identifiers in the customer database. Businesses must learn to manage this unstructured data to understand how it will eventually integrate into their customer strategies.

Finally, test an outbound pilot using social information. Reach out to your customers for sales, support, or marketing - informed by social data in the database. One successful beverage company we spoke with started small, with a single campaign to learn the social ropes. Following a recent commercial, the marketing team collected data from online discussion to understand how its customers responded to the campaign. Although it was only able to identify a small percentage of customers through their social profiles, it compiled a virtual focus group and collected targeted feedback in a matter of hours. Through this process, it identified what worked best and built out scalable best practices to grow larger social CRM initiatives. By starting small, you can scale your social CRM strategies without overwhelming yourself in data.

Reprinted from Zach Hofer-Shall's article on ComputerWeekly.com. This is an extract of Forrester'sWhat Social CRM Means To Customer Intelligence paper by Zach Hofer-Shall with Suresh Vittal and Allison Smith.

How To Choose the Right SaaS IT Solution

Jeff Maloughney

How Service Desks Are Weathering Economic Recovery

October 14, 2011

Mike Heberling

Starting the last couple of days we have entered the reporting season for the last Quarter’s earnings. While it is something of a mixed bag - as you look at how some of the earnings are achieved - it continues to show some ongoing mild growth that, though significantly slower than in most recoveries, leads us down the path of a typical 3-stage recovery.

1. Wall Street
2. Main Street
3. Employment

With this type of economic recovery model, Service Desks are always left with answering how to manage the increased volume of activity with decreased staffing levels while at the same time maintaining or improving the satisfaction of the Service Desk patron.

This recovery may present even greater difficulties for Service Desks as they manage their way out of the volume vs staffing chasm. Reasons for this include:

• the acute nature of this specific downturn
• false recovery starts
• internationalization of problems highlighted by Greece, Portugal and Spain
• globalization of the workforce
• high inflation possibilities resulting from the Federal Reserve's response to the crisis (increasing the money supply)

Over the next several posts we will look at how to prepare to cross the chasm of increased volumes of real Main Street activity with existing decreased staffing levels and we will consider the following: the impact of social media, automation and communication channels.

I am interested in hearing how you are preparing or have prepared for meeting the economic recovery with improved service delivery.

The Gold in Social Customer Service

October 10, 2011

Reposted from original article on Forbes.com

Talk to anyone in the software industry and in less than 5 minutes you will hear the phrase 'social media'. Whether it's accelerating revenue cycles, improving employee relationships or providing customer service, social media is the new elixir. Companies are manning Twitter tags and gearing up their Facebook sites in the quest to have better relationships with their buyers.

Post-purchase buyer engagement is the charter for customer service. It’s a tough job though when B2B Sales closes the deal handing the customer off to the support organization often with very little information other than what they have purchased. The result of this ‘over the wall’ toss is a disruption in the buyer’s experience from what they had during the evaluation and purchase stages of their journey.

Trust is broken. The buyer feels betrayed. Yet B2B companies baffled by the seemingly unwarranted dissatisfaction immediately question what’s wrong with the product or customer service. They should, instead, look at the overall experience the buyer is having. The artificial internal boundaries of Service, Support, Marketing, Sales, Finance, etc. are unnecessary barriers to buyer satisfaction.

Harold Goldberg, chief marketing officer of Merced Systems, a sales and service performance management solutions vendor, sums it up well, "customer service is all about aligning to customer behavior."

A core principle of the Buyers Journey is that everyone is a buyer, all the time. The Buyers Journey is a set of organizing principles for aligning company functions and roles to enable, engage and establish enduring relationships with buyers. "Customer" is an artificial label for counting and segregating buyers that have purchased your product. The notion of "customer lock-in" is, in today's world, a myth. Customers don't stop evaluating their purchases or their vendors just because they bought. It's actually the opposite; buyers are always buying even when they've just bought.

Companies are realizing buyers are more likely to talk about their buying experience and ask product questions on social media. Likewise, they'll turn to social media first to complain or share a bad experience. Companies that are able to "hear" those comments first and thoughtfully respond, quickly, with facts and actions win loyalty and credibility. That's gold. Companies also gain real cost savings in the form of deflected customer calls. According to IBM's Institute for Business Value, Best Buy realized $5Million in annual savings from social customer service. Even more gold can be found when Social Media is used to redefine customer service.

But before you set out to evaluate the over a hundred social CRM and customer service vendors, the place to start is to understand how social aligns to your buyers' service expectations. The traditional vendors have stretched the definition of social customer service to include chat, co-browsing, SMS, and even video. The "social" customer service vendors only support a few (like three) social media channels and relatively low volumes of interaction. Fully automated social customer service solutions that seamlessly integrate with CRM, contact center, ERP and other enterprise systems and can support high volumes of social interactions across a broad set of diverse social channels are hard to find. I don't think they exist yet. Today, high volume customer service organizations cobble together multiple point solutions with a lot of elbow grease. For example, a premier digital media search company uses over ten point solutions only to find they still can’t get their arms around it all and respond fast enough.

Aligning to buyer expectations on service can only come from "across the board visibility into metrics up and down the organization", said Goldberg. His mantra is a simple one, "transparency comes from empowerment which comes from information." How do you get transparency? Empower front line employees with better information and insights based on analytics and qualitative information such as resolving the customers issue on the first call” Most of the customer experience in Service comes from dealing with an agent or sales associate. They have to get it right in every encounter. Analytics and big data are the core enablers of empowerment. The other enablers are company leadership and culture change. “Many companies do not really know what it means to live in a socially-driven world. Their CEOs need to recognize how customers want to be talked to,” shares Goldberg.

Whether it is looking at buyer engagement chronologically to gain a holistic view as to why they are contacting customer service or understanding customer behavior and determining what the best next steps are, only through big data analytics can buyer interactions be analyzed and deciphered. With over 140 big brand customers that have large, high volume contact centers that handle hundreds, if not millions, of interactions a year, Merced Systems’ turn analytics into empowerment by identifying ways that an individual agent or entire center can drive better performance. For social customer service, Merced’s analytics and metrics enable companies to understand the context of the customer conversation.

To leverage social customer service, Goldberg’s advice is that companies need to view buyer engagement holistically. He recommends having a dedicated group of agents to handle social media. Let them experiment and learn because the rules of what constitutes world-class social customer service haven’t been written. Figure out the type of customer comments and requests, what type of infrastructure is needed to empower those agents, and how to most effectively move public interactions into private channels.

To mine the gold of social customer service, deliver a consistent experience across Buyer Enablement and Engagement Stages by tearing down internal boundaries. While a company’s goal maybe to cut costs or reduce churn, social customer service will only be successful if the interactions and motivations are understood from the buyers’ perspective.

Reprinted from Christine Crandell's original article on forbes.com.

Should We Be Asking Questions, or Making Intelligent Decisions?

Randy Jessee

I often hear this complaint about IVR systems:

Why do I have to go through a million options? Why can't I just talk to someone? 

To me, this means the person who designed the caller menu wasn't thinking, or doesn't have access to current technology.

Let me explain. If someone calls your voice application, the first thing it should do is look up the customer based on their phone number.

If it finds them and sees their preferred language is French, start talking to them in French - don't play a menu of the 15 languages you support, and ask them to pick one.

If you find they only own one of your products, route them to a specialist for that product, don't ask them what product they are calling about.

If they choose a support menu, look in your support system and see how many tickets they have open. Odds are they have only one - then you can ask them, "Are you calling about ticket number 1234356 regarding your missing parts?" It's a heck of a lot easier to press 1 to agree than remember that 7 digit ticket number, isn't it?

In a well-designed call menu, your callers won't hear anything but a live person on the other end who magically (to them) is the right person to answer their calls.

It's time to find your Voice.

Customer Service Should Be About the Customer

October 7, 2011

Mike Heberling

When considering Customer Service, isn’t it all about the interaction with the customer? How easy is it for me to interact? What options are available to me?

Limiting the type of interaction channels will force customers into specific interaction types, whether or not that is conducive to their particular time and priority requirements. If the interaction becomes too difficult they will vote with their dollars and find a more hospitable company to provide them the product or service they require.

In my personal life I have an earth auger that had a 4-stroke engine mounted on top. A problem developed with the engine and I went to the company’s web site to seek support. There was no direct channel to call customer support – there was only email

I submitted the e-mail and in a couple of days I received a response that was meaningless and unhelpful. As a consequence I have not purchased another product from that engine manufacturer.

