Economic Stress Test for the Software Industry: Will Your Company Pass? Neochange On May 22nd the stock market had valued the software industry at a 3.7% discount to the S&P500, based on the next-12-month price/earnings ratio. This isn’t particularly striking until we consider that for the past five years, the software industry has on average been priced at a 34% premium to the S&P 5001. What could account for this dramatic difference?   How to Thrive During an Economic Recession Managing Cost and Increasing revenue with Strategic Partners Convergys Leveraging Strategic Partnerships to Thrive in a Down Economy Is it really possible for technology companies to manage costs and increase revenue during a recession? If they engage strategic partners to manage non-core functions, yes, it is. Read the just-released white paper, co-authored by the Services Support Professionals Association (SSPA) and Convergys, a global leader in relationship management.   How to Make Service and Support Your Revenue Engine: The Initiative That’s Too Important to Delay Consona CRM The choice for service and support executives is simple. Be managed down as a cost center or squeezed as a direct profit center. Or take your place in the boardroom as the chief customer advocate and driver of customer loyalty and revenue. In this paper, David Kay and Tim Hines explore the astonishing power service and support organizations have to drive the business.   Shaping Your CEM Strategy: Five Steps to Achieving Market Advantage through Customer Experience Management The Urgent Threat and What Software Vendors Can Do About It Clarabridge, Inc. Companies who incorporate customer feedback build loyalty into their operations. Through text analytics, Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions can provide immediate, actionable insight to drive organizational performance and customer loyalty. Discover the tools and steps needed to deploy a CEM program by downloading our white paper.   Maintenance Revenue Protection 2.0: The Urgent Threat and What Software Vendors Can Do About It NeoChange Long the software industry’s cash cow, maintenance and support revenue provides high margins that are the funding engine for new product research and development. Additionally, the maintenance revenue stream is used as a basis for company valuations in mergers and acquisitions and financing arrangements. However, multiple forces have converged to intensify the threat, which has now become clear and present. The industry’s shift toward buyer perceptions of value has brought downward pressure on both price and sales volume, eroding the revenue basis on which the maintenance percentage is calculated. This white paper provides keen insights on what software vendors can do defend against this imminent threat to maintenance revenue.   Improving Contact Center Productivity with Universal Search Google Contact centers play an important role in many industries, from telecommunications, manufacturing, and financial services to energy, utilities, public sector, and travel.  Each of these shares the same goal: to provide a high-quality customer experience in the most cost-effective manner possible. Yet customer service representatives face challenges in quickly finding the answers they need, leading to lost productivity and a less-satisfying customer experience.  Learn how enterprise search can empower your CSRs and substantially improve performance and reduce training requirements.   2008 Service and Support Metrics Results Parature As a service and support professional, you hear a lot about best practices in the support center, but what is really happening behind the scenes in today's service center? To find out, Parature and SupportIndustry.com conducted the 2008 Service & Support Metrics Survey. Respondents shared valuable data on metrics directly related to running their support operations, as well as providing humorous insights about some of their most challenging customer interactions.   The Unique Challenges of Customer Support for Business Services SSPA and Oracle Business services companies are facing a loyalty crisis:  though satisfaction with support is considerably higher for services companies than for product companies, loyalty is considerably lower.  Companies are viewing services as a commodity, ignoring differentiation among competitors and making decisions based solely on cost.  For this to end, business services companies should embrace the concept of Value-Added Support.   How Generational Differences are Driving Requirements for New Support Channels SSPA and Lithium Technologies When it comes to supporting customers successfully, “one size fits all” is a thing of the past. Younger customers have different expectations for support channels, and do not assume retailers and manufacturers are the best sources of information.  A joint research project conducted by Lithium Technologies and the SSPA has, for the first time, documented these trends with real data. The findings of the research demand action: companies that want to meet the new requirements must embrace Web 2.0 technology and include customer support communities in their customer care strategy.   2008 Channel Survey: Partners Want Choice, Simplicity and Tools to Enable Them to Secure More Service Contract Revenue Encover, Inc. An online survey conducted in January, 2008 by Encover, Inc., invited partners to share their experiences and describe their needs related to attaching and renewing hardware service contracts and software subscriptions for the manufacturers represented by those partners. The respondents included executives from channel partners, solution providers and direct market resellers (DMRs) focused on IT hardware, software and services.   