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IDEA Cellular and IBM Extend Relationship to Include IVR
IDEA Cellular Ltd. (IDEA), an India-based GSM mobile services provider and an Aditya Birla Group company, and IBM announced a ten-year, $53 million contract to deploy, integrate, innovate and transform IDEA's interactive voice response (IVR) self-service infrastructure and processes. The consulting services agreement is designed on an innovative risk-and-reward model based on price per minute. The agreement was signed in June 2007 and is in addition to the ten-year IT outsourcing agreement between IDEA and IBM, valued around $600 million to $800 million signed earlier this year.
Rainmaker Acquires Philippines-based Qinteraction
Rainmaker Systems Inc., a provider of sales and marketing solutions combining hosted application software and execution services, has announced it has acquired privately held Qinteraction, an offshore call center located in the central business district of Manila, Philippines. Founded in 1999, Qinteraction operates on a 24/7 basis in support of its clients' business needs, providing a variety of business solutions including inbound sales and order-taking, inbound customer care, outbound telemarketing and lead generation, logistics support, and back-office processing. Under the terms of the acquisition, Rainmaker paid at closing a total of $11.5 million, including $7.0 million in cash, and $4.5 million in Rainmaker common stock representing 559,284 shares.
ForeSee Pairs Up with eHarmony to Measure Customer Satisfaction
ForeSee Results is measuring customer satisfaction with eHarmony.com using the scientific methodology of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). ForeSee Results applies the methodology of the ACSI to help eHarmony understand the current satisfaction of its site visitors. This powerful web metric also shows eHarmony how improvements to specific aspects of the online experience, such as usability and site performance, will positively affect satisfaction and customer retention. For example, the methodology shows the likelihood of members to refer the site to others based on satisfaction.
n2N Commerce Selects Sterling Order Management for On-Demand eCommerce Solution
Sterling Commerce has announced that n2N Commerce Inc. has selected order management technology from Sterling Commerce for its cross-channel on-demand commerce software solution designed for large multi-channel retailers. As part of the n2N Commerce platform, Sterling Commerce technology efficiently orchestrates complex order and inventory processes, enabling n2N to provide large retailers with a rich cross-channel experience.
Neocase 10.5 Simplifies Customer Support Processes for Mid-Market
Neocase Software, an international provider of customer support software, has announced the availability of Neocase 10.5, the newest version of its customer support offering for the U.S. mid-market. Neocase Software specializes in providing collaborative customer service solutions that bring efficiency and simplicity to what are often complex customer interactions. Neocase has invested heavily to make its solution easy for agents, partners and customers to use, bringing efficiency and profitability to call center operations through web self-service, intelligent knowledge management, service level agreements (SLA) and warranty management, employee and partner case collaboration, and automated workflows.
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White Paper: Using Web-based Support Tools to Improve Customer Service
Many service-centric organizations have already integrated their in-house service and support applications with Web interfaces, or deployed systems designed for the Web from the ground up. They’re better integrating channels through customer interaction platforms, greatly expanding self-service functionality, undertaking knowledge management initiatives, and extending their reach through remote support and maintenance tools.
This informative white paper from Supportindustry.com and sponsored by LogMeInRescue and Parature, examines the latest trends and technologies in using Web-based support tools to improve customer service.
Get your copy today!
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| Field Service and MRO Organizations Sharing Best Practices
Among field service and Maintenance and Repair Operations (MRO) organizations recently surveyed by the Aberdeen Group, companies that have implemented leading practices and technology solutions to support mobile field service, remote asset tracking and monitoring, business intelligence and analytics and optimized scheduling and dispatch have improved asset uptime to almost 90% overall . These best-in-class organizations are also showing increased daily technician “wrench time,” an increase in work orders completed per week and an impressive 5 hour average mean time to repair, beating the industry average of nearly 13 hours.
