The 2010 CRM Service Awards: Rising Stars -- Introduction

Providing high-quality service should be considered a finely tuned skill, developed through experience and tested by the rigors of time. The relative newcomers on the following pages may not share that luxury of longevity, but they’ve accomplished the next-best thing: In their short lives they’ve been able to empower and enable the delivery of high-quality service to their clients’ customers.

What’s more, this year’s winners have accomplished that feat during a period of economic recession, a trying set of circumstances that have hamstrung companies 10 times their size and resulted in lasting repercussions not only with startups but with their current and prospective clients as well. In fact, it’s a wonder any stars have been rising at all.

Fortunately, no barrel had to have its bottom scraped for us to locate the six companies composing this year’s class. These firms would be award-caliber contenders in any year, as would the innovative technology they’re relying on: From speech analytics to the analytics of customer experience, from private-label communities to dynamic content management, these offerings are the future of customer service—which means these companies will stand the test of time. 

The magazine's six Service Rising Stars for the year -- the most ever:

• CallCopy, an emerging midmarket player among contact center vendors providing workforce optimization suites;
• Clickability, a provider of Web content management via software-as-a-service;
• ClickFox, a specialist in customer experience analytics;
• Communispace, which provides private online communities and participant analysis;
• LiveOps, a provider of outsourcing and workforce management solutions for work-at-home contact center agents; and
• Nexidia, one of the few companies making speech analytics relevant to the contact center.