Knowledge Engineering - A valuable information repository providing definitive directions for product enhancements Cybernet - SlashSupport Knowledge created becomes a key asset of an organization. It enables support organizations to increase their operational efficiency, improve customer experience and productivity, and drive product improvements based on the customer experience. While knowledge management has become a critical competency for technical support organizations, providing Knowledge Centered Support is also becoming ever more complex to capture the experience of solving problems. This paper aims to promote and understand the business imperative of effective Knowledge Centered Support approach and principles, towards the practice of knowledge management. It also provides a step-by-step guide to implement a Knowledge Centered Support-based knowledge management solution.   Improving Field Service Productivity & Profitability With Mobile Automation Tools Zebra, Motorola It pays to be good at field service. Efficient field service companies have lower operating expenses, better productivity, higher SLA compliance and customer satisfaction levels, and capture more service revenue than their peers. For these reasons, best-in-class operators have 2.5 percent higher service margins than average companies, and are about 50 percent more profitable than laggards. Winning Strategies for Web Self-Service InQuira Web self-service increases in importance as companies seek to reduce costs while maintaining and growing their customer bases. At the same time, and equally important, consumers look to the Web as the resource of choice for researching and answering all their questions, support and otherwise. Google and other Web-wide information sources have benefited most dramatically from this developing consumer dynamic, but do not underestimate its potential impact on consumers’ expectations for your site. To ensure your Web self-service initiative satisfies both corporate objectives and consumer expectations, we lay out here four best practices for implementing Web self-service on your customer-facing websites.     Five Tips for Great E-Service in the Financial Services Industry Kana From ATMs to online banking, financial services institutions (FSIs) have been ahead of the curve in deploying electronic channels. But e-service has not always lived up to customer expectations. The 2007 KANA-IBM “mystery shopper” survey of more than 70 leading FSIs found that 95% of company websites could not answer a simple question, and 67% did not provide satisfactory answers via e-mail. Based on KANA’s experience with leading financial firms, the five tips in this article will help you start delivering the level of e-service convenience and quality your customers demand.     How Web 2.0 Technologies Enable a New Generation of Web Self-Service Platforms and Customers Salesforce.com Welcome to a Web 2.0 world, in which we are more connected, more available, and can more easily find and distribute information than ever before. However, the implications of Web 2.0 for customer service are enormous. On the plus side, companies are finding that peer-to-peer support offers tremendous cost savings by deflecting live agent interactions. In this paper, SSPA Research and Salesforce.com will explore the evolution of self-service, how Web 2.0 can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, and the role of OnDemand in enabling a new era of support: Customer Service 2.0.     The Power of Remote Support in Battling Today’s Top Customer-Support Issues Citrix Online Through ongoing member interviews, surveys, conferences and summits, the SSPA has identified the 6 toughest business issues impacting service and support organizations. These strategic issues represent the major obstacles to success for today’s technical support teams. For companies that want to differentiate competitively based on quality of service, responding appropriately to these issues is critical. Innovation in process and technology is required to meet these challenges head-on and lay the foundation for success in the years to come.     Implementing KM InQuira Most customer service organizations today will admit that effective knowledge transfer is the most crucial element to resolving customer problems. When done correctly, knowledge transfer accelerates problem resolution processes, fuels customer satisfaction and leads to greater organizational efficiency. No amount of analysis and planning, however, will uncover every potential challenge or roadblock. Here, practitioners who have been through successful large-scale knowledge management initiatives share their insights and lessons learned.     Redefine Customer Service with Service Intelligence KANA Most customer service organizations today will admit that effective knowledge transfer is the most crucial element to resolving customer problems. When done correctly, knowledge transfer accelerates problem resolution processes, fuels customer satisfaction and leads to greater organizational efficiency. No amount of analysis and planning, however, will uncover every potential challenge or roadblock. Here, practitioners who have been through successful large-scale knowledge management initiatives share their insights and lessons learned.     Hosting for business continuity in times of interruption: A Datamonitor whitepaper UCN This whitepaper will examine the case for hosted customer interaction centers, highlighting the ability of hosted service providers to deliver high levels of business continuity through resilient systems. In addition, a case study will illustrate how an organization can continue to provide an uncompromised level of service to its endusers during a period of business interruption.     On Demand Service and Support: A Datamonitor Whitepaper Salesforce.com Learn about the key issues driving change in customer service. Read deployment case studies that show how an on-demand service and support application can help relieve the increasing pressure placed on service and support departments.     An ISV's Guide to Faster Application Problem Resolution BMC Software in Conjunction with Identify Software This paper examines the challenges of problem resolution for ISVs across the product lifecycle. It presents three case studies that demonstrate how leading ISVs are using best practices and application problem resolution technology from Identify Software to meet their product release schedules and reduce their service and support costs significantly–all with a rapid ROI.