September 28, 2015
As I was pondered a topic one of my colleagues, Rayanne Thorn, wrote about, Understanding Employee Engagement, it got me thinking deeper about a vendor’s employees, and whether prospects should consider how engaged or happy employees are at a software vendor they are considering as part of their decision-making process. I think they should and let me take you through my reasoning.Evaluating VendorsWhen a customer is evaluating vendors, at the top of their list is usually the vendor’s ability to meet their technological needs. If they can’t meet that, all of the other considerations are mute. After that, close behind are: 1) price; 2) the vendor’s ability to deliver on what they commit to; and 3) the vendor’s customer support. At the end of the day, I consider #2 and #3 to be the most important considerations prospects should consider.…
June 3, 2016
Customer Service Today - a phantomMy colleague Matt, a sales director here at Dovetail, recently wrote about customer service on our HR blog - this is something I find myself more and more concerned with as we continue to move from a manual society to all-things automated or computer-related. As a customer, are your needs truly met - do you feel like you are listened to? Do you want more? Have you come to expect less?Expecting LessI think this is where we are today. We have come a place where poor customer service is the norm. Where the client is only listened to when they threaten public shaming or when they actually go to a public forum like Twitter or Yelp to describe their poor experience. How sad that it has come to this. How sad that the days of…
January 6, 2014
Dovetail's project to completely revamp and modernize our line of web clients for Clarify is starting to yield great results. Agent 5 is here! And it has been completely redesigned with an entirely new user interface (UI) that offers users an experience that is simpler, more usable and more enjoyable, yet still familiar. The focus on usability means fewer steps to complete a task, fewer clicks to get to the data you need, and less time spent navigating through windows when working cases. Agent 5 is quite literally a new experience. A few enhancements that you’ll notice immediately are: Multi-browser Compatibility: Agent 5 works using Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox. Speed: Agent 5 is noticeably faster than Clarify and other versions of Agent. This is due in part to newer technology, optimizations during building, and less windows.…
July 21, 2008
One of the best practices that ITIL brings to the party within Incident (case) Management is prioritization. ITIL calls out 3 separate attributes: impact, urgency, and priority. Impact: the measure of how business critical it is. Urgency: a necessary speed of resolving an incident. Priority: formulated from the combination of impact and urgency. Some formulate it as Priority = Urgency + Impact. Others use Priority = Urgency * Impact. They key difference that ITIL presents with the concept of Priority versus the classic usage of Severity is that severity alone does not provide enough context for Prioritization. The urgency factor needs to be added to severity in order to provide an accurate understanding of how to prioritize activity. Example of a priority coding system Impact, Urgency, and Priority within Dovetail Within Dovetail (and Clarify/Amdocs), Severity and Priority…