It was another great day for Attensity at the 11th annual  Future in Review (FiRe), the leading global conference on the intersection of technology and the economy. This is an amazing group of  thought leaders who have come together to discuss “Digitizing the Planet”. The 2013 FiRestraters have been selected for igniting conversations, analyzing, and creating the future of technology, economics, pure science, the environment, genomics and education. Here are the 2013 FiRestarters.

This is a fantastic summary of conversations from yesterday’s sessions posted on the Strategic News Service (SNS) blog.Vint Cerf discusses internet authentication, pseudonymity and resilience and Attensity’s CEO, Kirsten Bay, talks about taking voice digitization beyond words with Nuance and  Plantronics.

CNet is also covering the conference with an interview of Vint Cerf, who says social conventions have not kept up with technology, and the InteleSense anouncement of the Collaborate.org launch at FiRe, a way for people to create their own “project pages” where they can invite others to collaborate on specific things. These pages can include group calendars, videos, blogs, task lists, etc. Collaborate.org combines advanced GIS capabilities and access to real-time live data from around the world. It has an intuitive interface that allows the user to easily navigate diverse data sets simultaneously and display the results in meaningful ways.

Founder and CEO of Intelesense Technologies, Kevin Montgomery, received the FiRe 2013 Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

Lastly, we would like to share some photos from our friends at SNS. What will be our favorite snapshot this week is Sharon Anderson Morris, Programs Director for Strategic News Service and FiReFilms, together with Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist and one of the founding father’s of the internet, wearing Google Glass.

We are extremely proud to be named a FiRestarter!

FiRe Staff at the Opening Reception

 

This year’s Future in Review conference is underway, and Attensity’s Command Center is up and running, showing real time social insights for product launches, sentiment, trends, and emerging issues.

Attensity was thrilled to be a chosen FiReStarter, and described as a “Company Improving the World” at this year’s conference.  We’re excited to share our technology through real time views of the command center, and panel discussions throughout the conference.

Kirsten Bay, President & CEO, will be speaking Wednesday at the “Taking Voice Digitization Beyond Words” discussion,  and the FiReStarters II Panel, as well as on Thursday for the breakout session, “De-Hyping Big Data: Seeing It, Using It, Managing It”.   Kirsten will be discussing how, “Attensity is creating the next generation of corporate intelligence that will transform the vast sea of data into knowledge,”

Already drawing great buzz via Twitter and Facebook, Attensity is ready for the next three days at #FiRe2013!

The Billboard Music Awards are always a social media favorite and this year Attensity Media was honored in being able to monitor the social buzz of the entire event.  Attensity Media created and implemented a custom real-time twitter wall and command center for the event backstage.  The twitter wall was also presented live on billboard.com and presented by Samsung Galaxy S4.  Fans and followers of the event were able to watch the live video stream and ask artists questions using #BBMABackstage. The livestream was hosted by Billboard Editorial Director, Bill Werde & online entertainment host and correspondent Michelle Marie who did a great job interviewing artists and engaging fans.

Fans let their voices be heard, tweeting an average of 2,576 times per minute during the award show.  Spikes in tweets occurred during top notable moments such as Madonna’s Touring Award, Jennifer Lopez’s performance with Pitbull and Prince’s rare television appearance.

Not surprisingly, Justin Bieber was the most talked about artist during the show with runners-up Taylor Swift, Miguel, Prince and Chris Brown.  All in all, it was a great event showcased by the overall positive sentiment of tweets.

Click below to watch Taylor Swift interact with the real-time stream:

We’re excited to announce the release of Attensity Respond 6.0, a new release of Attensity’s Respond application designed to address the specific challenges facing the next generation of multi-channel social customer contact centers and marketers in large corporate environments.

