First Coffee

Five9, who sell on-demand call center software, recently released a video explaining their offerings. They also offer hosted call center services, with thousands of agents serving over 1,000 clients, according to the video presentation.

Last year TMC’s Kelly McGuire spoke with M.J.

Dr. Harish Kotadia CRM Consulting Lead for Infosys Technologies, certainly knows his stuff when it comes to Social CRM. He’s recently posted a list of what he considers to be five key technological trends driving Social CRM, excerpted here: Cloud Computing/SaaS CRM.

Social Media channels (like Twitter and Facebook) generate tremendous volume of user generated content created by millions of users. It’s not possible for CRM system to import/store the data locally, unlike traditional CRM, where data was generated by few users and stored in local database.

A 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.

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:

According 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