Ilene Gordon was recently named Executive of the Year of a Non-Services Business (more than 2,500 Employees)  in the 2008 Stevie Awards for Women in  Business.

With the holiday season upon us, what gift would you most like to give or receive?
Chocolates in innovative and attractive packaging.

What book are you currently reading?
The Gate House by Nelson DeMille.

What was the last movie you saw, and would you recommend it?
Frost/Nixon. I would definitely recommend it!

What is your favorite sport or hobby?
I love reading, particularly fiction.

Who is your favorite historical figure?
Bruce Henderson, who started The Boston Consulting Group.

Who are your favorite living persons?
My children and my husband.

If you could choose another profession, what would it be?
I would choose to be a math teacher.

What do you think is the worst bad habit to have at work?
Procrastination.

What quality or qualities do you most value in your business associates?
I value those who are transparent in their work. I appreciate those who live up to their commitments and are results-oriented.

Is there anything you'd like to improve about your own work practices?
To keep my desk less cluttered.

As someone at the top of your profession, what keeps you inspired or makes you hit the ground running in the morning?
There are many things that keep me inspired. Mostly, I am energized by working with highly-motivated teams that are committed to winning.

What do you consider has been your greatest achievement in business?
Balancing my career with my great family.

What advice or useful tip would you give to someone who is just starting out in business?
I have two primary pieces of advice.  First, always have a Plan A as well as a Plan B. And second, always treat other people as you would wish to be treated.

About Ilene Gordon
Ms. Gordon, 55, has been president and CEO of Alcan Packaging since December 2006. She is responsible for all aspects of Alcan Packaging's worldwide business. With US$6.2 billion in revenues, 30,000 employees and 131 manufacturing facilities in 31 countries on six continents, Alcan Packaging is one of few global packaging companies.

Previously, Ms. Gordon served as President, Alcan Packaging Food Americas, based in Chicago. She joined the company in June 1999 as senior vice president of Pechiney Group and president, Pechiney Plastic Packaging. Alcan acquired Pechiney in December 2003.

Ms. Gordon graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned both a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and, at the Sloan School of Management, a Master of Science degree in management. She is married with two children.

About Alcan
Alcan Inc. (NYSE, TSX: AL) is a leading global materials company, delivering high quality products and services worldwide. With world-class technology and operations in bauxite mining, alumina processing, primary metal smelting, power generation, aluminum fabrication, engineered solutions, as well as flexible and specialty packaging, today's Alcan is well positioned to meet and exceed its customers' needs. Alcan is represented by 68,000 employees, including its joint ventures, in 61 countries and regions, and posted revenues of US$23.6 billion in 2006. The Company has been featured on the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index consecutively since 2003. For more information, please visit: www.alcan.com.

Alcan Packaging is a global leader in value-added specialty packaging, ranking first in flexible food, flexible pharmaceutical, plastic cosmetics, and tobacco packaging. Headquartered in Paris, France, it delivers multi-material innovative solutions to customers around the world using plastics, engineered film, aluminium, paper, paperboard, and glass.

About Rio Tinto
Rio Tinto is a leading international mining group headquartered in the UK, combining Rio Tinto plc, a London and NYSE listed company, and Rio Tinto Limited, which is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange.  Rio Tinto's business is finding, mining, and processing mineral resources. Major products are aluminium, copper, diamonds, energy (coal and uranium), gold, industrial minerals (borax, titanium dioxide, salt, talc), and iron ore. Activities span the world but are strongly represented in Australia and North America with significant businesses in South America, Asia, Europe, and southern Africa.

The following is an extract from a white paper, 7 Innovations to Reinvent Phone-Based Customer Service, produced by Mountain View, California-based eGain.

Until the mid-1990s, the phone channel accounted for most business-to-customer communications but the advent of the Internet led to an explosion of business-to-customer communications through electronic channels such as email, chat, web collaboration, and web self-service.

Today, innovations such as VoIP, customer interaction hubs, multidimensional knowledge management™, and multishore sourcing models, have re-configured the economics and flexibility of phone customer service. As most companies struggle to find ways to provide superior customer service experiences, a savvy few are already grabbing the low-hanging fruit that has been there all along: the clunky old phone channel.

