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OUR TAKE -  Fee Flurry     Lasting Impressions: Practice random acts of independence and senseless acts of freedom. - Unknown At the end of last year, we had a lively discussion about good profits and bad profits prompted by the airlines move to charge for baggage. The broader discussion was about the general unbundling of services as manifested by add-on fees. And now, it seems, your hotel bill may be carrying even more extra baggage.   Many hotels are hitting customers with more surcharges including mandatory valet parking fees and higher "resort fees" regardless if you never step in the pool or exercise room. There are reports that some motels are charging for in-room safes regardless of whether you use them. A Wall Street Journal article reports that visitors arriving at hotels with cars were tagged with mandatory valet parking fees as high as $45 a day.   Why the fee flurry? Many believe this is a period of experimentation. It's a chance to keep the hypersensitive room rate in check while boosting the bottom line. To me, surprise charges are dangerous experimentation if the fees are not disclosed at the time of booking. Ahh yes. It's hard to see the transparency of it all when in the midst of a fee flurry.   That's my take. Do you agree? What's your take?   Gary Lemke, Publisher          Action Center         Free Subscription         Submit Content         Industry Events         Webcasts         Archive   Stock Ticker Chordiant 4      0.37 Unica 5.92      0.44 Interactive 12.98      0.72 Epicor 5.6      0.3 APAC 5.41      0.28 Sykes 19.06      0.97 SupportSoft 2.27      0.09 NICE 23.96      0.89 eLoyalty 8.15      0.27 ICT 9.02      0.29 Pegasystems 27.22      0.84 Teletech 15.58      0.43 NetSuite 11.31      0.3 Tekelc 17.2      0.37 SPSS 34.03      0.66 Salesforce 38.91      0.74 ATG 3.87      0.07 Oracle 21.74      0.32 CDC 1.55      0.02 Vignette 13.24      0.09 SAP 40.37      0.18 HP 38.68      0.03 Selectica 0.42      0 Astea 2.02      0 Amdocs 21.41      -0.04 NCR 11.76      -0.07 RightNow 11.72      -0.08 LivePerson 3.97      -0.03 Convergys 9.19      -0.09 ClickSoftware 6.4      -0.2 Rainmaker 1.45      -0.05 Jacada 2.06      -0.12 As of 4:00 p.m. on 7/1/09         NEW IN CRM   Article:    Poking Holes in Attrition In the face of a worsening economy and rising unemployment-even Internet heavyweight Google recently laid off 200 workers-jobs that may have once been deemed relatively unappealing are attracting hundreds of applicants. A school-janitor position in Ohio, for example-offering less than $16 per hour plus benefits-brought in more than 700 desperate job-seekers; a two-day job fair for 500 seasonal jobs at Los Angeles' Dodger Stadium drew 7,000 people. With nationwide demand reaching historic levels-California's unemployment rate skyrocketed to 11.2 percent in March-analysts believe the un- and underemployed may find compelling opportunities in the contact center industry, particularly now that human resources departments and contact center managers seem to have discovered the power of social networking.(DestinationCRM )   News:    Advent Software Deploys Cloud Computing From Salesforce.com Advent Software has deployed Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform throughout the company. Hundreds of Advent's sales, marketing, professional services, customer support, IT, finance, and executive management employees are using salesforce.com globally. Advent uses Salesforce CRM as a central data repository to help sales and customer service better understand customers. Advent also benefits from custom forecasts and dashboards that provide real time views of key opportunity and deal metrics, and make it easy to compare historical data. (Salesforce )   News:    Chinese Financial Organizations Leverage Workforce Optimization Verint's Witness Actionable Solutions workforce optimization (WFO) software has been deployed in the contact center operations of some of China's financial services organizations including two of the top three-Bank of China and China Construction Bank (CCB). Verint also counts the country's top three insurance companies, based on a China Insurance Regulatory Committee ranking, among its customers-China Life Insurance Company Limited, Ping An Insurance Company and China Pacific Insurance Company Limited.(Verint )   Article:    The Numbers Game: Nine Tips for Better Support Metrics A wonderful, simple book about statistics may inspire you to think about support metrics. The book is The Numbers Game by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, two British economist and journalist that set out to de-mystify statistics bandied about by politicians, mostly, but much of their clear and often funny advice can be used in many other contexts, including the one that we all care about, technical support.(CustomerThink )   News:    eGain Announces Promotion for Switch eGain launched a program that will allow enterprises to switch to eGain's solution for multichannel customer service. The promotion is available immediately to US and Canadian businesses that have existing on-site deployments from a range of vendors. (eGain )   Didn't read the last edition of CRMAdvocate? Click here to see what you missed.