Insurers today are growing through existing products, lines, channels, and geographic areas. They understand that a better understanding of customer needs and improved customer service increases sales and improves retention rates, which drives profitable growth.
Interactive Intelligence has released a fairly in-depth white paper, researched by SMA, a strategic advisory firm for insurance companies and providers, looking at customer communications management. CCM, the paper finds, "plays a critical role in maximizing every customer interaction to capture more information about customer needs, make timely offers, and enhance customer service."
SMA believes that CCM is most valuable "when considered holistically as the integration of all forms of communication and all types of information across the enterprise." In other words, a comprehensive CCM vision is pretty much essential today with what SMA finds to be "the advent of new customer demands, shifting demographics, and the expansion of the various devices and channels that policyholders, agents, and third-party partners use to interact with insurers."
The white paper finds that insurers should choose an approach that creates seamless flows of information from all voice and data communications, generating both structured and unstructured data, via a wide range of channels, and gives advice for how to do just that.
Officials with Speedflow recently told TMCnet the company was excited to announce that April 2010 showed two great figures well before expected - 1.000.000.000 transactions and 40.000 points of sales registered in total by the company's processing systems Pay-n-Get, installed worldwide.
A service marketed by Speedflow Communications, Pay-n-Get, is an Instant Delivery Processing System for making payments for mobile carrier's services, IP telephony, Internet, cable television and other pre-paid services.
The product allows selling top-up codes directly from the main server storage, as well as creating and managing extended dealers' networks. It also allows selling pre-paid services of several providers through the same terminal.
It comes with an unlimited number of providers allowed, an interface and "total control over all business processes," company officials say:
"No need of scratch cards any more. No burden with delivering cards and keeping up the range of them in different points of sale. You are always ready to refill clients' accounts for any amount."
Parlance Corp.'s nameConnector is a managed auto attendant service that enables callers to connect automatically by just saying the name of the person, department or location they wish to reach.
With this auto attendant solution, company officials say, "your calls are consistently greeted with your brand before the second ring. If operator assistance is needed, callers simply say 'operator' to speak with a live person."
Sure, some companies offer voice-enabled call routing as an add-on service, but sometimes that's of questionable functionality, isn't it? Parlance officials note that they've been "solely in the business of speech enabled call routing from the very beginning," which in their case would be 1996.
They must be doing something right, with a 96 percent customer retention rate and successful long term partnerships with companies such as GE, P&G, MSNBC, McDonalds, and Pepsi.
Though cloud computing is no longer in its infancy, it's still uncharted territory.
During last week's Interop conference in Las Vegas a number of industry vets told their stories during the session, "Clouds and Enterprises: Lessons Learned."
The panel of enterprise IT executives, including Mu Dynamics's co-founder and CTO Kowsik Guruswam, spoke about their experience with cloud computing platforms, with a particular focus on compliance, performance, and the support for legacy applications. What could they move? What broke?
Enterprises are now using cloud storage services at a rapid pace and are looking for qualified answers on how using a cloud platform can increase efficiency and ROI simultaneously, according to Interop organizers.
The old model of purchasing expensive storage systems or using large amounts of tape are prehistoric, adapting a new approach to storage is necessary in today's tough economic climate as budgets continue to be slashed and performance upkeep is critical.
Recently PCQuest ran a comparison of a few open source CRM solutions.
"Even though the total cost of implementing open source solutions is comparatively lower than their commercial counterparts, this is not the primary reason for the growing popularity of open source solutions," the journal said, adding that "a packaged product, even if it follows the best practices, cannot facilitate every organization's needs and requirements."
Opentaps is an integrated ERP and CRM suite that offers modules to cover the majority of an organization's processes and functions, PCQuest finds: "The Opentaps suite is based on Apache's OFBiz project and is designed to tap the full power of OFBiz framework for offering feature-rich, out of the box ERP and CRM."
The modules that are offered can handle everything from leads, order management, and customer service to purchasing, production planning, inventory management, and manufacturing, to shipping and accounting, according to the review: "Opentaps also integrates e-commerce and point of sale."