The recently published study found that leading field service and MRO organizations are successfully implementing strategies to link traditional asset management practices to advanced, mobile-enabled field service optimization best practices. These organizations have begun to move from costly highly reactive break/fix maintenance and service operations to more efficient predictive maintenance approaches that yield higher asset uptime performance, fewer service disruptions and overall reduced asset maintenance costs.
Other best-in-class characteristics adopted in field service and asset maintenance include the following:
- 63% use historical usage and requirement trends to plan/forecast and allocate resources.
- 50% have standardized, enterprise-wide procedures for planning, forecasting and execution.
- 58% have a senior executive overseeing maintenance or service operations.
Aberdeen recommends that MRO and service organizations consider the following strategies to better position themselves as to meet customer service needs:
- Establish process and discipline to measure key service performance metrics,
- Link asset management systems to mobile-enabled service technology.
- Share service information across the entire enterprise to drive decision-making.
- Begin migrating from reactive to proactive maintenance strategies.
More...
Seven Key Technologies for Effective First Contact Resolution
Sabio, a contact center services and solutions company, has highlighted what it believes are the seven key technologies that can help organizations implement an effective First Contact Resolution (FCR) strategy to improve overall customer service levels. However, before putting an FCR initiative into place, Sabio recommends that Customer Service Managers need to clearly define their own FCR definition, and set targets that are realistic from both a customer and an organizational perspective.
The seven key technologies for effective first contact resolution:
- Workforce Optimization -- an integrated WFO approach is essential for effective First Contact Resolution. Interaction Recording and Quality Monitoring mean you can measure the leading and lagging indications that are important to FCR, identify non-adherence, and schedule relevant eLearning where necessary. Workforce Management and Performance Monitoring can help ensure that contact centers are staffed with the right number of correctly-skilled agents, while WFO also embraces two key emerging technologies -- Speech Analytics and Customer Feedback -- that provide a real time overview of performance from a customer perspective
- Speech Analytics -- the latest phonetics-based and large vocabulary speech analytics tools now offer a cost-effective way to listen to every single customer call and pick out key words and phrases to identify unhappy customers who are likely to churn. By integrating speech analytics with WFO, organizations can now get these problem calls straight to the win-back team for immediate resolution
- Customer Feedback -- by capturing the voice of the customer and using automated speech survey techniques to deliver real time feedback, organizations can quickly identify customers with problems and immediately alert retention teams to resolve the issue
- Streamlined Agent Desktops -- composite, role-specific agent desktops can help agents access the information they need to handle calls quickly, with a focus on the customer rather than the screens in front of them. It also gives way to more time spent training agents on resolving customer queries than using the different applications.
- Blended multi-channel support -- to enable First Contact Resolution organizations need to take advantage of the latest Customer Interaction Management systems that combine with a streamlined agent desktop to create a true single view of each customer. A multi-channel approach ensures consistency across channels and that contacts are prioritized and routed in the same way. When coupled with Intelligent Call Routing, organizations can identify an interaction when it first comes in -- whether it's a voice call, an email, a self-service transaction, a webchat or an SMS -- and make sure that it is routed to an available agent with the right skillset
- Voice Self-Service -- using the latest IVR and speech technologies along with a caller-focused design approach means that organizations can implement solutions that can resolve customer queries quickly and efficiently.
More...
US Shoppers Put More Trust in Brands that Offer Customer Reviews
Bazaarvoice and Vizu Corp. have announced a benchmark survey on current attitudes towards customer ratings and reviews. Results show that approximately 80 percent of US shoppers place more trust in brands that offer customer ratings and reviews. Three out of four shoppers stated that it was extremely or very important to read customer reviews before making a purchase, and they prefer peer reviews over expert reviews by a 6-to-1 margin.
Customer ratings and reviews have moved beyond a site feature to become an important part of brand identity. In the near future, shoppers will not only have more trust in brands that offer reviews but will actively demand this level of participation in the social commerce experience. This will also lead to powerful insights for brand marketers and merchandisers, and better service and products overall, says Bazaarvoice.
