As today’s organizations proceed with upgrades to Windows 7 and Office 2007 or 2010, many are finding that the action plans they need are very different from the plans they used for previous upgrades, with particular regard to the migration of users to the new applications. Of course, there are...
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
According to the 2010 HDI Support Center Practices & Salary Report, only 19.9% of all centers are offering chat as a contact channel. With adding value and reducing costs at the front of most IT leaders’ minds, is this the right time to increase your support capacity by adding chat? And are the...
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
Most businesses claim to use their customer service organizations as key differentiators in creating competitive advantage in the marketplace, but this claim does not withstand closer analysis. The service the vast majority of these companies provide is actually the same as their competitors, so...
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
If there’s one thing service desks are good at, it is collecting information and reporting on it. If there is one thing they are terrible at, it is being able to focus on the few instead of the many. But one way to find out if anyone is actually reading the reports you spend so much time...
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
Once upon a time, customers relied on advertising to shape their perception of an organization. Certainly, some money was poured into customer service, but only enough to keep things moving. If customers had problems, their complaints were usually isolated to a strongly worded letter to the company.
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
The proliferation of mobile devices, increasing social and technical sophistication of the twenty-first-century college graduates entering the workforce, and anytime/anywhere demand for access have gained stronger footholds and show no signs of slowing. At the same time, the economic climate...
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
I remember the first time I encountered the term “managed services.” I had a tough time wrapping my head around those two words put together that way—to me, the meaning was not intuitive. And even though “managed services” has been in common usage for well over a decade, many people still...
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
Call it the cloud. Call it converged infrastructure. Call it hybrid delivery, or whatever the marketers come up with next. The fact is, the world of IT has changed. It’s the “new IT.” But let’s be honest: it’s not altogether new, and it’s not altogether IT. So what is it, and how is it going to...
Date Published May 23, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
When Apple announced the launch of the Apple Stores in 2001, it was met with widespread skepticism. There was concern over the impact the stores would have on Apple’s existing retail channels, the fact that Apple had no experience in retail, and that the mere existence of retail stores would do...
Date Published May 22, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016
As organizations multisource their IT services, push services to the cloud, and consolidate services into enterprise-shared services to reduce costs, their success increasingly depends on relationship management rather than the deep systems expertise that has traditionally been their core...
Date Published May 22, 2012 - Last Updated May 11, 2016