Better for them to open multiple channels of interaction so that customer satisfaction can be obtained on the product or service in question, thereby leaving the door open for more future business.

Please let me hear about any good or bad customer service stories you have.

Enjoy this post? Check out Mike's previous post, Operation Twist.

Cloud Computing's Hidden 'Green' Benefits

October 3, 2011

Reposted from original article on Forbes.com

Cloud computing energy consumption is a source of much debate. On one side, some see a massive new form of industrialization gobbling up resources; with large cloud and social networking sites consuming megawatts of power to feed insatiable computing needs.

Greenpeace called attention to the growing, power-hungry data center footprint, citing estimates that cloud computer sites could consume up to 622.6 billion kWh (kilowatts per hour) of power.  Jonathan Koomey, Ph.D., consulting professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, estimates that the cloud is already responsible for 1-2% of the world’s electricity use.

On the other hand, there is also a view that cloud adoption, by moving companies to share pooled resources and facilities, is helping to contain what could be relentless, viral growth of duplicate data centers across every enterprise. Two recent industry-funded studies make the case for cloud as energy-saver.

A report issued this summer by the Carbon Disclosure Project, supported by AT&T, finds that a company that adopts cloud computing can reduce its energy consumption, lower its carbon emissions and decrease its capital expenditure on IT resources while improving operational efficiency. By 2020, the group estimates, large US companies that use cloud computing can achieve annual energy savings of $12.3 billion and annual carbon reductions equivalent to 200 million barrels of oil.

In another study released at the end of last year, Accenture, Microsoft and WSP Environment and Energy estimated that that a 100-person company with applications deployed in the cloud can reduce energy consumption and emissions by more than 90 percent.

Koomey also recently observed that computer energy efficiency appears to be doubling every 18 months, much in the fashion of Moore’s Law, in which raw computing power increases every 18 months.

Efforts to green up data centers and cut consumption – especially at the larger cloud and social networking facilities – are the right things to do. However, I have to agree with my friend Dave Linthicum, author of the seminal work Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise, who points out that IT managers and companies don’t necessarily put green first on the top of their IT strategy agendas. Cost savings and competitiveness drive decision making about resource consumption.

Perhaps there’s a broader perspective that needs to be taken as well. As a result of our move to an online economy, it’s possible that we’re saving more resources than we give ourselves credit for. As many businesses are now digital, and operate virtually versus physically, there’s a potentially a significant degree of resource consumption that no longer takes place, that hasn’t been tracked. Perhaps, we’ll realize, for every kWh computers and data centers consume, they give back x number of kWhs.

Consider e-commerce, something that has been around in force for well over a decade now. How many physical retail stores have not been built, and do not operate, due to e-commerce? (For purposes of this argument, I’m using the term “online economy” fairly broadly, to cover all types of computing that invokes services from someone else’ servers, including cloud computing, e-commerce, Internet computing, and social networking.)

Or consider other potential hidden benefits of the online economy. How many automobile trips and additional office space is no longer necessary due to telecommuting and remote work? How much travel is no longer necessary because of online college courses? How many trees are no longer cut down because of electronic documents, PDFs, and collaborative solutions? How much drilling and digging is no longer required to find resources, due to better data on seismic formations and simulations? How much travel among insurance claims adjusters has been saved because of mobile and Internet technologies? The list could go on and on.

Part of the challenge is the complexity of measuring all this. I spoke with John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, to get his take on this question. He points out that sometimes, consumption is shifted, rather than moderated. “If you’re just looking at overall power consumption, in some ways cloud computing has pushed consumption up overall, on a per-unit-of-valuable-work basis,” he says. “We’re much more efficient than we were five, 10, or 20 years ago, but we’re doing more computing.” Engates also points out that e-commerce has shifted patterns as well – individual deliveries are shipped directly to consumers, requiring courier services, versus bulk deliveries to stores.

Still, Engates believes that many of the groups that are warning about data center power consumption may be taking too narrow of a view and the efficiencies and innovation that computing has delivered back to the economy. “They’re not really looking what what’s being done in data centers necessarily; they’re just saying, power is power,” he points out. “But I don’t think that’s fair, because there’s a lot of innovation, things we couldn’t do before that are only possible because of IT and computers.” For example, he illustrates, computing has delivered significant productivity increases in the agricultural sector. There are Rackspace customers who are employing online monitoring solutions to address energy management across facilities, he adds.

Koomey, who has also led studies on data center power consumption with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said as much at in the prelude of a landmark 2007 study that calculated the scope of the great energy drain by data centers in the first half of the last decade (gulping down about 45 billion kilowatts per hour – equivalent to the amount of power used by the entire state of Mississippi in 2005). He indicated that his study “only assesses the direct electricity used by servers and associated infrastructure equipment. It does not attempt to estimate the effect of structural changes in the economy enabled by increased use of information technology, which in many cases can be substantial.”

Yes, the energy consumption of our rapidly expanding cloud services needs to be managed. But it would be worth it to see more studies on the hidden green benefits the online economy is delivering.

(Photo by the author, Joe McKendrick.)

Reprinted from Joe McKendrick's original article on forbes.com.

Operation Twist

September 30, 2011

Mike Heberling

In the United Kingdom the interim Financial Policy Committee is considering whether some actions to raise additional capital to bolster Bank’s Balance Sheets against a Greek Sovereign Default "could potentially worsen the feedback loop between the financial sector and the wider economy and so should be avoided," so they are considering whether a run down in capital might actually be in order.

In the United States, the Federal Reserve has announced “Operation Twist” or the Fed’s plan to swap out $400 billion USD of short term government debt on its $2.8 trillion balance sheet and buy longer duration Treasuries. This is a continuation, post QE’s, of an ongoing attempt to push the economy and fuel the labor market with higher employment satisfying half of the Federal Reserves’ dual mandate.

A significant appetite for these longer term Treasuries was evidenced pushing down yields to 2 percent on ten-year notes.

As a result of this and the continuing economic slow-down, some economists are restive for an increase in government spending then cranking up the printing presses to monetize the debt.

For Service Desks, it seems like it is going to be a continuation of the same pressure that we have seen since the post Lehman collapse.

But as a true believer in the genius of the American system I know we will ultimately work our way out of this, so the real questions before those of us who manage and support Service Desks are:

1. In what kind of shape are our Service Desks going to emerge?
2. How many of our clients or employees are going to feel that the Service Desk treated them well enough during the down turn? Will they return for more business or grade the Service Desk favorably in surveys during their greatest hour of need?
3. How does the Service Desk cope with an increasing volume of business as we emerge from the trough of slow down to new peaks of activity?
4. What effect can inflation play on service delivery models?
5. Are we prepared, can we prepare, for inflation if monetizing greater stimulus is the preferred choice for expanding business and reducing our National debt?
6. What role does automation play?
7. What is the appropriate balance for quality and speed of transactions for the Service Desk?
8. What technologies are on the rise that can help me improve the capabilities and responsiveness of the Service Desk?
9. When considering inflation results, should I be leveraging Cap-Ex or Op-Ex budgets?
10. What is the best way to show the value and ongoing contribution of the Service Desk to the Enterprise whether the Market is still in a downward spiral or improving towards growth and renewal?

As we start this conversation we look forward to your thoughts and contributions about where we are economically, and what we can do at the Service Desk to improve the lives of our customers, employees and Service Desk agents.

We will also be looking to see what our political leaders are doing to help us return to the growth and happiness that is the right of every American to pursue.

Please join in and let us hear your thoughts.

New study yields eye-opening IT Service Management benefits

September 26, 2011

Reposted from original article on ZDnet.com

Summary: New data from Forrester and itSMF shows that ITIL has a positive impact on organizational productivity, service quality, IT’s reputation with the business and operational costs. Glenn O’Donnell blogs. 

In April and May of this year, Forrester and the IT Service Management Forum’s US chapter (itSMF-USA) conducted a joint study to assess the state of ITSM. We collected data from 491 qualified subjects that are heavily involved in ITSM efforts (69% have two or more years of ITSM experience and 95% hold some level of ITIL certification; 50% at an advanced level). Since it was in conjunction with the US chapter, the responses were heavily US-centric.

The results offer empirical evidence of something ITSM professionals already know: ITSM offers significant benefits to the organization and to the professionals themselves. The full report is now in the final editing stages and will be available soon to all Forrester clients, all itSMF-USA members, and all participants who do not already fall into one of those groups. Forrester clients and itSMF USA members will receive email notifications when it is ready. Others will be contacted directly by itSMF.