Driven by the dot-com boom and generational changes in channel preferences, businesses optimized e-channels and let phone service deteriorate. According to a 2007 Forrester study, of business and IT executives, 57% of survey respondents thought that their company's phone customer service was average, below average, or poor.

While some research studies indicate that e-channel communications have surpassed phone communications in volume, the phone continues to remain popular both as a preferred single channel for some customers and transaction types, and as an important part of the multichannel mix for many others. In fact, a 2006 survey of US and UK consumers by Accenture showed that 82% of respondents continued to use the phone to get assistance.

By innovating in the phone arena, while integrating with other channels, companies are enhancing brand loyalty, extending their competitive advantage, and reaping operational benefits. Following are some innovations that are helping to drive business growth:

VoIP
The compelling business value of VoIP has triggered a re-evaluation of the call center infrastructure in many enterprises. The business benefits of VoIP are many and include the following:
- Cost savings from combining the phone andd data infrastructure
- Ability to leverage VoIP infrastructure aand the ease of implementing virtual call centers across multiple sites and remote agents including at-home and outsourced agents
- Improved infrastructure and agent utilizaation and ease of management
- Improved customer service experience

Companies should carefully assess the benefits and suitability of VoIP to their organization as an important step in reinventing phone customer service.

End-to-End Call Process Automation 
Businesses have invested in call logging systems for many years. While these systems are useful, they have become disconnected data and process silos that do not integrate with call resolution or case management systems, knowledge bases, service fulfillment workflows, and non-phone interaction channels such as email, chat, SMS, and web self- service. The results: Increase in call handle time and repeat calls, increased call transfers, poor customer service experience, non-compliance with interaction regulations and best practices, failure to deliver on promised service levels, and ultimately reduced customer loyalty. 

With integrated call tracking, knowledgebase, and workflows, agents are able to resolve customer inquiries and initiate follow-on fulfillment tasks with service levels attached to them. Moreover, process expertise embedded in multidimensional knowledge bases (explained in detail below) and integrated workflows ensure interaction and fulfillment compliance. 

Customer Interaction Hub (CIH)
Consumers are increasingly using multiple communication channels to interact with a business and oftentimes hop across channels in the process of completing a service transaction or resolving a query.  Interactions through electronic channels continue to increase, accounting for 49% of support inquiries in 2006.

From a phone customer service perspective, call center agents that do not have a 360-degree view of customer interactions through non-phone channels, are simply flying blind. Integration with non-phone channels enables a complete view of customer interactions across channels, including web self-service, and allows phone agents to start where the customer left off in the previous interaction for optimal customer experience and contact center efficiencies.

Forward-looking companies are implementing Customer Interaction Hubs (CIH) in order to provide a unified cross-channel customer experience.  A concept originally advocated by Gartner, the CIH approach drastically reduces customer interaction costs and system TCO, while improving customer service consistency and quality by centralizing multichannel customer communications, knowledge management, business rules, workflow, administration, and analytics in one platform.  This integration can enable a 360-degree digitized view of voice and non-voice interactions, yielding new insights that can be mined for customer acquisition, retention and revenue growth.

Multidimensional Knowledge Base™
Traditional knowledge management systems in the call center have delivered limited ROI since they are flat or one-dimensional, and have not been focused on the critical areas that are needed for business value maximization: content, access, and process.

A multidimensional knowledge base™ takes a holistic approach to knowledge management, while enabling significant improvements in operational and strategic metrics such as first-call resolution, call handle time, sales conversions, reduction of unwarranted product returns and site visits, customer satisfaction, interaction compliance, and brand loyalty. A multidimensional knowledge management™ system addresses and integrates critical success factors in knowledge management, as explained below:

Content
Unlike traditional knowledge bases, multidimensional knowledge bases provide adaptive, closed-loop content management and workflow capabilities for authoring, publishing, content performance tracking and closed loop content management.  In addition, these systems integrate out of the box through adapters with leading content management systems to leverage existing content assets in the enterprise. Adaptive content management ensures that the content remains fresh and relevant by monitoring ongoing content performance, and by automatically triggering content creation and management tasks with service levels attached to them.

