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Through April 30, over two-dozen Brainbench certifications are available to you at no cost!

 Brainbench’s current FREE certification tests include:

• Accounts Payable Fundamentals
• ASP.NET
• ASP.NET 2.0
• C#
• C# 2.0

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Have you ever had a potential sale slip through the cracks because you weren’t proactive? Have you ever lost a loyal customer because of ineffective service? Here are four reasons why businesses should implement proactive service solutions to help with these and other issues that can be detrimental to business.

1. Help Distressed Web Site Visitors
   A distressed online customer can engage in a number of actions that can be harmful to business success, i.e., changing service/product providers, negative blogging, etc. One area that is a serious business problem is shopping cart abandonment. Marketing Sherpa reports that in 2006, shopping cart abandonment averaged an astounding 58 percent, which represents an enormous missed business opportunity.Some common areas of customer distress include:
   • Cannot find a particular product or service
   • Unsure of how to fill out a Web form
   • Lack of human interaction
   • Difficulty making payments

   The resolution to these issues is to provide customers with the same treatment they’d receive in a brick-and-mortar store. To do this, businesses must implement proactive service solutions, i.e., live chat and click-to-talk through VoIP. These technologies allow customers to access an agent at the point of need over the Internet using dial-up or broadband. Live chat and click-to-talk provide businesses with the ability to truly expand global reach from both the consumer and remote agent perspective.

   The use of these technologies will not only help distressed visitors, but improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

2. Significantly Slash Service Costs
   According to Gartner Research, proactive customer contacts can be a cost-effective complement to traditional inbound customer service contact center activities. This type of contact can also generate goodwill among your customers and reduce the overall cost per call.Live chat and click-to-talk help businesses provide a highly personalized customer experience and slash service costs by engaging a frustrated Web site visitor before they engage an agent via the traditional telephone, which can be one of the most expensive communication channels.JupiterResearch reports that companies are increasingly offering proactive interactions through chat and click-to-call to consumers who trigger business rules such as shopping cart value, session inactivity and lifetime value.
3. Make Some Money
   These innovative products also allow businesses to benefit from up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Click-to-talk and live chat can be used to take advantage of live interactions to offer additional goods and services that a customer may be interested in purchasing.For example, a customer appears to be having trouble finding product information about an item she’s interested in purchasing on a Web site. An agent proactively offers a live chat or click-to-talk invitation to help her find what she’s looking for, and closes the sale.Another proactive service solution businesses can use is real-time offers. This technology allows the system to create and push targeted offers to agents so they can offer them to customers.

   For example, a customer is on a mobile phone operator’s Web site shopping for a new plan and has proceeded to the shopping cart. Before the customer checks out, the monitoring agent pushes an offer to suggest a plan that may better suit the customer and also includes a free new cell phone.

   Real-time offers also can be used without an agent by the system automatically pushing offers to customers while they are active on a Web site.

   By using these technologies, businesses will not only increase revenue, but will be able to do something that would be difficult to do via telephone.

4. Increase Awareness and Understanding of Your Customers
   These solutions offer businesses the chance to communicate with customers with whom they may never interact otherwise. This new level of interaction enables agents to gain access to untapped customer information by asking simple questions like, “You look like you’re having trouble finding something; can I be of assistance?”Click-to-talk and live chat also help businesses keep better track of customer information they may not get the chance to gather through other channels.This customer knowledge can also help agents push personalized real-time offers to customers based on prior interactions, which again helps increase revenue and customer satisfaction.

   By using this customer knowledge, businesses are essentially setting themselves up for future successful customer interactions by enabling agents to offer the red-carpet treatment to loyal customers.

By Robert Booher, director of product management, Talisma Corporation

WordPress just released updates for both the 2.1 and the 2.0 branches. The 2.1 branch will get the 2.1.3 update while 2.0 branch will get the 2.0.10 update.

The update fixes several security issues which can be exploited via cross site scripting as well as a fix for a major XML-RPC problem. In this release, Wordpress performed a proactive full sweep of their codebase to minimise potential future problems.

Grab a copy of WordPress 2.1.3 and 2.0.10

I was about to check my mails awhile ago on Gmail when I noticed the new content being displayed in the login page. It says:

New! Introducing Gmail Paper

Everyone loves Gmail. But not everyone loves email, or the digital era. What ever happened to stamps, filing cabinets, and the mailman? Well, you asked for it, and it’s here. We’re bringing it back.

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