This morning (Monday, September 26, 2011), I presented the results at the itSMF-USA’s national conference known as Fusion 11. Here are a few key insights from the study:

• 51% of ITSM efforts are driven primarily by IT or business executives
• ITIL has had an overwhelming positive impact on:
  • Organizational productivity: 85% positive and 2% negative
  • Service quality: 83% positive and 1% negative
  • IT’s reputation with the business: 65% positive and 3% negative
  • Operational costs: 41% positive and 4% negative
   
• 70% received a positive salary increase in the past year with 31% over 5% (the general US population fell and general IT salaries were flat)
• 77% indicated a positive relationship between their Application Development and Operations teams. This indicates DevOps success is far stronger in ITSM-focused organizations than in the general enterprise. DevOps is a movement formed to foster better cooperation between App Development and Operations. This is fundamental to ITSM so the evidence tells us ITSM makes a difference favorable to DevOps.

The news is certainly good for ITSM professionals and their employers, but there were also a few areas still in need of improvement. The most notable of these is how change management execution still causes too many incidents. 58% of the subjects say over 10% of their incidents are caused by change. 25% are excessive (over 40% of incidents) and a beleaguered 22% don’t know. These numbers are not good, but convey a better scenario posited by the urban legend that about 70% of all incidents are the result of a change.

Management software vendors are always part of any ITSM discussion, so we captured many details of this market. Some come as no surprise (e.g., smaller vendors are more innovative than larger ones), but software vendors need to be aware of some realities:

• SaaS is viewed very favorably as a service desk software delivery option. 96% were satisfied or very satisfied with SaaS whereas the numbers for traditional software models and homebrewed tools all hovered around 70%.
• Despite some dissatisfaction with service desk, buyers are unlikely to switch vendors. 57% said they would not switch and 21% said they would. 22% did not know.
• The anchor-boutique “shopping mall” model for management tools seems popular. Major vendors are well entrenched (see above bullet) but 37% will fill gaps in their portfolios with smaller boutique vendors.
• The Big Four (BMC Software, CA Technologies, HP Software, and IBM Tivoli) management software vendors have some potent new competition. When asked to rank several vendors on their ability to solve their broader management and automation challenges, the Big Four ranked a bit better than expected. On a scale of 0 (worst) to 4 (best), they averaged 2.23 (HP was tops at 2.40). This is a vote of some confidence, but it’s not stellar. The group of Cisco, EMC, Microsoft, Oracle, and VMware averaged 2.51. The best was VMware with an impressive 2.91 and all beat the Big Four average. It’s clear that these “Improved Titans” will play a big role in your future ITSM efforts.

We at Forrester are extremely excited about this study and we hope the ITSM community gets some value out of it! Please let us know what you would like to see in the 2012 version and please push all itSMF chapters around the world to join us so we can make it a truly global study. It means more work for us, but we are more than eager to take on the task.

Reprinted from original article on zdnet.com.

Are you ready for the BYO gadget revolution? Five ways to feel the fear and do it anyway

September 26, 2011

Reposted from original article on silicon.com

Increasingly it is staff - and not the IT department - who are calling the shots when it comes to what technology they should use at work.

Photo: Shutterstock via silicon.com

Nearly three quarters of the companies surveyed by security vendor Trend Micro said they allowed employees to use their personal devices at work - a trend known as the consumerisation of IT, or bring your own device (BYOD).

But allowing staff to use their own kit in the office brings with it some major complications for business - throwing up technical, legal and financial issues that need to be tackled.

silicon.com spoke to security chiefs at blue-chip firms to find out their tips on preparing the workplace for consumer devices.

1. Assume all devices are insecure
A major concern for businesses thinking about letting staff use their own personal devices at work is that these devices are insecure. For all IT managers know, that shiny new tablet could be riddled with spyware that will suck up corporate data.

Mark Brown, chief information security officer for brewer SABMiller, said businesses can tackle the unknown threats that might lurk on personal devices by treating all devices that connect to their IT infrastructure as a potential risk.

"You assume that all these devices are insecure and rather than saying, 'I'm not going to use them', you change the ways you provide these devices with access," he said.

Brown said there are a variety of ways companies can protect their corporate IT infrastructure against insecure devices. These include setting up network access control technology to authenticate users connecting to the network and to check whether devices connecting to the network have antivirus software and are patched against security vulnerabilities. He also recommended creating a sandboxed virtual desktop infrastructure that keeps corporate data and apps separate from the user's device, and using data loss prevention tools that protect data as it is moved between corporate systems and user devices.

2. Be prepared to lose control of your IT
The days of IT being able to control the nitty-gritty of security settings on every device is over once staff start bringing their own tech into the workplace.

IT staff no longer have guaranteed control over patching the latest security flaws and setting security policies that determine issues such as how long it takes for a device to lock itself when it is left unused.

This loss of corporate control means responsibilities have to be passed to the employees, and it is the company's job to help educate them.

SABMiller's Brown said: "There is no easy answer. It's all about user awareness. You have to engage with the user so that they understand their role and responsibilities."

The sheer range of different devices that employees can choose to bring into work can also cause a problem when it comes to providing helpdesk support.

"Helpdesk haven't got a clue if it's a not a Wintel device. They have grown up for the past 20 to 25 years in Windows. The moment you give them something that's not Windows, they don't know what to do with it," said Brown.

And because helpdesk staff will need to be retrained, supporting the proliferation of different devices on the consumer market can quickly become expensive, said Cesare Garlati, senior director of consumerisation and mobile security at Trend Micro.

To keep helpdesk training costs down, Garlati suggested limiting the types of devices and the nature of the problems that can be supported by a business' inhouse tech team.

3. Get staff to surrender control of their devices
If staff want to use their personal devices at work, they may have to be prepared to hand over some control of their device to the business.

John Whitehill, head of security and continuity at Standard Life, said staff had to be willing to give their employers power to do things such as remote-wipe their phone in situations where the device goes missing.

"I don't see any approach where the user doesn't have to be open to flexibility with their device," he said.

"We have an obligation to protect our data and you have an obligation to help us protect it."

Whitehill said the company was looking to apply standardised security policies to consumer devices, that would mandate behaviour such as password-protecting devices.

"We are having to make sure that we retain a degree of assurance on what the device is being used for, so we have a security build standard for those devices," he said.

4. Ask how will it impact the rest of the business
Consumerisation of IT blurs the boundaries between what is personal use of IT and what is business-related use of IT. For this reason, the implications of letting staff use their own kit at work need to be considered by more than just the IT department.

When deciding what approach the business should take to the consumerisation of IT, "HR and legal need to be involved and you need to engage with them early", according to SABMiller's Brown.

"You need to ask, 'How do we change our acceptable use policies, data use policies and data protection policies?'," he said.

The idea of who owns data on a personal device and how to avoid infringing personal privacy while still protecting corporate data is also being examined by Standard Life's Whitehill.

"There are a lot of issues about how an organisation could interrogate a personal device," said Whitehill.

"Say we need to interrogate a device for auditing. Clearly we would have the ability to do that on a corporate device, but from a legal and data-protection angle we have to consider how we do that when a device is owned by a person?"

5. Start small
It pays not to rush consumerisation of IT. Letting staff use their own devices at work brings with it a multitude of legal, financial, HR and technical issues that need to be addressed and worked through over time.

The complicated nature of the shift means most businesses start small - letting a select group of users start using personal devices for work - before rolling out the practice to the rest of the business.

Whitehill said Standard Life has let a group of about 24 senior staff use a mixture of Apple iPads and BlackBerry Playbooks at work. The insurer will address issues that emerge among the trial group before widening the consumerisation policy to the rest of the company.

"We have a good handle on a small population of users and they are helping deal with moving this forward," said Whitehill.

SABMiller has a mix of personal iPads and iPhones used by its 72,000 staff, with Brown estimating that there are about 1,000 iOS devices in use within its global workforce.

"We have to think outside the box about embracing modern devices and technology to enable our business, and therefore it's only right that we should look at consumerisation and how we deploy it," said Brown.

"What we've found at SABMiller is the predominant demand is at the junior and middle-management level."

Brown said the company plans to allow for a significant increase in the number of staff able to use consumer devices at work over the next two to three years.

Reprinted from original article on silicon.com. 

Why IT is driving a Culture of Winning

Sept 16, 2011

Kevin Smith

Of the many reasons I enjoy working at FrontRange, the one top on the list I am most excited about is how we empower IT managers to do their jobs better. In case you haven’t noticed, IT has transformed. Your IT manager isn’t the tactical service provider you once knew.

