The Week in Review--2/13/03

In the news... The Help Desk Institute (HDI) this week released the findings of the HDI 2002 Salary Survey. HDI's survey found that due to sluggish economic conditions, reduced salary levels are prominent for all service-and-support industry related job categories in the United States. The highest level of job category surveyed, senior support manager/director, showed a 7 percent decrease, from $82,484 to $76,805, the biggest decrease in salary from 2001 to 2002. All other salaries decreased less than 3 percent. In Canada, however, 2002 salaries overall increased slightly over 2001. Egain Communications has released eGain Service 6, the latest version of its customer service--management software. The company says eGain Service 6 includes integrated suites for the customer contact center and Web self-service that, according to the company, incorporates hundreds of newly implemented, best-of-class features. Epicor Software, provider of integrated enterprise, e-business, and collaborative commerce software solutions for mid-market companies, announced the availability of Clientele Customer Support 8.1, which uses the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET IDE (integrated development environment) as its customization environment. The company says customers building the Clientele Software Development Kit on top of Visual Studio .NET can modify Clientele Customer Support quickly and easily, promoting a faster ROI and a lower total cost-of-ownership. Witness Systems and CallMiner announced a partnership this week. Using Witness Systems' equality customer interaction recording software in conjunction with CallMiner's CoreEngine and TrendMiner solutions, the companies say joint customers will benefit from the ability to capture and evaluate customer intelligence gathered in their contact centers, as well as perform speech analysis and detailed trending on the information. The result is designed to provide organizations with in-depth analysis on emerging trends, new opportunities, and improvement areas, all through statistics and interactive charting that includes the frequency of topics and subjects that are most prominent in customer interactions. Executive changes... Mid-market CRM software provider Clear Technologies promoted Van Symons, previously the vice president of sales, to the position of president and COO for the C2 CRM division of the company. Marketswitch, which produces high-scale, real-time optimization decision-making software for B2C enterprises, this week announced the appointment of Peter Martin as senior vice president of worldwide sales. Worldwide direct marketing company Harte-Hanks has named Kenneth Lambert its managing director for financial services markets, its top sales management position for this primary market served by the company. Harte-Hanks also named Keith Yagnik as a vertical practice leader for the retail and pharmaceutical/life sciences marketplace.