From snail-mail correspondence, to the telephone, to self-service knowledge bases, to social communities, customer service continues to evolve and expand its footprint across a range of delivery channels, according to Parature officials.
Parature, a leading provider of Web-based customer support software, has a white paper giving a good overview of channel choice in customer service today. They find it is best determined by a company's business model, but that "most successful businesses today offer a multi-channel approach that gives their customers options in seeking service."
In other words, companies don't need to offer every possible channel to their user base - just the ones they find to be most effective, based on their constituency. Determining which ones will be most effective is, of course, the fun.
Read more here.
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How'd you like to be able to give your CRM software vendor this recommendation:
"NetSuite has simplified our company's operations, given us great efficiency, power, and flexibility, helped us do business on the Web, and has helped unify our customer touchpoints by linking CRM with ERP and Ecommerce. In IT, NetSuite changed our role. We're not traditional IT anymore -- we now spend our time adding value rather than answering requests."
That's from Advantage Sign Supply, talking about their recent NetSuite CRM software installation.
They're a large supplier of sign-making materials and components, and they wanted to attract more franchise customers, improve profitability. Hey who wouldn't?
They have to deal with over 15,000 SKUs and frequent price changes by materials suppliers, and were trying to keep a handle on it all with fragmented IT systems, forcing company to set prices manually, SKU by SKU.
Read more here.
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Recently call center management software provider Knowlagent published a useful white paper dealing with the question of how to evaluate whether or not an at-home agent workforce is right for your business.
"First, you have to determine if a work-at-home program is even feasible for your organization," said Krystal Sautter, CEO of Moving Beyond the Bricks, a consulting firm specializing in home-based workforce implementations, who designed and implemented the at-home program at ConAgra Foods.
Then, she recommended, "consider all of the potential costs from office furnishings to supplies, technology, a customer satisfaction and workforce management tool, training, tech support, and any other elements needed to sustain an at-home program."
Other recommendations highlighted:
Read more here.
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Recently at the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had a chance to both break the house at baccarat and sit down and talk with Geoffrey Anderson, the senior product manager at Open Text, a vendor focusing on content management and enterprise fax over IP products.
Anderson works in the fax group, he said, adding that they have three product lines in their group right now, with two fax-based products, one of them being Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition, formerly known as RightFax, which is their mainline fax server product sold to medium to large enterprises.
They also offer Fax appliance products, smaller-scale appliances for SMBs, which are also well-enabled with capabilities.
"We also have a document management" product, Anderson said, the Open Text Document Server, Alchemy edition, which he described as a "capture and management" product, "strongly tied to our fax products and provides a great archiving application."
Read more here.
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Recently at the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMCnet's CEO Rich Tehrani had the chance to interview Force10's Senior Director of Product Marketing Kevin Wade.
Wade said they've had an active couple of months leading up to the show. "We really honed and focused our message for our data center customer base," he said. "For us, we're all about data center infrastructure. We've had a series of important announcements for the company leading up to the show."
Wade said they'd been concentrating on the show, over the past few months, noting that there are some topics that are important to their data center customers.
He mentioned their open automation initiative they'd announced a month before the show. "Open automation is our foray into automating the data center network infrastructure, in cooperation with some key ecosystem partners, to enable the network component of the infrastructures to be more dynamic and responsive to resource needs."
Read more here.