The number one factor that has changed how IT operates is SaaS. But an emerging paradigm, which builds on the traditional SaaS model, is what we at FrontRange call “Solutions as a Service,” or SaaS². These solutions are built on an advanced platform designed to support multiple applications, and are capable of multiple deployment models, including premise, SaaS and hybrid environments. This provides customers with the flexibility of optimizing their applications in the most efficient manner possible. Our vision for this new concept combines all the benefits of traditional SaaS applications and adds incremental customer benefits not included in typical SaaS offerings. These benefits include consolidation of disparate applications, improved manageability, and greater levels of pre-integrated applications with advanced functionality never before offered.

It is most interesting how SaaS² has surpassed its predecessor, SaaS, in terms of value-add. The offering has evolved over the years and has morphed into something that has turned IT on its head in a really good way. Companies are now deploying SaaS² technologies to fuel the IT department and be looked at as more than just a cost center. It is now possible for IT to help companies increase productivity, decrease costs, and provide improved service.

Here are the top reasons why I believe SaaS² is fueling IT to become a strategic business enabler vs. a tactical service provider:
 
1. Growth, flexibility and scalability are supported One of the strongest arguments for using SaaS² is that it is designed for organizations of all sizes. The highly flexible nature and scalability can meet the needs of dynamic and growing businesses. It is available when and where you want it with minimal need for internal resources and infrastructure.
 
2. Best practices adoption helps increaseInternal productivityIncreasing internal productivity comes down to a workforce that understands best practices and sets standards for consistency. Employees want to use technologies that allow them to do better work, which helps everyone meet their business goals (i.e. drive more revenue, bring in new leads, provide improved customer service and focus on core competency.)

3. Partner modelThe solution provider must meet the needs of the customer. If the service is not meeting customer needs and/or delivering adequate value, the partnership will fall apart. The service must be constantly improved, and the customer must be able to continuously become more efficient, effective, and productive. Success is mutual.

4. Quick implementation and ease of use
Being able to deploy SaaS² in a quick and easy manner means no wasted time. This approach has gained popularity because, in addition to deployments occurring more rapidly, less effort is required by internal IT organizations to operate the applications, which ultimately lowers costs. Best practices are embedded in the solution, as well as the ability to be flexible and meet the needs of a demanding enterprise. Ease-of-use is also critical to ensure widespread adoption.

The reality is companies deploying software today have several paradigms from which to choose. It is important to note that each model – premise, SaaS, hybrid and now SaaS² – has particular strengths and weaknesses, making it all the more important that a company carefully consider its specific needs and requirements. Depending on an organization’s needs, SaaS² can offer more value than traditional SaaS options. What is most exciting to me is how I have watched IT managers adopt this technology and the way it has transformed their ability to become a more strategic player inside of their organization. Anything that helps IT do their jobs better is a winner in my book.

Incorporating Social CRM for your business

by Jeff Moloughney

There are two views you should consider when embarking on social CRM for your organization. How will social CRM applications affect your relationship with your customers, and how will customers be affected by your social CRM use (in addition to how it will impact your overall customer service program)?

Let’s first start with how customers will be affected by your social CRM use. If you have not embarked on social aspects for your CRM business, keep it simple. For example, marketing can push new product or services being delivered to the market, or position events via social channels. Sales can leverage social CRM through improved peer / influencer management, as well as, better lead / prospect management through social network information a sales rep can easily acquire across various social channels.

Customer service teams can understand customer sentiments that may affect customer loyalty by listening to the social media networks, and possibly gain an understanding of customer loyalty and satisfaction levels through social surveys. Understanding internal perspectives may be easier than understanding how social channels may affect your customer’s view of your company. In order to understand how customers will be affected by your social use, put yourself in your customer’s shoes.

Think about what information you would want if you were a customer of your brand, as well as, when and how you would want to receive this information. As you grow in social media use you should analyze how, when, and where your customers retrieve social related information and change your social business accordingly. Ask yourself how often you would want to be connected, what type of information you would want to receive and how you would expect to be redirected back to the company (i.e. yourself!). Sometimes social related information can bring up additional questions, so make sure your customers understand where they can obtain further details about the related social CRM information that were provided.

Always keep in mind industry-specific needs as related to the social arena, as this will vastly effect how Social CRM is leveraged around the enterprise. And as mentioned before, don’t forget that analysis of how social CRM is utilized in the organization is needed since it’s an ever changing and constantly moving market space.

Don’t let social CRM scare you with terms and technology (especially since the social media is an ever changing, ever growing, and quite honestly, immature in regards to CRM usage). You may wish to consider social CRM as just another workflow involved in your CRM processes.

Where Will Customer Service Be in 2015?

Jamal Ahmad

Many companies have the goal of delivering superior customer service, but they may not have a complete vision of what it takes to get there, or even where ‘there’ is. After all, what’s superior today won’t be superior tomorrow. New ideas and technologies are constantly emerging to change customers’ expectations of customer service.

To provide superior customer service you must stay ahead of the competition by providing an experience beyond what customers expect today. You can do that by anticipating emerging customer requirements before they become mainstream. So let’s take a look forward at what great customer service will mean in four years.

Customers will expect service through multiple communication channels. Even today, some companies only provide phone-based service. But customers are becoming more and more accustomed to having options for how to communicate with a company. Web self-service and email already are mainstream channels to use when requesting customer service. By 2015, customers will prefer working with companies that give them even more flexibility to choose how to communicate. Their options will include the above channels along with web-based chat and social networks, including Facebook pages, Twitter, and new entrants like Google+.

Customers will expect a complete service experience when they are mobile. Smartphones and tablets, already commonplace, will only become more prevalent in the next four years. Online service channels will keep pace with the mobile computing revolution. This means, for starters, the web site you provide customers will have to work well when a customer accesses it on a mobile device. When your customer launches it from an iPad, it will look and feel like an application built for a tablet. When your customer launches it from an Android phone, it will look and feel like an application built for a smartphone. The impact goes beyond visual changes to a self-service website – the entire customer experience will be optimized for mobile access.

One-to-one service will become many-to-many. Customer service will be more driven by communities. It won’t just be a direct conversation between you and your customer; it will be an open discussion involving multiple participants. Customers will look to each other for help. They will receive it through online discussions and knowledge bases driven by company and community contributions, hosted on company web sites and social networks like Facebook. A key objective for customer service executives will be to foster a community where these discussions thrive. Companies that have large, active communities will outshine their competitors.

Customer service tools will be more intelligent. Online interactions are producing massive amounts of data, and technologies are maturing to make the data useful. Data sources such as online behavior tracking and surveys will drive more intelligent applications for customer service. Advanced tools for text analysis will generate automated customer responses that are more immediate and relevant. Community sites will be integrated with customer databases to provide a richer customer profile based on online interactions. The result will be a deeper understanding of customer needs, and a more personalized customer service experience, whether it takes place online or offline.

The next four years will present opportunities for companies to differentiate themselves and provide superior levels of customer service. By anticipating future trends you can get there ahead of your competition. Let’s get going!

Meet the Bloggers

Kevin J. Smith

Things might seem a little bit different around FrontRange lately, and I want to be the first to tell you that it’s no accident. Over the past year, FrontRange has continued its 20-year history of developing the highest quality products, as well as taken a new approach to how we communicate with our customers and the industry as a whole.

We have always valued our customers’ feedback and the opinions of our peers, but now we want a transparent place for our extended network to share ideas, discuss issues in the industry (and yes, this means topics outside the IT Service Management and IT Asset Management market), and uncover topics that connect the entire FrontRange ecosystem.

Sure, we have technically had a “blog” since October 2010, but not one that invited people to participate, ask questions or comment, or foster collaboration and conversations around the topics that impact our lives on a daily basis. That changes today. We want to hear from you, come one, come all and share what’s on your mind…

With that said, I'd like to introduce you to the team of FrontRange bloggers, who will bring you their thoughts on all things IT, Customer Service, Tech and related to the industry at large.

Jeff Moloughney, global marketing director, CRM/Customer Service/Voice solutions 
Jeff has been involved with the Customer Relationship Management and Customer Service markets for over 15 years. During his 10-year career at Oracle Corporation, Jeff fulfilled many roles in the CRM market space, including product management, project management, and his final role as Director of Product Strategy involved with Oracle, Siebel and PeopleSoft CRM product lines. Jeff joined FrontRange Solutions in 2006 and has fulfilled multiple roles in both marketing and sales. In his current role, Jeff serves as Global Marketing Director for CRM, Customer Service and Voice solutions for FrontRange. Jeff is actively involved with customer engagements and continuously leverages industry, as well as customer and market experiences to improve his knowledge of the CRM and Customer Service industries.

