By Tom Niehaus - Director, Product Marketing & Presales

In the economic environment today it is vital to prove a return on investment (ROI) on capital expenditures.  Justifying spend in a call center is always a complex task.  The call center is often seen as a "cost center" and therefore reducing costs is the most likely approach that most executives take in justifying a project.  In my experience, executives always use one of two cost reduction measures in the call center:  Average Handle Time (AHT) and Training Time.  These numbers are directly related to human resource costs.  Once the project is complete you can either do more with less (handle more calls with fewer people) or do the same with less (handle the same call volume with less staff).  Either way there is a related cost and return that needs to be calculated.  

By Richard Stern - Senior Vice President, Global Marketing

The Twitter-sphere is buzzing (or maybe the right term is tweezing) with news and commentary on yesterday's service outage which left their North American customers without service for 30 minutes or so. Salesforce.com has experienced several outages in recent years. The major outages happened two months ago, as well as in December 2005 and January 2009, with separate minor outages recorded in January 2006.

Major disruptions also occured in April 2006, while several Cloud platforms, including Salesforce.com and Amazon's EC2 and S3 environments, together with major ecommerce sites like Walmart.com, were also affected by a DoS attack. The attack affected users of NeuStar's ultraDNS service, which translates web addresses into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

While supporters of SaaS and the Service Cloud have mobilized to defend Salesforce.com, and the supports of premise-based solutions have fired back, most of the conversation reads like a group of 3rd graders talking about whose Dad is stronger. You're either all right or all wrong – and this time it's personal. And while there are many zealous opinions, there is very little substance. 

By Guy Tweedale – Senior Vice President, European Operations

On 19 May 1986 TIME magazine published an article entitled "Growing pains at 40".  The article announced the coming of age of the Baby Boomers, who had reached 'middle age'. In the article Al Gore said "We wanted to change it all, to do it our way."

Today we baby boomers complain about how Generation Y are shouting out loud about their independence and the fact that they will "change it all and like to do things their own way".   The fact of the matter is that way back when the baby boomers started we were challenging the status quo and finding new ways to communicate and influence the world – think of fax machines, mobile telephony, the birth of the internet and 24 hour news channels... were we any different than today's generation?

I just changed mobile phone providers.  Not the most convenient thing to do, and this company actually had less expensive plans than the company to whom I transferred my service.  But I had one rotten experience too many, and as you all know by now, customer experience is the name of the game.

Let's call them "Company X".  There are a number of customer service incidents I could tell you about, because I had been a customer for about 5 years.  But in the interest of brevity,  the overall issue is this:  whenever I talked with the call center, the agents were helpful, friendly and efficient.   Whenever I walked into a retail store, I was ignored, given attitude when the staff had to get off the phone to help me and charged fees that were not disclosed to me on the phone.   Things like this happened a few times during the past year.  It was like dealing with two different companies. 

Guest post by Scott Norteman - Product Management Director

In my years here at Jacada, I've been to dozens of our customers' contact centers and studied their metrics and how they are calculated. These companies all have the same goals of serving the customer and increasing customer satisfaction... but of course they must also reduce costs.

Traditional contact center metrics, such as AHT, ASA, Hold-time, Queue-time, etc., were developed with those goals in mind and focus on the length of time it takes to serve a customer's needs and the associated cost. It makes sense to use these metrics when the primary focus is efficiency. However, that doesn't provide any sense of whether the customer's issue is actually being resolved… and that is what concerns the customers.