Toiling silently in the
Forgotten Space of Customer Service and Support (CS&S), are the
Forgotten Men and Women in IT who are responsible for maintaining the
company’s Amdocs Clarify CRM system, and who try to enhance the tools of the company’s support agents, against difficult odds.
It
sounds grim, and it often is, for IT people dealing with the legacy
Clarify install. Today’s markets, and today’s customers, demand a
business agility and a personalized response to every situation.
“It emphasizes the ability of companies to look from
the outside in (that is, from the customer’s perspective), rather than
looking from the inside out (that is, the company’s perspective).
Balancing both perspectives is critical in this next generation of CRM.
The upcoming Summit will look at customer experience management,
innovation, customer loyalty, reengineering customer processes and
customer analytics as major themes.” – Is Your Organization Ready for the Next Generation of CRM?
This requires ad hoc querying, and full sets
of retrieved information pertaining to the case at hand. This in turn
requires flexible software, with power and performance built in.
Customer support requires full knowledge of case status, from sales
commitments and notations made, to fulfillment in the shipping
department, through to the global supply chain.
“Knowing inventory status ensures that product is
available when and where customers demand it. Use technology to meter
the flow of materials and product through the supply chain to avoid
production shortages or stockouts.” – How to Succeed With a Global Supply Chain
Customers don’t want agents merely to know their names, they want somebody who can take care of the situation now.
“In the Web 2.0 world, the customer service team is a
critical and primary participant in relationship forming conversations
with customers. Too often, the service and support organization defines
itself purely in terms of case-closing. Cases come, one after the
other, in an endless wave of disconnected transactions. But this
assembly line approach to support often means that the customer
relationship is ignored and the enterprise loses its opportunity to
learn.” – A Modern Approach to Improving Customer Support
All of this places demands on software. And
software often brings better changes than management policy alone can
mandate. Workers need more than guidelines for action: they need tools
to act with. The forgotten people in IT hear the requirements from the
business side every day. Their great problem is how to supply the
functionality of today’s new tools.
“Software creates change, or else prevents it. We’ve
talked before about democratic software, and the empowerment of
customer-facing and problem-solving agents. We’ve said that software,
as with all institutional protocols, can be an enslaving dictatorship,
in fact here’s a quote from us:
‘Of course it’s a lot easier to say that a company
should remember the fundamentals than it is to put this into practice,
especially as the technology of the times imposes its own dictatorship
on the business processes of the enterprise.’” – The Power of Software
What the forgotten space of service and
support needs most is flexible and powerful software. With the Clarify
system, this means Dovetail Software. The reasons are many, and include
Dovetail’s being designed specifically to fit into the Clarify
installed base seamlessly, with identical look and feel, and with
enormously expanded capabilities. Dovetail doesn’t only perform out of
the box, it exposes most of the Clarify business processes to extension
through APIs and Web Services, offering a development path for the
future.
The forgotten men and women of IT laboring in the
forgotten space of support gain from Dovetail the capability they were
looking for but couldn’t find with Clarify tools. And they gain a
future.