Nital Vora, product director, SaaS and On-Demand Solutions 
Prior to joining FrontRange Solutions, Nital was director of product management at SAP where he drove the vision and strategy of mobile, social and collaborative solutions for SAP’s new Sales / CRM on-demand application--the first market solution in a growing portfolio of on-demand applications from SAP. Prior to SAP, Nital also spent several years with NetSuite and RightNow Technologies in product management, business development and consulting roles.

Janie Chung, product director, Service Management Solutions 
Janie has over 25 years of experience within the IT and Service Management industry. During her 7-year tenure with FrontRange, Janie oversees the product strategy, definition, delivery and market introduction of a new generation of ITIL compliant Service Management product solutions. Her overall responsibility also includes working with sales, marketing and support to ensure revenue and customer satisfaction goals are met. Most recent accomplishments include the market launch of the FrontRange ITSM enterprise, Service Catalog and ITSM SaaS2 products.

Jamal Ahmad, senior product manager, CRM solutions 
Jamal is responsible for product management for FrontRange’s customer service, sales, and marketing products, which include the GoldMine product line. Prior to FrontRange he held roles in product management at Akamai Technologies and Digital Impact (Acxiom), in strategic marketing at Symantec, and in product marketing at HP.

Randy Jessee, senior product manager, Mobile Solutions 
Randy has been defining product strategy in the contact center space for over 15 years for companies including IBM, Salesforce.com, and Five9. Currently he manages communication and mobile products for FrontRange Solutions.

We look forward to talking with everyone soon!

-- Kevin J Smith

IT Help Desks Not Just For Large Enterprises

With compromised productivity a constant threat to business success, the question for SMBs isn't how can we afford a help desk, but how can we afford not to invest in IT support?

Kurt Keesy

I recently read with interest the following article by Michele Warren in Information Week and thought I would pass it along to our audience.  Michele makes some good points about how leading help desk vendors are providing enterprise level functionality to SMBs.

Reduce Call Volume

5 Easy Steps

Randy Jessee

If you want to get serious about reducing call volume to your agents, the best way is to allow your customer to handle themselves. Here’s how: 

1. Add self service options for the most common requests (and only the most common). If you offer two self service options, and then offer to bring the caller to a live agent, you can potentially divert 30-40% of your calls. As an example, in IT departments, password resets often make up 30% of the call volume, and can easily be handled via self service  
2. Consider having helpful hold music. If you intersperse your hold music with useful hints and tips, often you can divert current or future calls. Keep your tips fresh; try to re-record them at least once a quarter.    
3. Consider allowing callers to opt out of holding to self help themselves. If a caller knows it will be 8 minutes until you think you can help them in a live call, they will be much more willing to peruse a larger self help section, or leave a voicemail case which you can then call back when loads are lighter, providing a better distribution of your workload and making the agents you do have more efficient.   
4. Consider adding a message of the day at the beginning of your call flow. This message can be left blank under most circumstances, but when you have an outage it can quickly be replaced with a notice of the issue and expected time it will be addressed. This can tremendously reduce call volume when you need it most.   
5. Finally, consider setting up automated outbound calls on tickets that are aging to see if they can be closed. This doesn’t directly affect incoming call volume, but can have a very positive effect on open case volume, and will also often prompt customers who may be unhappy with the status to re-contact you and working the problem to resolution, leading to higher customer satisfaction.    

If these look like better alternatives, give your FrontRange rep a call today, we’d be happy to show you how to put them in place.  

Stimulating Loyalty, and Revenue: 5 Steps for Delivering Superior Service

Creating Customers for Life - FrontRange Customer Service Management

Kurt Keesy

 The Loyalty-Revenue Relationship Commoditization is sweeping many industries, and your company is not immune. Considerable time and money has been invested to win your customers. You can’t afford to lose them, not one. You need to deliver customer service that is a competitive differentiator, a loyalty builder, and an aftermarket revenue generator, fast. Your customer service software can help.

Tangible Impacts on Revenue
Because customer service representatives (CSRs) are in constant contact with customers, they can be leveraged as a low-cost sales force to up-sell, and potentially, cross-sell products. A survey by AMR Research has noted that aftermarket services represent approximately 24% of revenue and often contribute 40% to 80% of profit. The key is to ensure that front-line reps are equipped with access to customer history, so they can easily identify up-sell and cross-sell opportunities during routine conversations with customers.

Step 1: The Personal Touch
We’ve all heard the adage, “people buy from people.” Enabling your CSRs to engage in personal dialogue with call-in customers is critical. If your CRM and telephony systems are integrated, the phone number can identify the customer calling and pull the appropriate record automatically, allowing the rep to greet the customer by name and to quickly scan the history and speak intelligently with the customer. Instead of wasting valuable call time wading through screens searching for customer data, your rep can begin building a personal relationship with the customer, while focusing immediately on the reason for the his call.

What's your personal touch?

More tips to come in our next post.

Firms caught using illegal software doubled in 2010

Fines demonstrate clear need for improved software Management

Matt Fisher,

The Business Software Alliance (BSA), a software licensing watchdog funded by some the world’s leading software vendors, has announced that it fined businesses in the United Kingdom £2.2 million (US $3.53 million) for using illegal software in 2010.   That’s more than double the £960,000 (US $1.52 million) levied against British firms in 2009, which itself was an increase over the amount recovered in 2008.

The results highlight a growing focus from the BSA and its supporters on cracking down on illegal software use globally (the 2010 annual figures for the US are not yet published, but are expected to follow a similar trend).  But why is it that so many organizations are getting caught out and what can you do to avoid costly fines?

It has to be noted that the majority of software piracy in the developed world is not malicious (although counterfeit software is a major problem in some countries, it makes up a relatively small number of piracy cases in Europe and the United States) – instead it is often down to poor management at the organizational level.

It is often far too easy to install software, share CDs/DVDs around the office or download applications without giving thought to the licensing conditions attached to the software.  As a result, it is all-too common to see software being used across the organization that has not been correctly licensed.   This can be as a result of IT staff not being sufficiently diligent to check the number of licenses owned by the organization prior to installing software on PCs or, in some cases, by senior management turning a blind eye to their licensing obligations.

Either way, the statistics suggest that organizations are now more likely than not to get caught out.  Figures from Gartner and other analyst firms now state than more than 50 percent of organizations can expect at least one software audit over a 12-month period (some firms have experienced three or four requests from separate vendors).

Each audit cannot only cause disruption to the business, but can also be costly in terms of manpower and, if the organization is found to be under-licensed, compliance costs.

Introducing Software Asset Management

The simple way to minimize the costs of an audit and avoid compliance fines is to prepare in advance.  Establishing an audit of what software is in use across the network and reconciling this against the licenses purchased by the organization is part of a process called Software Asset Management (SAM).  An in addition to reducing potential disruption and costs in the event of an audit, proactive SAM can also save the business money.

Studies conducted by FrontRange Solutions found that the typical organization over-spends on software by as much as 20 percent (buying new software rather than re-harvesting licenses, purchasing outside of volume licensing agreements, continuing to pay support fees for unused applications etc).  By understanding what software is on the network, how it is used and what licenses are held, organizations can optimize their available assets and eliminate over-spend on software.

Getting Started in SAM

The simple and most effective way to get started in SAM is to understand what software is currently on the network and whether it is actively being used.  Tools likeFrontRange Discovery create a dynamic inventory of the hardware and software across the network.   Identifying applications installed on PCs but not actively used can be one of the fastest ways to start saving money today.

FrontRange offers a free 30-day trial of Discovery.  Why not surprise yourself and see what applications you can find on the network that are costing you money and causing an unnecessary compliance risk?  The chances are if you don’t find it yourself, then someone like the BSA will…

Download your free trial of Discovery today

But Wait There is More... 5 More Ways to Better Manage Sales Leads and a Bonus Tip

CRM Best Practices

Kurt Keesy

We recently posted 5 Ways to Better Manage Leads.  Well here's five more. Try these strategies for improving your lead management efforts.

1. Excite your sales staff about each prospect. The best salespeople focus on detailed qualifying, and so should the rest of your staff. The more information you have about a prospect, the more excited your salespeople will be about the lead. Whoever's collecting prospect information needs to extract additional information from every prospect with each interaction, including such things as "what interested you about our products" and "why is it important to you." They should also try to may the organization so your salespeople are getting in touch with the decision-makers in each company.

