A good day, a fine day to one and all, welcome to Radio CBM 98.6, a fair to sunny day here in the Crescent City, all Buddy Guy all the time:
Our first news comes from Melbourne, where MCR vendor Stellar—yes that's MCR, Managing Customer Relationships, not CRM—announced plans to launch the listeningCentre [1], a Quality Monitoring & Analysis service for call centers.
Company officials said they considered Analysis Monitoring Quality and Monitoring Quality Analysis approaches as well, but decided one jumbled-up acronym was enough.
John Hollingsworth, CEO of Stellar Asia Pacific, noted correctly that "winning a customer back after they have left is far more difficult and costly than retaining them."
He then announced he was changing his job title to Executive Chief Officer.
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In politics the Senate and House of Representatives both voted to cut off all federal funding [2] to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, after ACORN employees were filmed advising people how to break numerous laws.
ACORN spokesman Scott Levenson's press conference to rebut the charges was delayed when Kayne West leaped in front of Levenson to declare Beyonce "the greatest living musical artist alive at this time, and all her videos, too."
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Verint Systems, a vendor of analytics software, has announced a Portuguese language version [3] of its Impact 360 Speech Analytics software from Verint Witness Actionable Solutions.
The product can "surface emerging trends," company officials say, or "superfície que emerge tendências," as well as "the root causes resulting in customer frustration and rising call volumes into the contact center—all without listening to hundreds and thousands of calls," because hey, quem quer escutar centenas de milhares de chamadas?
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Customer management consultant Graham Hill recently looked at the concept of crowdsourcing [4], noting that while "Toyota implements over 1,000,000 employee ideas every year, 95 percent of them within 10 days of being submitted," the much-ballyhooed My Starbucks Idea has implemented a measly 315 ideas out of the 75,653 submitted by customers.
Industry analyst Herbert L. Finkelstein observed that one must cut Starbucks a bit of slack, as the ideas the customers submitted "really suck. I'd bet 80 percent of it was 'play more Josh Ritter'."
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In sports, Philadelphia Phillies fan Steve Monforto and his three-year old daughter Emily became instant Internet celebrities [5] when he caught a foul ball at a Phillies game and gave it to her, only to watch her throw it into the lower level seats. Scouts for the Pittsburgh Pirates quickly inquired if Emily would be interested in a tryout. "She's got a better arm than most of our infield," one Pirates scout said.
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Ireland's Iontas, a BPO software vendor, has announced that "one of North America's largest financial processing companies" has purchased its Process Focus software [6].
The coyly-unnamed buyer, known hereinafter as O.O.N.A.L.F.P.C. evidently wanted Iontas's "time-sensitive and accurate transaction processing," according to Joe Stockton, CEO of Iontas.
The software is billed as giving companies the ability to "understand exactly how employees use their various software applications to do their day-to-day jobs, such as Facebooking and passing around ACORN jokes.
O.O.N.A.L.F.P.C. official John Doe, speaking off-the-record at an undisclosed location, said "no comment."
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That's the show for today, we're off to invest in chewy chicken feet [7].