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I mentioned on 4 September and 6 July that Apple will explore business uses for the iPhone. It’s inevitable. Today, MacRumors, iPhone Alley and CNN.com, Apple and Salesforce.com are working on modified, CRM-capable iPhones. Mobile customer relationship management has become an important source of competitive advantage as companies face the rising expectations of their customers for fast, accurate, reliable assistance and support. Salesforce.com relies on BlackBerrys and Palm devices to meet these needs. Expanding their hardware support to the iPhone should help SalesForce.com retain existing enterprise customers.

On February 5 and February 13, I wrote about the changes to Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the US and Canada, and how these changes required software patches.

Phil Wainewright writes that last week, Microsoft finished releasing its official patches for DST. According to Mary Jo Foley, a noted IT journalist who has followed Microsoft for years, MS just released the DST patches for Microsoft Dynamics. That product is Microsoft’s entry into the customer relationship management (CRM) field, an industry dominated by smaller vendors like Salesforce.com and NetSuite.

Of course, these vendors have patched their web-based on-demand software already, as their programs don’t require a corporate server installation like Microsoft Dynamics does.
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes notes that while the DST changes aren’t as bad as Y2K, the conversion will give IT departments headaches for the next few weeks. Managers and technicians are discovering that Microsoft’s patches must be applied in a specific order, or they won’t work correctly.

In the past, Microsoft’s patches have been easier to apply. For most users, Microsoft Update or Windows Update, the built-in patch management systems in Windows, would handle the patching process for Microsoft products.

This time, DST patch management is a colossal mess and Microsoft has dropped the ball. For example, next Monday morning, mainland users who patched their copy of Outlook before their IT staff patched the company’s Exchange server will find their Outlook appointments could be one hour off. It depends on how the user connects to the Exchange server.

While the state of Hawaii does not observe Daylight Savings Time, plenty of companies and employees in the state do business with the mainland. Unpatched versions of Outlook and Exchange may report that conference calls start an hour early or late, for example. Mainland call centers that handle Hawaii-based customers may have similar issues.

Margie Semilof noted that , Shavlik Technology and BigFix customers received their list of approved patches last month, as each company completed their respective tests of the available software patches. Eric Schultze, Shavlik’s chief security architect, said that keeping up with the changing inventory of patches has been a challenge for the firm. Both companies build their own patches for older versions of Windows, including Windows NT 4.0.

Of course, none of these patches address time and clock functions in hardware. Some PDAs and cell phones will need patches, for example. Clocks and watches that synchronize to atomic clocks on the mainland may be one hour off for the four-week period between March 11 and the traditional start of DST, the second Sunday of April or April 8.

In the meantime, some IT administrators will be hoping that the Easter Bunny is carrying software patches in his basket this spring.

According to the Honolulu Advertiser, Hawaiian Telcom CEO Mike Ruley spoke during an investors’ conference call yesterday. He discussed the ongoing issues that have plagued the telephone company’s customer relationship management (CRM), order management, billing and financial reporting systems.While he admitted that HawTel customers will encounter these continuing problems during 2007, Ruley passed the buck and blamed BearingPoint, the firm that HawTel hired to integrate and update these systems. HawTel has spent over US$11M on BearingPoint’s integration project, and is seeking additional concessions. The utilitu spent an additional US$22M to rent Verizon’s old systems after BearingPoint missed a key delivery date. Yes, HawTel had to rent the same systems that BearingPoint was supposed to replace!

Utility companies live and die on CRM and billing systems. It’s much more expensive to recruit a new customer than it is to keep a current customer. It’s even more difficult to recruit a former customer when they’ve received poor service.

The average customer service call hold time is down from 28 minutes in May to under 4 minutes now, he said. The company’s goal is to have calls answered within 20 seconds.

To paraphrase Nigel Tufnel, these systems are so important to HawTel’s performance that they rate an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10.Sadly, it seems that the hold times are the “extra push over the cliff” that has driven more of HawTel’s landline customers to VoIP or wireless.

Last December, the Star-Bulletin reported on the company’s “Save the Line” campaign, which empowered HawTel employees to keep current landline customers from switching carriers. Ruley also announced yesterday that HawTel’s IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) service will not be released in December as the company had previously stated. This service would help HawTel provide a more complete bundle of consumer services, when compared with Time Warner Cable, its biggest competitive rival.

The latest financial results show that HawTel is losing this battle.

http://starbulletin.com/print/2005.php?fr=/2006/04/12/business/story01.html

Check our earlier discussions. These restaurants are using a call center in Santa Maria, California. The article has a brief discussion that details what the call center reps do on each call, and describes how the call center works with each restaurant to take the orders.