Saturday - May 10, 2008
The software as a service trend is revolutionizing the call center industry, as companies of all sizes are now discovering the advantages of going with hosted versus on-premise solutions. With SaaS for the call center, applications such as integrated voice recognition, automatic call dialing, predictive dialing, workforce management and CRM are hosted on a shared platform in a data center and delivered to the agents via the Internet or dedicated network.
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Tuesday - April 29, 2008
Fittingly, the Google-Salesforce.com tie-up is many things to many people. The message for the larger industry is that CRM has to make room for collaboration in its suite set, says Rebecca Wetteman, vice president of Nucleus Research. "It is no longer just about the workflow -- it is about getting the right people together to solve a problem or address an issue."
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Sunday - April 27, 2008
Look closely at any effective customer relationship management strategy. Look beyond the technology, beyond the hype, and what will you see? What you'll see is a company that knows how to effectively communicate with its customers. Ask yourself, "What do CRM solutions actually do?" To put it very simply, they collect and manage customer information.
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Thursday - April 24, 2008
Law firms stand to gain as much as anyone from the advances being made when it comes to CRM systems, and CRM software providers are keen to fill this potentially lucrative market niche. LexisNexis, Microsoft and Salesforce.com are among the firms out there offering CRM systems specifically geared for professional services organizations.
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Wednesday - April 23, 2008
It's a common management idea that there are only three possible problem areas in a business: technical skill, values and behaviors, or organizational systems -- but the last point may only really make sense once you've actually tried running a company yourself.
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Saturday - April 19, 2008
I recently got a chance to speak with Jim Smith, vice president and general manager of Avaya's customer service applications division, about Avaya's launch of the Communication Manager 5.0 solution, which the company has positioned as a more cost-efficient and reliable way to implement end-to-end SIP in the contact center.
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Sunday - April 13, 2008
Here's a great anecdote: At one international call center, an agent was (after a time) discovered to be ending each customer call with the words "I love you." When his supervisor finally intervened and asked him for an explanation, he stated that he had wanted to show customers that he cared.
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Thursday - April 3, 2008
In recent years, First Call Resolution has emerged as a critical element for contact centers looking to become more customer centric. The FCR metric focuses on how well a contact center handles customer requests the first time, and most organizations agree that it is the only true metric that delivers a clear measurement of their effectiveness and customer satisfaction level.
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Friday - March 28, 2008
Companies now have many options when it comes to packaged applications for CRM, and these applications are helping companies reduce development time, in some cases by as much as 65 percent, which in turn helps save money. These resources are now freed up to explore greater CRM customization that ultimately helps companies focus on aligning their CRM systems with their core business objectives.
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Wednesday - March 12, 2008
As a business process aided by technology, CRM is growing up. Most small businesses realize customer relationship management is about more than simply tracking customer contacts, and most CRM vendors now know a "one-size-fits-all" CRM system usually doesn't deliver what businesses need.
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Sunday - March 9, 2008
There are lots of claims of improvement in the giant industry that is customer service, but as we all know, the proof is in the customers' perceptions, which are still quite low when it comes to B2C customer service, probably because many retailers and service organizations still don't understand what their options are when it comes to automating best practices in CRM.
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