Access
Traditional knowledge bases have often experienced limited customer and agent adoption due to their “one size fits all” approach to access. On the other hand, a multidimensional knowledgebase provides multimodal access to content. For instance, experienced users may prefer to quickly process search hits, while novice users may fare better with guided help. A chatbot enables a branded self-service experience and increase online conversion in pre-sales situations, while answering less complex queries after the sale. Guided help that leverages a reasoning engine is more appropriate for contextual cross-sell and upsell as well as diagnosing and resolving queries of medium to high complexity. Multimodal access to content helps increase user adoption and the business value of the knowledge base.

Process
Following the right steps in interacting with customers and prospects and providing them information is critical to delivering an exceptional customer experience, while at the same time maximizing the business value of the interactions and enforcing compliance with government regulations and organizational best practices. A multidimensional knowledgebase leverages technologies such as a reasoning engine to capture best-practice interaction expertise across various customer queries, and serves it to agents or end-customers step by step, leading them to the right content and/or the next best steps including contextual cross-sell and up-sell offers. 

Phone-aided Web Collaboration™
Co-browsing the web with customers and prospects, while speaking to them on the phone simultaneously, is a powerful enhancement to phone-based customer service that can virtually match the quality and experience of in-person interactions.  This innovation enables agents to help customers complete online transactions such as form filling and online shopping, while training them at the same time on how to use web self-service for informational, transactional and diagnostic queries in the future. 

The Phone Is Here to Stay
Improving phone-based customer service to elevate customer experience is an obvious strategy that is often overlooked as contact centers attempt to tackle communication channel proliferation and generational shifts in customer service preferences. Taking the phone-customer-service bull by the horns and unleashing the aforementioned innovations can catapult companies to service-based market leadership.  The phone is here to stay as an important part of the multichannel mix.

About eGain:
eGain (OTC BB: EGAN.OB) is the leading provider of multichannel customer service and knowledge management software for in-house or on-demand deployment. For more than a decade, the world's largest companies have relied on eGain to transform their traditional call centers, help desks, and web customer service operations into multichannel customer interaction hubs. Based on the Power of One™, the concept of one unified platform for multichannel customer interaction and knowledge management, these hubs enable dramatically improved customer experience, end-to-end service process efficiencies, increased sales, and enhanced contact center performance.

Headquartered in Mountain View, California, eGain has operating presence in North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific, and serves hundreds of enterprise customers worldwide. To find out more about eGain, visit www.eGain.com or call the company's offices: 800-821-4358 (US headquarters), 1753-464646 (UK and Continental Europe).

A full version of  the eGain White Paper  “7 Innovations to Reinvent Phone-Based Customer Service” is available at the following URL:
http://www.egain.com/best_practices/white_papers.asp

Other Sources:
- 2007 Forrester Wave report on interaction-centric customer service management:
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,44109,00.html

- 2006 Forrester Wave report: Highest rating in “current offering”
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,38429,00.html

-2005 Patricia Seybold Group Bull’s Eye Reports on Cross-Channel, Cross-LifestyleCustomer Service: Overall capabilities, knowledge management, architecture, and Analytics [LINK: http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=412]

© 2008 eGain Communications Corporation. All rights reserved.
eGain, the eGain logo, and all other eGain product names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of eGain. All other company names and products are trademarks or registered trademarks of the respective companies.

Blogs, or web logs, are all the rage these days. Each month in this space we'll point you to several blogs that we think might be of interest to you.

All Tech Considered : Stumped for what to buy for the CXO who has everything? All Tech Considered, a new segment of All Things Considered on NPR in the U.S., has some ideas for you.
Rapid eLearning Blog : Baffled by new technology? This blog aims to help.
Tom Peters : Current blog includes Tom Asackers "Nine Predictions for 2009."
The Health Care Blog : Health care will be a big topic in the U.S. in 2009. This blog provides some insights.