CBM News: Will Bing, Microsoft's Third Try, Finally Knock Off Google?

Good day one and all indiscriminately, welcome to Radio CBM 98.6, all Tom Waits all the time, the pride of Lizard Lick, North Carolina.

Today's a special day here at the station as we're awarding our first Radio CBM Customer Service Rep Of The Month, an award dedicated to recognizing customer service employees who go above and beyond the call of duty to add that special something to the lives they touch.

And the first winner is... the unnamed hero of the Verizon Wireless contact center who refused police requests to turn on a customer's cell phone so the man could be located before he committed suicide.

According to The Times-Reporter of New Philadelphia, Ohio, police asked the Verizon Wireless operator to turn on the customer's cell phone so the man, described as a potential suicide victim, could be located.

Showing the commitment of the truly dedicated agent, however, according to the Times-Reporter the Verizon rep told police the man was behind on his bill, and that police would have to make a payment of $20 for the signal to be connected.

Sheriff Dale Williams tried to reason with the representative, who was having none of it. As the newspaper reported, deputies discovered the man just as Williams was preparing to pay $20 out of his pocket. "It would have been nice if Verizon would have turned on his phone for five or 10 minutes, just long enough to try and find the guy," Williams said.

We here at Radio CBM only hope that Verizon values this employee as much as we do.

Let's play word association. I say "online search engine," you say... "Google," of course. But Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys, thinks there's room for Bing, the third charge up the hill by Microsoft to muscle into that mind share.

According to the Brand Keys' Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, Passikoff says, "Google ranks #1 overall, but when it comes to Facts vs. Insights, which has the highest of high expectations," the rankings are as follows:

1. MSN
2. AOL
3. Google / Netscape (tie)
4. Ask
5. Alta Vista
6. Yahoo

In 2005 Bill Gates said "The magic moment will come when our search is demonstrably better than Google's." Anybody willing to bet that Google will be dethroned within the next few presidential administrations just ask the folks over at cuil.com how their plans for world domination turned out.

In politics, President Barack Obama dismissed as "meaningless coincidence" the fact that the Chrysler dealerships targeted for closing under his plan, which will increase unemployment by 100,000 jobs, are owned by Republican donors, and that dealerships owned by Democrat friends and donors will stay open, saying "Democrats won the election so we can do this, if you've got a problem with that, tough beans. By the way, chief, where do you work again?"

Ah, spring time in big sky country. The trout are swimming, the grizzlies are growling and RightNow's releasing RightNow May '09, with Cloud Monitor and Enterprise Analytics added to the CRM tool.

"Today, companies can't force one-sided conversations with customers; enterprises must listen closely to what consumers are saying," says RightNow CEO Greg "You Couldn't Drag Me Back to New Jersey With A Trailer Hitch" Gianforte. "And we heard them say 'We want more stuff from Montana.'"

The RightNow Cloud Monitor tracks external conversations about products, services and brands as they occur on the social Web, Gianforte explains, saying it tracks both Twitter and YouTube, with support for other social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn on the drawing board. It's supposed to help companies follow discussions on social networking sites, and its SmartSense emotion detection feature scans tweets and other content to assess how consumers feel about a business.

"For example, a negative emotion score could be prioritized for immediate action," Gianforte says, or alert a business owner to quickly make a donation to a Democrat so his business isn't nuked by the Obama administration.

In sports the NHL playoffs drag on interminably. Imagine how sick of it we'd be if they actually televised the games.

Jenzabar, a CRM vendor working the higher education corner, has released Jenzabar's Internet portal, JICS Version 7.0, with what they say are "a faster interface and advanced customization options," including an instant "Contribute To A Democrat" icon on the dashboard to prevent institutional closure in case the Obama administration decides to bail out higher education.

The Internet Campus Solution connects candidates, students, alumni, faculty, and staff to an institution's database at any time from any Internet browser. The newest release is built on Microsoft's .NET 3.5 framework, and incorporates a "News/Blog" portlet to give authors the ability to post news, text and images and to blog and post comments within JICS.

That's the show for today, and nobody's fools us, we're off to send the Democratic National Committee $50.