ReadWriteWeb

Recent news reports name GenY as the most influential generation for retailers. Given ReadWrite's coverage of Gen Y working preferences here, I thought I would take a moment to provide some of the many lessons we've learned with building communities aimed at this cohort.

An alteration made for the latest 2.0 version of the Dropbox app for Android in order to better comply with the rules of the operating system resulted in the removal of some features that, in the 1.x versions, users had come to rely upon. As a result, Dropbox team members these past few weeks have found themselves in damage control mode, as they work to stem a rising tide of frustration from users, some of whom aren't yet buying the company's message that these changes were necessary.

The biggest change the new version makes is to the storage locations for files downloaded from users' Dropbox storage areas to their phones. One is the cache for files that may be useful on the phone, like pictures and music. Another is for documents that may then be opened up in apps on the phone, like the QuickOffice productivity suite or the KeePassDroid password cache. The new version of the Dropbox app moves these locations to directories specified in the Android guidelines. But the change was implemented before users and developers were ready.

At the Right Now customer summit today, CEO and founder Greg Gianforte laid out a very compelling vision of where he sees the future of customer experience. If only just a few of our humdrum daily interactions with call center agents, support techs, and phone problem resolution situations were anything close to this nirvana. Nevertheless, it was an interesting perspective and I will share some of his thoughts with you. RightNow sells its own SaaS-based solution for self-service customer portals and is used by many of the largest corporations.

Two recent studies about how companies use social media for customer support have concluded that for the most part they don't do a very effective job at responding to complaints. And while some companies are better at listening and responding to their customers, many do a miserable job, still. It is a sad and somewhat depressing state of affairs, to be sure.

NetSuite, a hosted ERP company that got its start selling to the SMB market, has stopped selling to small businesses. Bob Scott quotes NetSuite CFO Ron Gill: "We simply stopped signing new business in that business. The small customers represent about 6% of revenue and 40% of customers."

According to Dennis Howlett, NetSuite stopped selling to sub-$10,000 a year customers "a while ago." The reason, according to Howlett, is that NetSuite wasn't doing a good job of supporting these smaller customers.

As new firms enter the Web-based help desk services arena, we are seeing a blurring of lines between the traditional service desk products and the breed of public online Q&A types of services. Particularly as these tools adopt connections to social media, it is getting harder to tell whether these are two separate categories anymore, as IT becomes consumerized and as self-service style apps become more popular and capable.

Assistly, a social CRM and help desk software-as-a-service, announced version 2.0 of its product this week, including a new freemium pricing model. Your first Assistly user is now free, with no limitations. It costs $1 an hour for additional part-time agents or $49 a month for each full-time agent with unlimited usage.

Besides the pricing change, Assistly's admin panel and reporting features got a facelift.

Earlier this week Avaya announced new contact center products that integrate with social media. Avaya, one of the descendants from Ma Bell, supplies telephony hardware and software to some of the largest enterprises and telecommunications companies in the world, and they are getting seriously Facebook'd.

It isn't all that surprising, really. Avaya isn't some old fuddy-duddy phone company. It has been a huge user of social media for its own purposes for quite some time.

We've questioned before the value of investing in contact center technology without improving call center conditions, and the ability of outsourced labor (regardless of whether it is also off-shored) to provide good customer service. These are the types of questions that are important for business decision makers to ask. If you want to go a bit further, you can read this story in Mother Jones about the experience of a writer from the U.S. training to work in a center in India. It doesn't provide much detail as to whether you should or shouldn't outsource your customer service functions (or to who), but it doesn't provide an interesting perspective on the conditions of these workplaces.

Turning live chats with your customers into actionable leads just got a tad easier thanks to Olark's intgration with SaaS CRM Salesforce.com.

Olark is a customer service live chat app that plugs into your preferred chat client and lets you engage visitors to your company's Website in real time.