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Managing Emerging Technologies
Publication date: 12/05
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Executive summary
Walk the floor of any trade show for support managers and you’re
bound to see dozens of entrepreneurial companies, all pitching new
automation and cost-saving technologies. Most will claim to be the
“leading” player in some hot new market segment, or purveyors of a
“disruptive” concept that promises to overthrow the current leaders,
or perhaps a “strategic” partner who will transform every
mild-mannered Clark Kent customer into a hyper-competitive Superman.
If you feel a bit bewildered at all the noise, it’s no surprise.
In fact, emerging technologies are almost always messy and over-hyped.
A genuinely visionary idea can transform a whole organization and
shake up an entire industry—and it’s happened many times in the
technology world. But separating the genuine innovators from the
moonbats has never been easy (that’s why venture capital is such a
tough business). Support organizations in particular have a track
record of spending far too much money on flashy tools and technologies
that never delivered much ROI; in many companies, top management has
now become deeply skeptical about any investment in support and
services automation.
As a result, support managers tend to be somewhat risk-averse about
technology. Before adopting anything new, they like to see real-world
customers, strong endorsements by their peers, and other signs of
traction in the market. Even better, support managers want reassurance
that the specific vendor they choose will become a dominant player—or
at least a survivor.
But where does this reassuring information come from? In typical
early-stage markets, product reviews and market research are usually
sketchy, and customer references are hard to find (and often out of
date). To help fill this gap, the ASP recently surveyed its members
and other support managers about their level of interest in ten
high-visibility technology areas. Our goal, we explained in the
survey instructions, was “to suggest what’s moving into the mainstream
versus what’s still mostly on the horizon.”
The ASP's Emerging Technologies report looks at relative adoption
rates for the following ten technologies:
- Web Conferencing
- Remote Diagnostics
- Automated Chat/Instant Messaging
- Multi-Channel Queue Management
- Agent Development/Agent Performance Analytics
- VoIP
- Workforce Management/Labor Scheduling
- Intelligent Auto-Response (E-mail)
- Virtual Call Center Services
- Interactive Voice Response/Speech Recognition
Copies of the survey are free to ASP members in the
members-only area.
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