2. "Tag, you're it." How do you save those interesting bits of information about customers and prospects? If you tag your records with the names of your competitors on deals, what their objections are, whether they'll be a referral or not, which products they already own and so on, you can then find those detail fast in the future. This allows you to leverage what you learn in order to be more successful.

3. Treat your prospects like customers. By capturing the source I mentioned in #2 of my last about each prospect, anyone at your company can answer a call from that prospect and more effectively answer their questions. This will have a significant impact on your prospects and will cause them to want to engage with your team further.

4. Measure everything you do. But in order to measure your results, you need to decide what you want to measure and why. Then you can capture the correct information upfront. And once you have the right information, you can determine the return on investment of your campaigns and focus on the campaigns and prospects that will increase your sales pipeline.

5. Hold regular meetings with your sales staff and anyone else involved in the sales process. You should meet with appropriate staff members on a regular basis to review lead quality, win/loss records, and tracking CRM systems so you can continue to improve your sales effectiveness.

Bonus Tip: Preload your database with the right prospects. Your customers are the first step in prospecting sales leads. Most people think they already know who their customers are, but many companies tell us they find a few surprises when they do an analysis of their customer base. So confirm what you know about your customers. Then, once you know who your customers are, define a few key attributes about them. This could be external attributes such as geography, SIC code, company size (employee count and revenue), or internal attributes such as products, territory, credit type and contract type. Now you can use the profile of your best customers to better define and acquire new prospects.

If you are interested in how CRM software can help enable these best practices, here is a resource.

View the GoldMine Premium Edition 9.0 flash demo.  

5 Ways to Better Lead Management

CRM Best Practices

Kurt Keesy

If you're looking for ways to increase revenue--and what smart entrepreneur isn't--one of the fundamental processes you need to review is your lead management program. Prospect leads can originate in a variety of ways, and there is often only a very loose structure in place to manage and react to those leads. Your sales pipeline and your ability to hit revenue targets all begin with good lead management. Try these five strategies for improving your lead management efforts.

1. Develop a concrete definition of a lead and make sure all employees understand it. One of the biggest disconnects between sales and the rest of the company is the definition of a lead. When does a prospect become a lead that a salesperson will actually work on? It's estimated that 90 percent of the leads that are sent to sales staff are never acted upon. And there are generally two primary reasons for that. First, the lead is routed to the wrong person and never gets passed along to the correct person or at least not in a timely fashion. Second, the lead isn't ready to engage with a salesperson yet. So the sales person will make one, maybe two contacts with that prospect and then move on to "lower hanging fruit." For better sales effectiveness, your sales staff and the rest of the company need a more granular definition of when a prospect becomes an actual lead that should be forwarded to sales. 

2. Install an effective customer relationship management (CRM) tool. For optimal sales effectiveness, you need to provide employees with a tool that captures information about each and every interaction with your prospects and customers. This includes integrating your different channels, such as your website.

3. Track the source. People most often hear about your company and products and services through ads, referrals, online banner ads or some other form of advertising. You need to keep track of what actually caused these suspects to raise their hands so you can better determine what works and what doesn't. In addition, it's important to capture the source of each intervening event so you can determine such things as how many times you need to touch a customer or what order of touches work best. If you don't capture the source, you have no way of figuring out what's working. 

4. Distribute your leads quickly. Studies have shown that if you respond within 48 hours of a prospect contacting you, your sales closing rate goes up dramatically. Think about your own experiences. How many times have you tried to contact a company to request information and they never get back to you? By responding quickly, you set yourself apart from your competitors. 

5. Nurture your leads. Depending on the products and services you offer, most people are probably not ready to buybased on their first interaction with you. Best practices call for nurturing your leads over time. You need to develop campaigns that allow you to touch your prospects multiple times so you can move them through the sales cycle until they're ready to think about actually purchasing from you. 

If you are interested in how CRM software can help enable these best practices, here is a resource.

View the GoldMine Premium Edition 9.0 flash demo.  

SupportIndustry.com Reports on Achieving Competitive Advantage via Customer Service Software

Tools and Technologies To Maximize Your Support Center's Potential

Kurt Keesy, Marketing Manager

Can you gain competitive advantage by deploying an integrated suite of customer service software applications based on a sound multichannel strategy? 

This SupportIndustry.com  report states that delivering excellent customer experience depends on ready access to accurate customer data. It’s a straightforward goal, but creating high-level customer visibility into customer data and making it accessible to relevant parties — agents, partners, customers — requires that support organizations surmount a number of inherent challenges.  While live assisted support via telephone remains a key contact point, businesses are cutting expenses and increasing customer satisfaction by choosing IP-enabled voice systems that integrate to other customer service software applications.

Though savvy businesses have long recognized the power of customer service software as a differentiator, more than a few find themselves playing catch-up as its impact as a corporate image-shaper grows. The Internet has been a game-changer for service, providing a platform for customers to trumpet their happiness or discontent to a ready audience.

They’re putting providers on notice that they have power beyond their individual spending.  Companies that take this notice to heart understand they must deliver the best possible experience each time they get the opportunity and, further, leverage every opportunity to deepen customer relationships. Ultimately, delivering that experience depends on ready access to accurate customer data. It’s a straightforward goal, but creating high-level customer visibility into customer data and making it accessible to relevant parties — agents, partners, customers — requires that support organizations surmount a number of inherent challenges.

The report cites current best practices for meeting these challenges call for deploying:

• Integrated customer service software application suites with VoIP
• Multichannel service delivery 
• Realtime and historical reporting and analysis
• Adaptable workflow 

If you are interested in downloading the SupportIndustry.com report, "Tools and Technologies To Maximize Your Support Center's Potential" click here.  

FrontRange Recognized by Leading Customer Service Publication

FrontRange Solutions Receives Customer Interaction Solutions® Magazine’s 2010 Product of the Year Award

Kurt Keesy, Marketing Manager

“We’re going to win on Sunday. I guarantee it.” – New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath’s famous guarantee before Super Bowl III. It has been over 40 years since, Joe Namath, an exceptional and innovative quarterback, guaranteed a Super Bowl victory – while our recent “win” is not quite as dramatic, we’re pleased to receive the 2010 Product of the Year Award for Exceptional Innovation from Technology Marketing Corporation’s (TMC^®) Customer Interaction Solutions magazine, the leading publication covering CRM, call centers and teleservices, for our product FrontRange Customer Service Management.

FrontRange Customer Service Management delivers an integrated service, sales and marketing multi-channel application complete with inbuilt voice enablement. The solution is designed to help organizations maximize the value of every customer interaction, whether through web, telephone or email.

Read the full press release here.

Check it Out. A free test drive of FrontRange Customer Service Management without a full install.

Software help for IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Specification & Compliance

FrontRange Solutions

As the author points out, ‘there are any number of ITSM tools that will help you achieve ITIL compliance, so the real issue then becomes finding the one that best simplifies your life so you and the rest of the staff have a decent shot at getting home for dinner on time.’ Isn’t that what’s it’s all about? Doing more with less. We’re seeing more and more businesses turn to simple, effective solutions from FrontRange… what do you think? Will you research or invest in ITIL tools in 2011?

To read the entire article, visit Mastering ITIL Realities.

Learn More about our new SaaS Service Desk Solutions

It was a great first week for our new SaaS2 solution!

Kevin J. Smith, Vice President, Products

The feedback we have received from customers and the market has been overwhelming and positive.  The people we have heard from love the solution and hundreds of people have watched the online demo and read through the white paper and the brochures.  Our customers appreciate that we have delivered a true SaaS solution with the proven Help Desk and Service Management capabilities thousands of our customers have implemented globally.

 We encourage you to stop by our FrontRange SaaS page to check out the new SaaS² information, watch the online demo and read the white paper.  We would welcome the opportunity to provide a personalized sandbox for those of you wanting to take a closer look at the solution.  Feel free to call or contact us at any time- we look forward to hearing from you.

FrontRange announces an industry-changing SaaS solution

A true Hybrid approach to SaaS

Kevin J. Smith, Vice President, Products

Who else can say they have Premise, Hosted and Hybrid solution for IT Service Management? Today is a great day here at FrontRange Solutions as we launch the new SaaS2 solution- the culmination of years of work and the tireless efforts of many talented people. We are very excited to bring this new solution to our customers, partners and the market- it is unlike anything available today with proven and powerful help desk and service management capabilities on a true multi-tenant platform. The market told us what it wanted and we listened… Stop by our web site at www.frontrange.com/saas/ to learn more and be sure to watch the online demo.  We believe you will like what you see. Stay tuned for more updates from us, coming soon.

