Author: Stephen Lynn

President and CEO

About:

Stephen Lynn is the Chief Executive Officer of Dovetail Software. As CEO, he is responsible for formulating the strategic vision, executing the business plan, and building the team for Dovetail Software. Stephen is a successful entrepreneur, with extensive experience running enterprise software companies. Prior to becoming the CEO of Dovetail, Stephen was the President and Chief Operating Officer for bTrade where he was responsible for the day-to-day operations. Under his leadership, bTrade tripled revenue in three years and sold the company to Click Commerce, a public supply-chain company. Prior to bTrade, Stephen was President and CEO of AFX Technology Group International, a wireless telemetry company. He developed the overall company strategic direction and secured their initial key customer before leaving to join bTrade. In the mid to late 90's Stephen was the Chief Operating Officer at IEX, a telecommunications software products company. He led the company's expansion globally, growing the company to over $50 million in revenues and was instrumental in IEX's acquisition by Tekelec, a public telecommunications company, for $163 million. Earlier in his career, Stephen held various senior level positions at Dalfort, Pepsi, A.H. Belo, LTV and American Can. He is also a mentor at STARTech, a Richardson, TX high-tech accelerator that works with startup companies in their early stages to develop their business plans and assist them in securing venture capital funding. Stephen received a MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and also earned a BS in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania with majors in Finance and Accounting, graduating Magna Cum Laude.

Posts by Stephen Lynn:

Authentic Voice

August 21, 2007 Recently, there have been a number of discussions in the market about the importance of companies finding an “authentic voice” as they enter the blogosphere. “Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.” -- Building An Authentic Voice As a consequence, companies are taking a number of different approaches to blogging in search of their “authentic voice.” Some, not surprisingly, adopt a controlled corporate focus, letting their marketing department drive the Blog through very pre-packaged messages. “As I see it, large corporations try to sanitize all their outgoing messages (online) for the sake of keeping face. It is very easy to identify this kind of behavior. Whenever you read something and it sounds like a series of pre-made phrases strung together, instead of a…

Now with Knowledge Management

August 7, 2007 We announced some exciting news for both Dovetail and Clarify customers last month. We added integration with best-of-breed knowledge management to the company’s customer service and support (CS&S) product suite. We also completed our first such integration, with KNOVA’s suite of Intelligent Customer Experience applications. In the future, we will integrate additional best-of-breed knowledge management products. Check out the details about our new capability by reading the fullpress release. This continues our company’s trend of listening to our customers in determining what improvements we should make to our product suite. They have told us about the importance of knowledge management to their organizations and their willingness to spend CRM dollars on knowledge management initiatives. We looked into it and determined the value of bringing knowledge management into an overall CRM strategy can't be minimized as it relates to rapid ROI…

Customer Service is Everywhere

August 6, 2007 I have always believed in the importance of customer service, both as a provider of solutions to customers and as a consumer. I have made numerous decisions over my life in staying with a product or service or switching based on the quality of customer service I have received. My family and I had a recent experience in customer service that I would never had guessed would have the impact on a decision that it did. My mother-in-law had a heart procedure. While no one is about to claim she an enjoyable time at the hospital, the level of service she received was unlike anything I have ever seen at a hospital. They couldn’t have been more accommodating and more helpful in providing all the care possible to my mother-in-law. After the procedure, it was determined that she needed heart…

The Forgotten Space

June 20, 2007 We have coined the area of Customer Service and Support (CS&S), "The Forgotten Space". In my 2 years as CEO of Dovetail Software, I have spent a lot of time “observing” the marketplace and there are signs everywhere of how CS&S just doesn’t get the same attention that other areas of CRM does. Interestingly, I find that CEOs and other executives of large companies “talk” about how important the customer experience is to them. However, I am a believer in the phrase, “Actions speak louder than words”, and everywhere I look, I see little action towards truly improving the customer experience. Actually, I believe that CS&S and contact centers are seen only as cost centers to most executives, and therefore the primary goal is about reducing costs. Thus, the CS&S space, and the employees who work in this area, try…

A Message From Dovetail Software CEO Stephen Lynn

June 14, 2007 We started the Dovetail blog at the beginning of the year, and to be honest, I didn’t know what the reaction might be from the Dovetail/Clarify community, or how our employees would act in their role as company spokespeople.We had numerous discussions within the company in regards to corporate policing of employee posts and employees believing that the true value of the blog was keeping it open without company monitoring. I checked what other companies were doing, and even read Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s book, Naked Conversations, looking for insight into what we should do. From our beginning over a decade ago, when we were known as First Choice Software, we’ve had a culture of openness in the company; therefore I decided I needed to continue that tradition with our company blog. Furthermore, since I already emphatically trusted my…

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