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February 2012

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Enterprise Call Recording, Oz Banking Customer Service Improvements, Social Media and Customers, India Turning From Call Centers?

February 28, 2012

 

You probably don’t think of yourself first and foremost as a customer when you show up for a dental appointment, but in reality that’s what you are. So there’s no reason why dentists shouldn’t get in on all the fun of customer marketing leads and enterprise call recording just like the rest of us.

In fact, officials of the Internet Dental Alliance have announced Total Lead & Call Tracking, what they’re calling a “core feature” of the alliance’s New Patient Marketing Machine and based on its LeadFire technology.

Not what you normally think of when you think of dentists, but they’re trying to run a business as well, so why not?



Improving Customer IVR, Customer No-Nos, Voice Biometrics, Call Center Advantage - Remote Monitoring

February 24, 2012

The thing about Interactive Voice Response is that while, yes, it does save businesses a lot of time and money, it also saves the customers time too, when used correctly. Frankly this reporter prefers automated interactions when it’s simple information that’s needed.

But too many IVR systems are one size fits all, instead of having the capability to tailor to the customer. That’s the contention of IVR industry insider Jason Andersson, who wrote recently that it’s highly possible “self-service applications, such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solutions are looking at a slow painful death because of lack of innovation.”

Take grocery shopping. Wouldn’t it be nice, Andersson says, if you could walk into a grocery store arranged for you to fast-track your trip, with all the things you normally buy in the same place up front?



Tracking Customer Keywords, TeleTech and Satmetrix's CEM, Call Center Software Awarded

February 21, 2012

 

What many businesses want are completed sales. They aren’t really interested in how many clicks they get with online advertising, what they want to know is if there are any particular keywords that are leading to completed sales.

That’s where Calltracks.com sees an opportunity.

Email Marketing Mistakes, SatuitCRM and Alpha, KeyBank Customer Satisfaction, CloudCRM

February 16, 2012

Email marketing is kind of like a souffle -- so effective and impressive when done correctly, but so easy to do wrong.

We don’t know how many ways there are to screw up a souffle, no doubt imaginative klutzes are coming up with more each day, but CustomerThink has done a good job listing five fairly common ways to lower the effectiveness of email marketing. Oh a fallen souffle is still edible, and you’ll get some response from your email marketing even if you’re committing some of these “facepalms,” as CustomerThink columnist Yo Noguchi calls them.

But you’re not using email marketing just to be passable, are you?



TeleTech and Satmetrix in CEM Deal, IVR Auto Attendant, Women Car Customers, CRM at Cloud 2012

February 14, 2012

This past week TMC’s Michelle Amodio noted that TeleTech and Sametrix, two well-known names in Customer Experience Management, have partnered to work on a beefed-up suite of CEM offerings.

As she wrote, TeleTech is now the only BPO provider using the Net Promoter approach to improve their CEM. The idea behind CEM is to take steps to both retain customers and increase profit margins associated with each customer.

"We've reached a tipping point in the customer revolution.

Cloud CRM and Forecasting, Bad Customer Silos, Videoconferencing, Email Marketing

February 9, 2012

You know, of course, that done correctly, sales forecasting can do Very Good Things for your business. But you want more than just “Oh it’ll be good, trust us.” How, exactly, does it help? After all, you’ve got a presentation to the CEO; you can’t go in with “It’ll be really cool.”

Soffront, which sells CRM, recently wrote a good blog post focusing in on just that very question -- what specific ways does sales forecasting help your business?

The basic idea behind forecasting is that it would be great to be able to see into the future.



Cloud CRM, Auto Attendant Voices, Email Customer Lists, Protecting Customer Passwords

February 7, 2012

“It's only very recently that the CRM ideal has been rendered realistic due to the advent of cloud-technology and the introduction of advanced CRM software,” writes The Independent, which defines CRM as “organizing interactions with customers, particularly sales transactions and client communication, using facilitating software.”

Cut those last three words off that sentence and it’s a fair definition. Adding anything about the tools one uses to interact with customers introduces a dangerous mindset that CRM is “about” the technology, not the needs and strategies which dictate the choice of technology.

You do not need software to do CRM correctly. Sure in most cases it really helps, but all software does is act as a tool to accomplish the job of CRM.



IVR System Benefits, Collect Customer Info Fast, Cloud Predictive Dialers, Avoiding Customer Hell

February 2, 2012

Hey, take it from Snooozy, “The biggest benefit of the IVR system is how quickly an organization can collect information from a person.”

We don’t care what online handle he or she uses, that’s pretty good advice.

Snooozy has some other tidbits for you as well, in case you were wondering just what the advantages of IVR systems might be when it comes to collecting survey information. The fact that yes, it can get a boatload of information pretty quickly is up there, but there are others.



One is that, simply, it can be a critical part of a positive customer experience, and that’s old news -- way back in 2010, TMC noted a survey conducted by Alcatel-Lucent found that “three-quarters of 4,200 respondents said they would continue to business with a company with which they had a great contact center experience.”

In fact, half of all respondents told Alcatel-Lucent they’d dropped a company based on a poor contact center experience.

App Deployment and Customer Satisfaction, Recording Calls, IVR for IVR Haters, Virtualization Resolutions

February 2, 2012

 

It’s possible to get so fixated on the particulars of what we do in our business every day that we lose sight of the overall picture. For example, what business are you in? Hotels?  

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