Survey Says: 79 Percent of Consumers Have Experienced Poor Voice Quality with Call Centers

According to a recent survey undertaken by the Customer Experience Foundation on behalf of Empirix Inc., 79 percent of consumers have experienced poor voice quality. The study asked 3,925 consumers about their experiences in dealing with contact centers and identified technology related trends and common problems that are affecting customer service and costing organizations around the world billions of dollars.

The high percentage of global consumers that highlighted poor voice quality as a common problem points to a real issue in the industry.

The study also revealed that poor voice quality drives down sales volumes, increases call lengths and the number of calls that are forced to be redialed. And as a result, churn rates can increase for both customers and staff. The magnitude of the problem is indicative of how much businesses are struggling to come to terms with this issue, while consumers are quickly losing patience."

Survey Says: 79 Percent of Consumers Have Experienced Poor Voice Quality with Call Centers Costing Organizations Billions Globally

http://beconfident.empirix.com/mk/get/ENT-WS-WP-cefpoorvq-092010

Traffic Bait Doesn’t Bring Ad Clicks

A new study by Perfect Market has found that the most profitable online articles at several major newspaper online outlets were the ones readers were most engaged with, and that appears to be topics like unemployment, the egg recall and mortgage rates.

Perfect Market, a company that helps newspapers make their Web sites more profitable, examined the advertising revenue generated from more than 15 million articles from 21 news sites over a three-month period this summer, using data from newspapers including The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Orlando Sentinel,

The reason, Perfect Market says, was that advertising is more effective when it is paired with news content that is relevant to the product, especially when the subject of the news is something in which readers have a personal interest.

Traffic Bait Doesn’t Bring Ad Clicks

Steve Job Anti-Android Rant

"Creative" Accounts for 52% of Ad Success, Says comScore

To the extent that the aim of an ad campaign is to stimulate additional sales, advertisers need to pay more attention to the quality of the creative, comScore says.

"The quality of the creative is four times more important than the characteristics of the media plan in generating sales,” said Jeff Cox, executive vice president of comScore ARS. “In fact, creative is the single most important factor and accounts for over half the changes in a brand’s sales over time.

Getting the creative right is absolutely essential, and yet its importance so often gets minimized in the process of developing an ad campaign. Now is the time for advertisers using digital, as well as more traditional media, to get serious about optimizing their creative on the front end so they don’t get a rude awakening when the ads don’t work and they are left wondering what went wrong.

In other words, a good plan and a good channel are helpful, but more than half of any new sales generation will hinge on whether the advertising succeeds in motivating behavior. That's more art than science, but it would appear too many advertisers neglect the art part.

comScore ARS Research Highlights Importance of Advertising Creative in Building Brand Sales

Moms and Millennials

The millennial generation is in one sense not a "market segment," but rather an indication of where all future markets are headed. As you might guess, behaviors of Generation X, sandwiched between Boomers and Millennials, have some characteristics of both preceding and succeeding generations, though it is the differences that normally get the attention.

In a more immediate sense, Millennial behavior is important because it influences the behaqvior or older age cohorts, thus driving behavior now, and not simply in the future.

Moms and Millennials

eMarketer Webinar: Tips for Reaching & Engaging the Elusive Millennial

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Millennials are in one sense not a "market segment," but rather an indication of where all future markets are headed. As you might guess, behaviors of Generation X, sandwiched between Boomers and Millennials, have some characteristics of both preceding and succeeding generations, though it is the differences that normally get the attention.

In a more immediate sense, Millennial behavior is important because it influences the behaqvior or older age cohorts, thus driving behavior now, and not simply in the future.

Steve Jobs: “Open Systems Don’t Always Win”

Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, is unapologetic about Apple’s "closed" or "curated" approach, which is to tightly control how everything integrates from the chips to the software to the industrial design.

“Open versus closed is a smokescreen,” he argues. “Google likes to characterize Android as open and iOS as closed. We think this is disingenuous,” says Jobs.

The real difference between the iPhone and Android is, he says, “integrated versus fragmented."

There is some merit to that re-framing of the argument, though some will consider it a sophisticated bit of semantic gymnastics. Up to this point, Apple has been the salient exception to the "rule" that open approaches lead to more, and faster innovation.

But that is starting to change in the media business and with the rise of applications and closed user communities on the Internet. These days, in the content business, the options are "open," "closed" and "curated," which is another way of saying "fragmented," "integrated" or "annotated."

Steve Jobs: “Open Systems Don’t Always Win”: