India Based Call Centers: The Worker Perspective
July 16, 2011
ReadWrite Enterprise asks, “What’s It Like to Work in an Indian Call Center?” For an answer, writer Klint Finley turns to a Mother Jones article by an American writer, Andrew Marantz, who sampled Indian Call Center training.
With regard to overseas call centers, ReadWrite generally focuses on is whether businesses should invest them now or wait until working conditions and customer service quality improve. That question remains unanswered here, but this piece does call attention to the workers’ perspective.
Finley summarizes:
“Much of the article revolves around the cultural impact that the business process outsourcing industry has brought to India, both good (more economic opportunities for women) and bad (the potential stifling of Indian culture as call center workers attempt to conceal their identities). Here are a few interesting points:
Other key points we noted:
- There are almost as many women as men working in the call centers.
- Many of these workers are college educated, but are doing very basic work.
- Some workers are encouraged to eat American fast food and listen to American music, even on the weekends.”
Treatment of Indian workers by their employers eager to westernize them is a tangled thicket.
How does this relate to search? Three points of contact.
First, search vendors talk about improving customer service. What seems to be more accurate is reducing the costs of support for the company offering help to its customers.
Second, it is not clear in my mind that brute force indexing or even more sophisticated systems do much to address the disconnect between what a customer needs and what is available to answer the question. If the answer is not in the processed content, who is kidding whom?
Third, the notion of improving a customer interface sounds great in a meeting. But the actual implementation is usually more about preventing the customer from contacting the company saying it is “customer facing” and “committed to excellence in customer support.”
Enterprise search vendors know how to address these issues. Right?
Cynthia Murrell July 16, 2011
INTEGRITYOne Partners and SharePoint Team Up to Aid the FBI
July 16, 2011
I try to keep at least one tired eye on the competition within the US Federal government between Google and Microsoft. This PR Newswire lead caught our eye here at Beyond Search: “INTEGRITYOne Partners Win $40 Million FBI SharePoint Contract.”
INTEGRITYOne is a management and IT consulting firm that specialized in inspirational and creative ideas/solutions for high-performing clients. They announced a partnership with Applied Information Sciences (AIS) to win a five-year Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract to provide SharePoint services for the FBI. (IDIQ contracts are definitely good. Yep.)
INTEGRITYOne has provided SharePoint services for other law enforcement and national security organizations in the past, proving to have a strong track record. Their experience has made them familiar with the law enforcement mission and will be a boon to their new contract. We learned:
“The role the FBI plays in ensuring the safety of American citizens cannot be overstated,” said INTEGRITYOne Partners Managing Partner Michael Waddell. “We are honored to support their mission under this contract.”
After reading this brief, we asked ourselves will other law agencies dump Google and head to Microsoft SharePoint? SharePoint is easier to self-contain and secure. Google is just about anyone’s game. The FBI should may want to ask an appropriate vendor to check out SurfRay’s technology to make their SharePoint search all the more easier.
Torben Ellert, July 16, 2011
SurfRay
Is Google+ a Threat to Facebook’s Business Demographic?
July 16, 2011
EWeek.com informs us that “Google+ Will Target Businesses, Facebook Audience.” It seems that Google intends to entice businesses as well as personal accounts into its Google+ Web. This may pose a problem for Facebook, who has long encouraged companies to set up pages on its site. Recently, that company has even introduced new tools aimed specifically at businesses.
Google discourages businesses from setting up shop in its initial Google+ project. However, it is working on something just for them:
We have a great team of engineers actively building an amazing Google+ experience for businesses, and we will have something to show the world later this year,’ Christian Oestlien, a group product manager at Google, wrote in a July 6 posting on his Google+ profile page. ‘The business experience we are creating should far exceed the consumer profile in terms of its usefulness to businesses.
If that’s true, Facebook had better continue to step up its game. Our view at Beyond Search is rotated about 12 degrees.
First, we think that social media is useful. It is less about the Internet and more about communication. No problem, but communication has a history of industry-centric regulation. As social media follows the path worn by AT&T, there will be some interesting changes coming.
Second, the novelty of social media may follow the pattern of behaviors in other group discussions; that is, intense use followed by declining use and then popping in and out of groups “to find out what’s happening”. The data backing my assertion were collected in the early days of online groups, and I am watching for signals that suggest a similar pattern. My hunch is that there may be some usage shifts coming which will be as interesting as the regulatory net that will be woven around social media.
Third, control of content within social media systems will impart enormous power to those who have a superior capability within the social media system. For this reason, social media will morph into products and services which have a built in magnetic quality. A user may leave one group, only to reengage with a different group later. Fragmentation of attention will be a defining secondary characteristic. The primary characteristic is that fragmenting of attention will be just hat Dr. Algorithm ordered to punch the user’s purchase, vote, think buttons. The users won’t have much choice. Some won’t even care.
Net Net: Both Google and Facebook may be chasing demographics. Neither service may be the end of the line. What’s next is likely to be even more Googley and Facebooky.
Cynthia Murrell July 14, 2011
Vivisimo Assumes Leadership Position in Twitter Chat
July 15, 2011
I noted the write up “Customer Service Industry Luminaries Participate in Vivisimo’s Unique Twitter Chat Experience Vivisimo Twitter Chat #CXO is Named one of "The 12 Most Stimulating Twitter Chats". The CXO is a business publication. My recollection is that I wrote something for the company years ago. I lost track of the outfit after I shifted to the Enterprise Technology Management publication. (If you click the link today, you may see the addled goose himself. I wrote about Google, not Twitter Chat. I did not know what a Twitter Chat was.
The write up informed me that I was wrong about CXO, which means customer Experience Optimization and not the publication CXO. I also learned that Twitter Chat has been an ongoing activity since April 2011.
Here’s the passage I noted:
"We’ve grown to over 100 participants in just over 10 weeks and have had A-list participants join us because Vivisimo has established residency as the leader in customer experience," said Tracey Mustacchio, Vice President of Marketing at Vivisimo. "The #CXO Twitter chats are an interactive, convenient, and highly effective medium to collaborate and learn from peers how to improve their customer experience initiatives. Also, being named one of the 12 Most Stimulating Twitter Chats was an honor and will help to set us apart from our competitors." Previous session topics included: What is Customer Experience Optimization? Another Officer in the C-Suite: Chief Customer Officer [CCO] The Intersection Between Innovation and the Customer Experience Customer Experience for the Gen Y, Digital Native Trust in the Customer Experience "Who Comes First in Shaping #CustExp – Customers or Employees?" Social Media and the Customer Experience What’s the best way to make customer experience metrics actionable? Going Mobile with Customer Experience? Customer Data: from Overload to Insight Supply Chain or Customer Value Chain To join in on future Vivisimo #CXO Twitter chats, visit the following link every Monday at 12:00 pm ET: http://tweetchat.com/room/cxo. If you use an application like Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop, create a search column for the term "#CXO" and follow the Vivisimo chat.
If you want more information, visit the Vivisimo Web site at www.vivisimo.com. Interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, July 15, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publisher of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
SEP: Bitten by Search
July 15, 2011
“Search Engine Poisoning: One More Thing To Worry About,” declares Network Computing. Though Search Engine Poisoning (SEP) has been around for a while, it is now the primary online threat according to a report from security firm Blue Coat Systems.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, SEP works by creating links that masquerade as legitimate answers to search queries. Many of these queries are ones that workers commonly use in the course of their job, so the schemes affect enterprises as well as home users.
Network Computing’s Robert Mullins elaborates:
The way SEP works is that distributors of malware maintain large ‘link farms’ where they create malicious links that represent all sorts of things people would search for online. [Tom Clare of Blue Coat] gave the example of Keen Footwear, a brand of hiking shoes. If someone searches for that brand in a search engine, as many as half of the top 10 results could be links to malware. SEP is particularly devious in that it doesn’t actually have to infect the Web site of Keen Footwear but can still trick end users.
The malefactors’ job is made easier by URLs that are vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS). That vulnerability allows the injection of malicious code.
We continue to look with skepticism on the search engine optimization business. We think that Google wants SEO professionals to optimize their pages and then, if traffic falters, feel really good about herding the traffic thirsty Web masters toward Adwords.
Stephen E Arnold, July 14, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
X1 Professional Client Available on Amazon
July 15, 2011
Short honk: I wanted to document that X1 Technologies is selling its desktop search client on Amazon. You can check out the ad at http://goo.gl/mfvAk. According to the Amazon promotional copy:
- X1 searches all your resources as fast as you type-even if you have hundreds of thousands of emails, attachments, and files.
- Detailed search specifications-including Boolean, proximity, and keyword-help X1 return accurate results in record speed.
- X1′s unified interface delivers all your search results in their native formats, so you can fully preview over 500 file types even if you don’t have the application that created a file.
- Deep integration with popular mail clients like Outlook and Lotus Notes means you’ll never misplace an email or attachment again.
- iPhone and iPad applications allow you to instantly search your desktop and fetch emails, files and attachments from your desktop wherever an internet connection is available.
The product became available in April 2011. The product is ranked at bestseller number 60 in software.
Stephen E Arnold, July 15, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publisher of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Search and Why No One Knows How to Find Stuff
July 15, 2011
I received a call early this morning from an addled prospect in a distant time zone. After the call, I grabbed by trusty iPad and took at look at the news scooped up by my Pulse and Flipbook apps. Why search when I can let an anonymous system “tell” me what I need to know. One of the “must know” things snagged my eye with this fetching headline: “My Top 10 Insights from 10 Years in Search”. After dismissing an annoying ad about something called “search marketing”, my expectations were at snail level. I was not disappointed.
Search, I learned, was not about findability, information retrieval, semantics, or text mining. I learned that search is about:
- Pumping content without regard for quality to the top of a brute force search result
- Not resting on one’s laurels when a content trick actually works and fools the Facebook-obsessed Google from delivering high precision and recall
- Being “great” at Excel.
There were seven other “learnings” which shined a very weak light on the topic of search as I understand the concept.
Search has been usurped—maybe the proper word is devalued—by search engine marketing. The idea is simple. Traffic means revenues. The world in which this addled goose paddles uses a different denotation and connotation. Search is about answering questions. Search NOT about polluting a relevance method, getting clicks, and making money. I make money because I find information, absorb it, and frame my own ideas, products, and services. Information is one type of high value input. Fiddle with the input and the output is probably flawed or misleading.
Search is difficult, and it is getting problematic. Those with access to log files know that the majority of users’ actions can be converted to quite tidy items of data. These items can be used to deliver exactly what the majority of people want a search system to be: An input system for that which is consciously or unconsciously needed by an individual user.
In my odd little goose pond, I run a query on a phrase like “confluent opportunity space.” I want to know who said it, where, when, and why. Answering that question is something that few search systems can do. My hunch is that an individual operating with the foundation upon which the “10 insights” are erected may use approaches that may not work for my context. Heck, maybe the approach won’t work at all.
What’s this say about “search”?
First, I don’t think most people know what search is. The failure to define the overused and much abused term is leading to confusion. I think people use the term and talk about systems and methods that are more fractured than than rocks in the Allegheny orogeny.
Second, heaven help the vendor of text mining if the word search slips into a conversation with an online marketer. The dust up in “When Worlds Collide” will look like two puppies pushing into a bowl of kibble.
Third, I am convinced that people are not interested in understand search. The entire sector is confused and increasingly indifferent to useful communication about information retrieval.
We are on the path to a super saturated world of advertising. Calling this search is downright amazing. I am delighted to be 66, indifferent to such linguistic jumping jacks, and an addled goose paddling in a rural backwater.
The consequences of this devaluation and distortion of a once useful word may have more to do with today’s crises in decision making, innovating, and revenue generating than meets the eye.
Stephen E Arnold, July 15, 2011
Freebie by golly!
Updates for XSL in SharePoint
July 15, 2011
When SharePoint 2010 was deployed, programmers sighed and reopened their old 2007 projects and code. They knew they would have to adapt them to fit the latest version of the Microsoft product. Matthew McDermott created a bunch of XSL samples for SharePoint 2007. He recently updated them for 2010 in a release called, “SharePoint Search XSL Samples Update.” Each sample is open source and contains a detailed description on how to implement them. McDermott even includes a release on how to read his sample guides. Note: you can find the release instructions at this link. XSL samples code are at http://sctxsl.codeplex.com/releases.
We learned in the write up:
Each sample should include two items, the instructions and the actual XSL file. The instructions detail the necessary elements of the sample that you must follow to configure the sample. This may include the specific web part that the sample applies to, and the necessary web part property settings to use the sample. Unless otherwise stated in the instructions, the sample XSL file should be copied to the XSL Style Library of the search site and checked in. Next, edit the Web part properties following the instructions to implement the sample.
The XSL samples include an “open document library” that renders a link next to document result items that opens a new window containing a library/folder. The “search results XML” renders the search results as raw XML and the “view results metadata” renders search results as metadata in a cleaner format than plain XML. Lastly, the “render links list URL “Presents link list results as links to the content rather than a link to the DispForm.aspx page.” These XSL samples are a great way to improve search for SharePoint 2010, but SurfRay Ontolica is even better.
Torben Ellert, July 15, 2011
SurfRay
Google Revenue Surges
July 14, 2011
I read the Computerworld version of the Google revenue blow out. The story was “Update: Google Q2 Revenue Up 32% to $9B-Plus.”
Here’s the passage I noted:
Most of Google’s revenue — 97 percent — came from advertising, while the rest was generated by its emerging businesses, such as enterprise software and mobile.
Google is doing well as an online advertising system. Other attempts at revenue diversification are growing but not reducing Google’s dependence on ads.
Here’s a bonus quote to note:
"We’re only at 1 percent of what’s possible," Page said.
Here’s a factoid:
At the end of the second quarter, Google had $39.1 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, and 28,768 full-time employees worldwide.
Fascinating and Googley.
Is Google a zero gravity, friction free, perpetual motion machine? I am a believer. What can possibly go wrong?
Stephen E Arnold, July 15, 2011
Sponsored? Nah.
Yahoo BOSS API V2 Here, V1 on Way Out
July 14, 2011
“Yahoo Search BOSS API V2 is Paid, V1 Gone in Two Weeks,” reports programmable web. Programmers who employ Yahoo! BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) have known the change to a paid service was coming since last October. The new version includes HTTPs support, SQL and YQL support, News Service enhancements, and documentation upgrades. The feature writer Romin Irani most appreciates, though, is daily usage limit specification:
Top of the list is the ability for developers to specify their daily usage limits. You can now specify a daily dollar limit for your service consumption and you can modify that as needed. This is especially important in a paid service since developers might not be prepared for an increased bill in case of a sudden spike in usage.
The fee structure was detailed back in February 2011 by Juan Carlos Perez in “Yahoo Sets Fees for BOSS Search Developer Program” at PCWorld:
The top-tier option, called Full Web, includes result links to general Web pages, images and news articles, and will cost US$0.80 per 1,000 queries, Yahoo said on Tuesday. A less expensive tier, Limited Web, will draw its results from a smaller index that isn’t refreshed as often as the one Full Web uses and costs $0.40 per 1,000 queries. Yahoo will also offer developers options for an image-only index ($0.30 per 1,000 queries) and for a news article-only index ($0.10 per 1,000 queries).
So, if you have apps that rely on BOSS V1, be sure to transition right away. I did a quick check of my list of sites using BOSS. Cluuz.com was alive and ticking. The others. Flatlined.
Cynthia Murrell July 13, 2011
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