Respond 6.0 provides a unified customer listening post where customer requests in social media as well as in emails, and other channels are automatically —and intelligently— analyzed, classified and routed to appropriate departments for response. These communications can take the form of cries for help, product issues, service feedback, intent to churn, or other events such as sign-ups, cancellations, or complaints about competitors. Respond is also one of the few applications certified by Twitter as part of its new Certified Product Program for social engagement.

Customer service is shifting to social channels, so it’s critical for companies to invest in improving their social listening, analytical, and routing capabilities in order to strengthen customer relationships. In the new social contact center, corporations have a unique opportunity to leverage customer conversations as a business asset to drive revenue and reduce churn. Attensity Respond 6.0 enables them to break through the social noise to identify actionable conversations and efficiently drive key engagement processes.

Attensity Respond 6.0 screenshot

Attensity Respond 6.0 offers:

• A new web-based, fully ADA-compliant and iPad compatible user interface designed for more effective action
• Enhanced reliability and performance
• Improved auto-categorization to classify incoming documents with industry-leading accuracy
• Enhanced supervisory reporting and monitoring capabilities
• Multi-channel support, with access to the full Twitter Firehose data stream, publicly available posts on Facebook, Google+ and YouTube, blogs, reviews, surveys, and private and public forums and communities, as well as to internal communications, such as email, including full cross-channel ticketing for tracking of each customer’s communications as they move across channels
• More connectors and enhanced integration with enterprise systems, such as Jive forums and Salesforce.com
• Blended queues to enable each agent pool to support multiple social channels seamlessly
• Auto-swap out of Twitter handles, based on loads – which is especially useful for organizations responding to hundreds of communications per hour

We will host a complimentary webinar to discuss Respond 6.0 and its capabilities on Tuesday, March 19, at 11am Pacific Time. Register for free at: http://j.mp/ZmBYvu

Germany is often insulted as being known as the “Service Desert”, referring to the quality of customer service in Germany. But is Germany’s customer service really as bad as people say?

Pollsters have repeatedly tried to answer this question via surveys, mystery calls, and other methods. Unfortunately, none of these methods is able to capture the customer’s unfiltered emotions during or shortly after a particular service incident. Is the customer enjoying fast service, is he happy about friendly and competent advice, and does he “thank” his customer service agent and recommend the company to others? Or is the customer frustrated about waiting too long for an answer or being stuck in an endless call queue, does he perceive the service agent as being rude or incompetent, or does he complain that the cost of obtaining service is too high?

Mystery calls and surveys cannot answer these questions about customer sentiment in an effective manner. They are just not good enough in measuring emotions. However, emotions are important indicators about how service quality is perceived. Therefore, answers to such questions are highly important for service-oriented companies, particularly in B2C, to see what people have to say about their company — or even their competition.

This is where social media analytics can help. Attensity has analyzed the voice of the customer in terms of customer service in Germany, as it is expressed daily in Twitter. The analysis was done by Attensity in cooperation with the Call Center Association of Germany e.V. and the business intelligence consulting firm, b.telligent GmbH & Co. KG. More than 65,000 tweets about customer service were analyzed using Attensity Analyze from December 2012 to February 2013.

Some of the findings include:

1. Surprisingly, 72 percent of all comments assess the quality of customer service in Germany positively. So much for the “Service Desert”!

2. Not surprisingly, almost every Tweet (98 percent) about being on “hold” is negative.

3. Two thirds of the statements (64 percent) about the performance of customer service over the phone are negative.

4. E-mail service fared a little better, with only 40 percent of the tweets about email customer service interactions being negative.

5. Conversely, customers generally praised their interactions with social care teams — with less than 2 percent negative comments — a whopping 98 percent of comments about those interactions were positive!

6. In terms of industry, the retail sector was rated most positively (92 percent), while hospitality/transportation and IT/telecommunications scored a dismal 54 percent positive.

Attensity will continue to monitor and report on other findings. In the meantime, if you are interested in improving your customer service scores through improved engagement, you may wish to learn more about Attensity Respond. Or if you’d like to do your own analysis, Attensity Analyze may be right for you.