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OUR TAKE -  Changing Values     Lasting Impressions: I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph. - Shirley Temple Yesterday, I suggested a different way to think about the often used phrase of customer retention. I called it staying in the game. In short, "staying in the game," means doing what is necessary to keep the customer in your fold as to maximize customer lifetime value.   Let me suggest that customer lifetime value may be the ultimate driving force that separates the business that survive these economic storms and those that perish. Why? Because for most businesses, there is simply not enough new opportunity to replace vanishing demand from the installed base of loyals. Furthermore, there is a dramatic, if not catastrophic, difference between losing the top 15% of your customers and the bottom 15% of your customers.   Entire customer bases are re-evaluating what they value, indeed what they purchase. Entire companies will be forced to re-evaluate their value propositions. And to re-evaluate the lifetime value of each customer.   I know this is heavy stuff for the holiday season. But I want you to "stay in the game" too. That's my take. What's your take?   Gary Lemke, Publisher          Action Center         Free Subscription         Submit Content         Industry Events         Webcasts         Archive   Stock Ticker Nortel 0.25      0.03 eLoyalty 2.42      0.28 Selectica 0.84      0.09 LivePerson 1.77      0.17 Rainmaker 0.8      0.05 NetSuite 8.07      0.3 Amdocs 18.66      0.01 APAC 1.01      0 Unica 5.05      0 Astea 1.91      0 SPSS 25.19      -0.17 Vignette 8.75      -0.08 ICT 4.12      -0.04 Pegasystems 12.21      -0.16 SAP 34.02      -0.48 Oracle 17.52      -0.26 Chordiant 2.85      -0.05 Tekelc 13.03      -0.23 HP 34.75      -0.65 ClickSoftware 1.9      -0.04 ATG 1.88      -0.04 Convergys 6.39      -0.15 Interactive 7.34      -0.18 NCR 12.87      -0.32 Sykes 18.23      -0.46 Salesforce 31.09      -1.21 Epicor 4.13      -0.18 SupportSoft 1.85      -0.1 NICE 21.53      -1.17 CDC 1.21      -0.08 Teletech 8.14      -0.67 RightNow 7.79      -0.7 As of 4:00 p.m. on 12/22/08         NEW IN CRM   News:    Del Taco Chooses Epicor IT Service Management Del Taco, the nation's No. 2 Mexican quick serve chain, has chosen Epicor IT Service Management (ITSM) 2008, the latest release of Epicor's service desk management, to provide field service support for the chain. Del Taco plans to use Epicor ITSM for its Help Desk Store Support to support its more than 510 restaurants in 16 states as well as to support corporate employees. Support for the stores will be facilitated by Epicor's Self-Service and Field Service Portal solution, newly available with Epicor ITSM 2008.(Epicor )   News:    Alibaba.com Selects NICE Systems for its VoIP Contact Centers Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.com, the world's leading B2B e-commerce company, placed an initial order for NICE SmartCenter solutions for two of its VoIP contact centers. The NICE solution will provide Alibaba.com with a quality management solution for improving customer service agent performance, training effectiveness, and customer satisfaction. The flagship of the Alibaba Group, Alibaba.com offers business-to-business service that connects millions of buyers and suppliers from around the world, and recently expanded its business to markets in India, Japan, and Korea. (NICE )   Article:    Lose the Meat Cleaver - Be Smart About Staff Cuts What's the best way to cut customer-facing staff, which the recession may tempt many companies to do? The best answer is, "Resist doing it." More than a few business execs inwardly believe that in business downturns, customers should share the pain for lousy business conditions. After all, customers are obligated to help companies survive, aren't they? Doing stuff the wrong way always comes with a cost. What if you have no choice? If your situation is so dire you must cut customer-facing staff-or you're stuck working for obtuse senior execs that don't yet comprehend the power of customers-make sure you first redesign workflow and information flow, so fewer people can deliver the same quality and quantity of customer-related work. (CustomerThink )   News:    San Francisco Chronicle Awards APAC Multi-Year Contract Under a multi-year contract, APAC will provide the San Francisco Chronicle with a comprehensive suite of publishing customer care services and back office processing, including subscriber retention, customer service, subscription paper delivery, billing inquiries and newspaper courier services. The six-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Chronicle is the nation's 12th largest daily newspaper and SFGate.com is among the nation's top 10 newspaper web sites.(APAC )   Article:    Want SaaS? Get Integration First Software as a service (SaaS) is one of the fastest maturing segments in the IT sector. According to analyst firm Forrester Research, SaaS adoption grew more than 50 percent from 2007 to 2008. SaaS offers simplicity of software management, reduces capital and operating costs, and offers access to a broad range of value-added services. It is therefore no surprise to anyone that SaaS is rapidly being adopted as the preferred software delivery model. In fact, industry watcher, Saugatuck forecast 65 percent of all businesses will have at least one SaaS application deployed-enterprise clients will deploy an average of seven.(DestinationCRM )   News:    Nexidia Announces The Release Of Audiofinder 2.0 Among the new release's enhanced features, AudioFinder 2.0 includes Language ID, which automatically identifies and processes multiple spoken languages in a group of recordings, enabling users to accelerate the process of capturing and analyzing audio and video content. AudioFinder's new Language ID feature targets the needs of law enforcement and other government organizations that require the ability to quickly and accurately search, review, categorize and tag large volumes of audio and video in different languages. Although the system comes with a predefined set of languages models for identification, users can easily customize these models to include practically any dialect or language spoken around the world.(Nexidia )   Didn't read the last edition of CRMAdvocate? Click here to see what you missed.