Focused as we are upon Customer Service and Support (CS&S), we pay great attention to the myriad stories in the CRM
space that explain exactly what constitutes good customer service, and
what exactly results in true customer satisfaction. It would be wrong
to say it ALL comes down to the individual,
customer-facing employees of the enterprise – but not very wrong. Too
many stories show how the individuals involved in support and
after-sales service save the day
Enterprises
nowadays are spending more to upgrade the systems that their agents
use, recognizing that information at the agent’s fingertips results in
credibility and confidence with the customer, and cleaner disposition
and resolution of each case. The net nominal result to the enterprise
is a measurable boost in the productivity of customer-facing workers.
Forrester
Research sees more attention being given to the application’s user
interface (UI), and workflow dynamics, to ensure that these are better
aligned with the working practices of day-to-day users. The desire by
sales, customer service, and marketing executives to obtain more
user-friendly applications is driving interest in CRM application upgrades as vendors make better user interfaces available in new releases. See CRM Market Size And Forecast, 2006 To 2010
Amdocs,
Inc. – whose development path matters crucially to our own Dovetail
customers – talked last month about its future plans regarding the Web.
“A major part of our future plans is for the portal or
Web-based. In markets where saturation has been reached in the telecom
market, the issue is how to reduce costs and increase the customer’s
experience. It is possible to do both by moving to Web-based or self
service.” – Dov Baharav, president and chief executive officer, Amdocs Management Ltd
The Web-based system cuts two ways. Customers can
access knowledge bases and support systems without the mediation of
human agents. This saves costs for the enterprise to the extent that
the software in the middle of the exchange is helpful and productive.
Alternately, once the situation comes to live support or service, the
agent can most usefully access pertinent data (histories, analyses,
decision trees and options) through a portal acting as a gateway of
linkage.
Dovetail Software responded to this need by writing
software from the ground up which provides such an agent portal, and
gives access to multiple applications in one single view.
“Many customers have used the Dovetail Platform as
well as Dovetail Web Services to deploy custom portals, aggregating
information and services from multiple sources into a single page or
view, designed for use by employees, partners or customers. In this way
they have been able to provide appropriate information and
functionality in an optimal way to each stakeholder community within an
easily maintained, web-based environment.” Dovetail Software