New Year, same old IT challenges?

Will we see new challenges emerging in 2011?

Matt Fisher, Director of Marketing, ITAM

So we've entered 2011, probably with mixed feelings of hope that the worst of the global recession is perhaps now behind us but also a lingering uncertainty about what actually lies ahead for the next 12 months.  Within the sphere of IT operations, will 2011 see new challenges emerging or more of the same?

Well, yes and yes.

Let's take a look at a couple of examples.

Despite all the talk of simplifying the IT services that are delivered to end users to support the business, the fact is that the IT infrastructure has never been more complicated.  For starters, we're using hardware from multiple vendors and purchasing software through all manner of different licensing schemes.  And then we look at virtualization and the increasing importance of non-Windows platforms in the business - granted, neither of these are 'new' but the way we use and manage these technologies in 2011 is likely to change.  

But what are the challenges associated with the points outlined above and why are they important in 2011?

Managing hardware from different vendors

Aside from the issue of managing purchase and lease contracts for multiple hardware vendors,a more tactical issue for the IT team tasked with enabling end users is the diversity in configuration, components and specifically drivers that these different machines require.  With the increasing move towards automation of daily tasks such as software deployments, upgrades and the periodic re-building of machines to improve performance, managing different configurations of target PCs is critical.  Too many Desktop Management automation tools fail to address this issue, leading to IT teams spending way more time than is necessary manaully duplicating or tweaking install packages to suit different PCs.  In 2011, having a Desktop Management solution that automatically caters for different hardware configurations and driver requirements could deliver a massive time saving.

Software licensing

Software licensing has never been easy, with little consistency between different vendors' licensing schemes and little desire at a senior level to ensure that software is procured, distributed and managed in a highly efficient manner.  Again, this will need to change in 2011, for a number of reasons. First, research suggests that the typical organization currently over-spends on software by 20 percent.  That figure comprises purchasing software that isn't needed, not buying it through the most cost-effective channels, maintain support agreements for unused software and failing to re-harvest licenses assigned to ex-employees.  That's a significant chunk of the IT budget wasted, and with no sign of a dramatic improvement in spend in 2011, something that is not tolerable any longer.

Another issue facing both those charged with managing software and the caretakers of the organization's legal obligations is software license compliance. Over the last three to four years, the number of software audits undertaken has risen steadily and there is no indication the trend will change in 2011.  According to various analysts and research, there's now a 50-60 percent chance your organization will be audited by at least one software vendor in 2011.  As such, the rising adoption of Software Asset Management (SAM) solutions to discover software, manage licenses and improve software utilization will continue in 2011.

Virtualization

Virtualization is nothing new; the chances are you already made a significant investment in this technology in 2010 (maybe even 2009).  But how is that investment working for you?  Is it delivering all the cost and efficiency savings you hoped for?  Time and time again we hear about organizations disappointed with virtualization - not at the fundamental capabilities of the technology, but at how it has failed to revolutionize the way they work.  That's ofen because while virtualization has indeed made it easier to create 'new' IT assets and explore different possibilities, the actual management of virtual assets is just as much of a headache as physical IT assets, perhaps even more so.

So for 2011, more organizations are going to look at how they can use a single toolset to manage both their physical and virtual desktops and servers, unifying both the management console and methodologies employed to create, deploy and update assets regardless of their type and deployment method .

Managing Non-Windows platforms
 
While Linux and Mac OS X platforms will not surpass Windows as the prevalent desktop or server platform for the vast majority of organizations in 2011, the simple fact is that both their popularity and importance to the business fucntions they support is growing.  As such, the IT team is required to support a wider array of platforms and types of asset than ever before.  And, as with virtualization and multiple hardware configuraitons, this presents a major issue in terms of time and therefore the productivity of the IT team.

The answer for 2011 will be for organizations to unify the methodologies and technologies employed to manage both Windows and Non-Windows assets in much the same way as they will have to do for virtualized and physical machines.  A single console will reduce the time taken to create all types of IT assets, reduce the training overhead on IT teams, reduce the burden on service and support resources and reduce overall costs to the business.

So while many of the individual challenges IT owners will face in 2011 will not be 'new', the way they are addressed will have to be.  With a continued focus on saving money, and many other avenues already explored in 2010, turning your attention to how you manage your software and hardware assets (physical and virtual) could be the key to delivering greater value at lower costs in 2011. 

Tiered Approach could be key to greater SAM adoption

Four-stage SAM standard outlined

Matt Fisher, Director of Marketing, ITAM

Launched in 2006, the ISO 19770-1 international standard for Software Asset Management (SAM) is an impressive body of work, outlining how organizations should go about managing their software to both ensure licensing compliance and minimize costs.

However, ISO 19770-1 has one major failing.  To date, not one organization worldwide has been certified as achieving the standard.

Why is that?  Largely it’s due to the complexity and ‘all or nothing’ nature of the standard.   The ISO 19770-1 contains a large number of conditions and best practices, all of which need to be met before an organization can be certified.  It's a fearsome set of requirements.

But change is on the horizon.

There is now a proposal for a four-tier approach to ISO-19770, which could make it much easier for organizations to digest and adopt in an less ‘intensive’ manner.  The four tiers are outlined as:

* Tier One - Trustworthy Data - creating an accurate inventory of everything to be managed
* Tier Two - Practical Management - implementing basic management controls
* Tier Three - Operational Integration - making SAM a part of daily IT Operations (such as ITSM)
* Tier Four - Full ISO Conformance - where SAM becomes a strategic enabler to the business

The tier approach is currently being previewed and assessed by a working group on SAM standard (ISO/IEC JTC1 SC7 WG 21) and a review is expected sometime after March 2011.

Hopefully this will pave the way to the speedy release of a revised standard which encourages organizations to start by fully understanding what they have and creating repeatable SAM processes, before then tackling some of the more complex requirements of SAM. 

The tiered approach seems entirely logical and will hopefully lead to greater SAM standards adoption, which can only be a good thing for end users and software vendors alike.

In the meantime, if you want to start creating your own base of Trustworthy Data, why not download a free trial of FrontRange Discovery and find out how many software applications are on your network.
 

How much of your software expenditure is wasted? – PART TWO

Research shows savings of up to 20 percent, but where do they come from?

Matt Fisher, Director, ITAM

Last week we looked at two of the four key reasons why many organizations spend more on software than they need to – wasting money that could be used to fund new IT projects or mission-critical purchases.

This week it’s time to look at the remaining two reasons money is wasted and what can be done to realize tangible savings.

Problem #3: Buying outside of volume licensing agreements or special contracts.  Many software vendors offer attractive pricing discounts to (even smaller) customers willing to enter into volume purchasing agreements. 

The licensing agreements do, however, put a requirement on the customer to centralize their purchasing, so that orders can be accurately tracked and discounts applied.  And this is where many organizations fall down.  Although many organizations have policies to support centralized procurement of software, actually monitoring and enforcing these is more difficult.

As such, it is disappointingly common to see example of ‘maverick’ or ‘rogue’ purchasing – where rather than going through the appropriate channels to procure software at the best possible price, individuals across the organization take matters into their own hands and purchase ‘off the shelf’ software for a perceived immediate need.  This can end up costing the organization tens of thousands of dollars.

Fix #3:  To avoid the costs of rogue purchasing, it is vital to both have in place policies to mandate the centralized procurement of software AND also the visibility to see when unauthorized software is installed on the network.  Tools like FrontRange Discovery and FrontRange License Manager both have a role to play here.  FrontRange Discovery (or a similar audit solution) can be used to monitor the network for new software installs – flagging these up to managers so they can be checked against centralized purchasing records.  A centralized license management solution can also be used to check that new licenses are being acquired through the proper channels, using the right agreements and approved suppliers. 

Problem #4: Paying support and maintenance for unused software.  This one sounds like a no-brainer, but after many customer engagements, you’d be surprised how common it is.  There are essentially three main causes of over-spending on support and maintenance: 1) paying for a ‘premium’ service agreement that far exceeds your actual needs; 2) failing to adjust support renewal to reflect any downsizing in software use; 3) continuing to pay support after a product has been retired (yes, this really happens!).

Fix #4:  The fix for #1 above is highly subjective and requires thought as to whether the software is mission-critical, how many times has support been required previously etc.  However #2 and #3 are easier to quantify and should never be the cause of over-spending on support and maintenance.  Before renewing any support contract, you should know both exactly how many instances of the affected application are installed on the network and whether they are being regularly used.  If applications are not being used, it is worth considering whether to remove them.  Similarly, if the number of applications installed has lessened since the last renewal, the next iteration of the contract should reflect this.