According to research from Shop.org and MarketingSherpa, usage of ratings and reviews has nearly doubled in the US over the last year. The Bazaarvoice and Vizu survey revealed that US shoppers consider ratings and reviews to be the most useful eCommerce site feature (44 percent). Product comparison (15 percent), product navigation (12 percent), and privacy information (11 percent) followed in the distance.
The benchmark survey also polled UK consumers on their attitudes toward ratings and reviews. Customer ratings and reviews were important for over 50 percent of online shoppers in the UK. In contrast to US shoppers, privacy and security information took center stage when making a purchase with over one-third of UK shoppers rating this as the most important site feature. These findings reflect the relatively low number of UK sites offering a ratings and reviews facility compared to those in the US.
More...
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| Multi-Channel CRM: It's in Your Future
As organizations become increasingly enamored with online support and other self-service applications, the question of “how much is enough” starts to come to mind. After your IT help desk moves frequently asked questions, software downloads and low-value-add support requests like password resets to self-service, should they stop there? On your customer-facing sites, what level of user adoption or successfully resolved cases or online orders should be your target? And assuming you have not fallen into some of the common self-service traps, once your self-service applications are up and running, how much call deflection is considered a success?
Full Article...
Was Sprint's Decision a Good CRM Move?
Sprint Nextel has taken a fair amount of criticism in the wake of its decision to terminate the contracts of more than 1,000 customers who made excessive calls to customer service. On June 29, Sprint issued a letter to more than 1,000 customers informing them that it was terminating their subscriptions at the end of July and would waive all charges on their accounts. Bloggers and consumer watchdogs have blasted Sprint for the move, charging the company with blaming customers for its own failings and creating a double-standard by trying to terminate contracts early but charging customers to do the same. Yet some CRM experts say it was a wise decision.
Full Article...
Customer Data Quality: A Sales and Marketing Leadership Issue
Poor data quality can impact an organization in a myriad of ways: Employees wasting time checking and rechecking their work, the unnecessary cost of redoing mundane tasks, and dissatisfied customers screaming at the other end of the phone are just a few of the data quality challenges that customer-facing managers must deal with every day. With the proliferation of customer data silos and the increased demands that customers are placing on organizations, every manager instinctively knows that data quality is a serious business issue. Sadly, despite these challenges, customer data quality issues are often left unaddressed.
Full Article...
Customer Experience in Procedures and Processes
During a recent customer experience seminar, participants highlighted a common challenge regarding their ability to delight and even satisfy customers. Nearly all agreed that consistently delighting customers is virtually impossible when customers routinely believe that their individual cases are exceptions and that existing policies and procedures should not be applied to their problems. The seminar highlighted the root cause behind this uncooperative behavior as being the customers’ sense of entitlement. Customers that have this sense of entitlement routinely ignore polices and procedures, or worse, never bother to learn them.
Full Article...
Who Owns Your Customer and Prospect Database?
Lately, there’s a new trend in mid-size companies -- a trend where marketing is taking ownership of the customer and prospect database. Many marketing departments are expressing frustration with sales not closing the loop on lead development, not paying enough attention to customer retention and data quality. Sales is usually so intent on “hitting their numbers” that their attention to the management of the customer and prospect database is lacking.
Full Article...
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|  Hypnotic Writing: How to Seduce and Persuade Customers with Only Your Words
by Joe Vitale
The principles of hypnosis, when applied to copywriting, add a new spin to selling. Joe Vitale has taken hypnotic words to set the perfect sales environment and then shows us how to use those words to motivate a prospect to take the action you want.
For
more information, or to order your copy...
You can find
more industry sepcific books at our web site:
http://www.crmindustry.com/
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| Multichannel Service & Support Survey of Executives: Report of Findings
Supportindustry.com and eGain Communications Corp. recently conducted a survey of contact center, helpdesk and customer service managers and executives, focusing on multichannel customer service and support -- its importance, the current state of their multichannel capabilities and challenges in implementing and managing it.
To get a complimentary copy of the report, click here:
http://www.supportindustry.com/research.htm
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