David Sims
June 2011
You are browsing the archive for June 2011.
Drive by Voice, Put CRM Data To Work, Intuit's Bad CRM, Customer Power Protection
June 24, 2011A recent white paper titled “Five Ways to Put Your CRM Data to Work for You and Your Customers” provides the basics in sharing and using information from CRM systems to improve customer service.
Since a whole lot of a business’ customer contact comes via the phone, integrating an IVR with CRM is crucial.
Empower your customers: Organizations that use IVR applications with their customer service functions understand that one key to generating a positive caller experience is providing self- service options, or providing callers with fast and efficient phone-based interactions to automatically deliver real-time information at their convenience. Simply put: the best way to serve your customers is to have the information they need, when they need it.
Personalize the customer interaction for more efficiency: Yankee Group estimates that live telephone conversations still account for 77 percent of customers’ access to enterprise information, and that telephone interaction will remain the dominant form of access for years.
Tracking Children Online, Enhanced Contact Centers, Essential Call Center Technology, Newsflash -- Passwords Not Stolen
June 24, 2011My, yet another way this reporter’s behind the times. Maybe his kids, who roll their eyes whenever we refer to an iPod as a “Walkman,” are right after all.
According to industry observer Shane Richmond of Britain’s newspaper The Telegraph, researchers have found that “parents are sending an average of 312 emails and 600 text messages every year to keep track of their children.”
Maybe our kids aren’t really old enough to be too many places yet (that we don’t have to drive them to), or maybe it’s just that we have a good sense of where they are, but we certainly don’t text twice a day to find out where the heck they are.
Twenty percent of parents said that the best place to find out what their children were doing was on social networks, such as Facebook, according to Richmond’s reporting of the study, and we’ll agree that we have learned a couple, ah, interesting things about our kids’ social activities on Facebook. Someday Facebook is going to come out with a parental block kids can use.
VoltDelta on Customer Care, Contactual Cloud Computing, Hosted Call Center ROI, Flexera and CRM
June 20, 2011
On-demand products vendor VoltDelta recently published a white paper, titled “Shatter Channel Boundaries to Deliver Remarkable Customer Care,” providing some examples of how an integrated multi-channel hosted service enhances customer satisfaction while reducing cost.
Too much good stuff in the paper to adequately summarize here, but we can hit the highlights:
Voice self-service. An engaging voice self service combined with a well designed voice user interface helps to anticipate customer needs by delivering dynamic IVR menus based on past caller information. Multi-channel integration can take an experience to a new level with text message confirmation for mobile callers, or eliminating the dreaded requirement to repeat detail.
Salesforce.com's Confab, Cloud Cost Efficiency, EliteTel and IVR
June 20, 2011Interesting comments from Monica Norton recently on Salesforce.com’s Chatter Blog. She starts off with something she heard at the recent Confab content strategy conference: “Social media is not a strategy. It’s a tactic.”
If you had the same reaction she did, you think that sounds “obvious.” I mean, does your company sit around scheming about how to dominate social media, or planning how social media can fit in with your existing mission statement?
Fine so far. But Norton took it one step further, thinking about “the resistance to social media that many companies have.” This isn’t the “I don’t want anybody Facebooking on company time” deal, Norton’s talking about companies that avoid using Facebook, Twitter, and “even made-for-the-corporate-world social tools” as part of their overall business strategy.
Are the resisters right? Norton can see that they might could just possibly sort of have, you know, a point -- “maybe it’s just that no one has presented social media as a legitimate tactic to support their specific business goals.
Customer Feedback Action, Schedule Adherence In Call Centers, Complex Call Center Operations, HTLT Hills-B Optimizer Pro
June 6, 2011According to officials of a Webinar titled “Listening Is No Longer Enough,” customers are providing feedback to all parts of the organization: “The time is now to link that insight and take action – or risk losing customers to competitors.”
More and more, webinar organizers say, customers are sharing compliments, complaints, and ideas with multiple departments across an organization – an extension of the social media phenomenon, where if a customer gets bad service, all their Facebook friends know about it whether the company does or not.
In response, savvy organizations are moving from annual and transactional surveys to using voice of the customer in real time across the enterprise, from product marketing to sales to R&D, webinar officials say: “What's more, these companies are combining that data to get deep insight into customers' needs, preferences, and expectations.” But sadly, most firms simply collect customer feedback that does little more than pad out reports. No action on the customer voice, get ready for more Facebook bashing.
Read more here
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BayBridge is offering a webinar as a “Three-Part Series: Forecasting, Planning, and Analysis for Complex Contact Center Operations.”
Series 1 was presented Thursday, May 19.
“Forecasting and Planning with Significant Uncertainty and Planning for Unforeseen Events” is the title and a pretty good description of the content that will be presented.