Continuing to pay support on retired software is indicative of a disconnect between IT and finance – where one part of the organization simply assumes that an invoice is good to pay, simply because it does not know any better.  Giving both teams access to a common toolset to monitor installs and licenses dramatically improves collaboration and reduces the chances of invoices being processed without due diligence.

So there you have four of the most common causes of over-expenditure on software and how to address them.  Perhaps it’s worth taking a look at your own organization and assessing how many of these issues you might at risk of suffering?

To get a handle on your current situation, why not try a free trial of the FrontRange Discovery IT audit solution or contact one of our SAM experts today?
 

How much of your software expenditure is wasted? – PART ONE

How much of your software expenditure is wasted? – PART ONE

Matt Fisher, Director of Marketing, ITAM

Research shows savings of up to 20 percent, but where do they come from?

Recent research released by the Software Industry Research Board (SIRB) – of which FrontRange Solutions is a founding member – showed that some organizations who are actively engaged in Software Asset Management (SAM) are achieving savings of up to 20 percent on their software expenditure.

But where do these savings come from?

From the many engagements we have undertaken with customers looking to improve their software management and compliance practices, FrontRange has identified four common causes of over-spending, together with corresponding ways to address them.  The first two are covered in today’s blog post; the second two will follow next week:

Problem #1: Failing to re-claim, or re-harvest, unused software on the network.  FrontRange estimates that around seven percent of software installed on any given network is currently unused.  Because it is installed, it is legally consuming a license and may well be costing the organization in terms of ongoing support and maintenance (more on this in next week’s Part Two). But unused software delivers no value to the organization and leads to over-spending as firms waste money buying new licenses instead of re-harvesting the ones they already have.

Fix #1: The ability to see what applications on the network are actively being used is critical to the process of re-harvesting software licenses.  Solutions like FrontRange Discovery enable organizations to find and monitor all software installations.  By providing clear usage information, FrontRange Discovery identifies applications that are not being used and thus are prime candidates to be re-deployed to other users, rather than purchasing additional licenses. 

With an active SAM program, it should be policy that any decision to purchase new software licenses is preceded by a check of the deployed inventory to first check that no licenses were suitable for re-harvesting.

Problem #2:  Over-expenditure on licenses. Although you might be forgiven for thinking that the majority of organizations out there deliberately try to get away with buying less licenses that they need, the reality is that organizations also often buy too many licenses.  This results in the organization buying licenses for what is effectively just shelf-ware; again delivering no value to the business but consuming much-needed cash.

Fix #2: The fix to over-purchasing software licenses is exactly the same as the fix to under-licensing: know exactly what you need before you buy! All too many organizations ‘guestimate’ their license requirements, rather than basing purchasing decisions on cold facts.  As such, the best advice here is to start with an exact inventory of machines on the network, which can then be broken down into different groups such as Organizational Units, departments or sites.  Again, solutions like FrontRange Discovery make this easy – with a complete audit of all PCs and servers from across the corporate network.  This gives procurement managers an exact count of how many licenses they will need to buy, eliminating any guesswork.

FrontRange License Manager (also part of the FrontRange SAM solution) can also help here by giving immediate reports on how many licenses the organization already owns – so that these can be tallied against future requirements.

It’s fair to say that the common link between Problems 1 and 2 is the need for better visibility of what’s on the network and how it’s being used.  Only once you know how many PCs you have, how many applications are installed, how many licenses you already own and how your software is being used can you make cost-effective decisions about future license purchases.

To start answering some of the above questions today, why not try FrontRange Discovery free for 30-days? Learn more about our free Discovery evaluation download now.

Check back next week for more guidance on how to realize significant software cost savings when we delve into the final two problems and fixes.
 

Where are the incentives to drive down software costs?

Software managers feel efforts go unrecognized

Matt Fisher, Director of Marketing, ITAM

On 12th October, I had the pleasure of chairing a small SIRB roundtable event attended by software and compliance managers from some major names in the UK public and private sectors.

Asking the table to indicate, by a simple show of hands, whether their current software management initiatives had led to any tangible cost savings, I was surprised to find that no-one in the room felt they could currently put a strong case forward to demonstrate cost savings back to the business.

Upon further questioning, there seemed to be a number of reasons for this:

1) Software managers still have to hand-over to procurement for final contract negotiations, and thus there is a growing risk of disconnect where no-one has the full picture
2) Software managers feel that any cost savings achieved through better visibility of needs etc are often attributed to their procurement colleagues, leaving those that provide the ‘intelligence’ unrecognised
3) Few, if any, software managers are targeted or compensated on delivering cost savings when it comes to software license spend
4) The board and management often have the same ultimate goals, but speak a different language

This last point was borne out by the results of IDC research undertaken on behalf of the SIRB, specifically the section that explored the “Board / Non-Board views on the Methods of Achieving Savings”.

Among the ‘Non-Board’ (for which, read mainly IT and Financial management) respondents, the single most cited way of saving costs was via ‘reduced software procurement costs’, with 60%.  However, the board saw things differently, with just 31% citing the above reason while 21% and 22% opted for ‘alternative models for licensing’ and ‘reduced non-compliance risks’ respectively.

It doesn’t take a lot of reading between the lines to realise that the above three priorities should all ultimately lead to the same effect on the bottom line – cost savings through better use of licenses, available assets etc.  But it’s also easy to see why a disconnect can occur when different stakeholders use different language.

Among the attendees at the SIRB roundtable, there was no shortage of desire or passion for delivering real tangible value to the business, but it does seem that if the business doesn’t recognise or reward the efforts of software managers who play a critical part in driving down costs, then this enthusiasm will wane and the organisation will ultimately lose out.

So here is a call to action for UK and international businesses – hold your software managers to account!  Target them with delivering real value to the business (reduced license expenditure, cheaper support and maintenance contracts, more flexible licensing agreements) and then reward them for achieving these goals.  We know from the SIRB research that cost savings of 20% are eminently possible; surely that’s got to be worth striving for?

Is software piracy the work of a criminal mind?

Either way, software misuses ultimately costs

Matt Fisher, Director of Marketing, ITAM

With the release of the half year enforcement figures from the BSA, some within the industry could be forgiven for thinking that our businesses today are rife with criminals.

While it is true that a number of cases have shown a wilful disregard for software licensing laws and software vendors’ intellectual property, the truth is that the most common culprit for unlicensed software is ignorance and poor IT management practices.

But with the BSA recovering a reported £6.5 million in EMEA so far this year, something is clearly wrong with the current state of software management.  And it all starts with visibility. 

Today’s business environment is about instant reaction and access to key information on the go, which encourages the full use of available technologies to achieve the ‘always on’ mentality. Naturally, to achieve this, organisations need to increase the number of software programs needed to carry out the day to day tasks. However, the sheer rate of proliferation of these applications makes it increasingly difficult for the IT manager to monitor what software is being used within the business. This is compounded by the fact that many employees are able to download or install software on their PCs without the knowledge or permission of the network administrator.

It’s this blind sighted approach to managing software that leads to so many businesses falling liable to large penalties.

However, as it seems the threat of ‘piracy’ and associated fines is doing little to motivate businesses to get their software licensing in order, perhaps more information and guidance from organisations such as the BSA and software vendors alike would be more effective. To build awareness around the importance of Software Asset Management (SAM) a better approach might be to move the argument away from the threat of illegal software use and penalties and start to focus on the cost savings that SAM can deliver immediately. In this difficult economy, it’s critical for organisations to ensure that they’re getting the most return from their technological investments, so significant cost savings from IT should be a welcome incentive to ensure software assets are managed effectively.

Not having a complete and up-to-date inventory of all software assets on the network means that businesses are inevitably over-spending on software in a number of ways.  First, organisations don’t make the most of renewal and maintenance agreements they have with their existing software providers and pay more than they need to (it’s likely that both software usage and licensing options have changed since the contract was initiated).  Second, they are unaware of software that already exists on their network and how it is being used and as a result purchase unnecessary duplicate or replacement copies (why buy new copies if you have unused applications already sat on the network?). 

Last, employees downloading or installing their own copies of software to a corporate network unchecked can also lead to duplicate copies and therefore even more budget wasted (not to mention creating a potential security risk). So while the talk of copyright theft is seemingly doing little to encourage businesses to comply, maybe the way to get action is to not accuse businesses of being ‘pirates’ but instead ‘money wasters’?