Tag: Stephen Lynn

Practice What You Preach

February 11, 2008 Just image, a company whose business is developing CRM software for Customer Service & Support who doesn’t provide great support themselves. What a contradiction! Lucky for Dovetail and its customers, this situation doesn’t exist. Utilizing my favorite motto, “Actions Speak Louder than Words”, let me cite a recent example that demonstrates Dovetail’s commitment to world-class customer service. A customer opened a support case. We quickly solved the customer’s problem and closed the case. Later that day, the person who handled the support case was on a conference call with the customer on a non-support issue. The customer had to pause to tell a story about what had happened earlier in the day. He said, “I was very impressed when I opened a support issue, and had a response back from Dovetail just 3 minutes later. It was such a fast…

True Customer Partnership – Making a Difference

December 18, 2007 How often have you as a customer heard from your vendor that they want to be more than just your vendor? “We aren’t looking for the quick sale. We want to be your long-term partner”. Sound familiar?We at Dovetail also make that claim, but one big difference is that we back up the words with our actions. As I have said before in my blog, Actions Speak Louder than Words. So, let me tell you about a recent example. I just visited one of our key customers (I haven’t asked their permission so I won’t use their name.). Over a two day period, I met with senior management, both within IT and within the business unit, as well as the key people responsible for the Dovetail environment. I was finishing up with one of the meetings with a senior executive…

Dovetail Bolt for the Holidays

December 14, 2007 We at Dovetail Software have been faithful providers to the Clarify community for over 10 years. It is a unique position as we are a successful software company in our own rights, but we also feel an allegiance to the Clarify community. We compete for the Clarify business, but we also provide to those people who are responsible for supporting their Clarify environment on a daily basis. With that in mind, Dovetail’s gift to the Clarify community for the holidays is our Dovetail BOLT product (Data Sheet). This is a powerful tool that gives the Clarify users real-time access to their Clarify data from a set of easy-to-use web pages. All you need to do is join our forum (Click to Join) and we will email you BOLT for free. A double bonus, a powerful development tool and a forum that…

Assistance for Dovetail and Clarify Users

September 5, 2007 As I said in one of my previous blog posts, we are often accused of providing free consulting as part of our normal customer service and support (a great problem for our customers). This occurs when our customers call us with a question, through suggestions provided via our Company blog, and even through CRM forums such as the ITtoolbox Clarify User Group . And for those of you who follow me , you know that I believe that Actions Speak Louder than Words, so let me utilize two recent examples from Gary Sherman to validate my claim. The first occurred when Gary was thinking about a customer’s question regarding their desire to monitor SLAs. There was an easy way out, but that isn’t the way Gary, or our other Dovetail employees work. Our goal is to find the best…

Actions Speak Louder than Words – Customer Service

September 1, 2007 I am accused of having many mottos I live by. Sometimes, I think both my family and my employees are tired of hearing me quote these. One of my favorites is “Actions Speak Louder than Words”. Let’s relate this motto to a critical area, Customer Service. Most companies will tell you how important customer service is to them, and keeping their customers happy is paramount to them. However, often when you investigate further, you find that while they say this, their actions don’t follow their words. We at Dovetail also say that customer service is critical to our company. However, we make sure that our actions follow our words. Let me tell you about a recent example. We recently secured a new Clarify Help Desk Support customer, a State University. I won’t name them since I haven’t asked their permission,…

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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