CRM - January 2009 - (Page BPS10)

10 January 2009 Sponsored Content Seven Ways to Cut Costs and Improve Customer Service in a Down Economy Through the ups and downs of the economy, one thing doesn’t change. Your customers expect good – even great – customer service. Take your eye off the ball and watch a customer turn into your competitor’s hottest new lead. Now’s not the time to take on unnecessary risks or big IT expenditures. But it is time to take measures to trim your costs everywhere you can, and that includes sharpening your customer service. Parature helps smart companies do it everyday. Parature is your one stop, ondemand customer service software provider. When it comes to saving money, here are some ideas that will give you the biggest “bang for your buck”, help balance competing demands and make an impact. 1. REDUCE THE VOLUME OF INBOUND CUSTOMER EMAILS AND CALLS. 2. CONSOLIDATE AND STREAMLINE CUSTOMER SUPPORT OPERATIONS. Supporting customers through different systems like FTP sites, ticketing systems without customer views, custom FAQ Web pages, and Outlook email is inefficient and expensive. Add the cost of support requests fallen through the cracks and you’ve got lost dollars and lost customers. Parature Customer Service™ software integrates everything into one tightly unified, efficient system that streamlines and strengthens ongoing customer responsiveness. It increases the efficiency across your entire organization, improving processes among customer support, operations, development and sales. You’ll better manage all your support activities to ensure the right coverage. 3. REDUCE SUPPORT TEAM TRAINING TIME AND EXPENSE. And make sure you’re carefully tracking user transactions at both the account and user contact level to shed light on emerging sales opportunities. 5. DON’T GO DOWN THE COSTLY HARDWARE AND IT RESOURCE PATH. Purchasing and deploying IT resources and managing hardware upgrades come with big price tags. With SaaS (software-as-aservice), implementations take just weeks. And it offers the lowest ongoing cost of ownership. With no administrative costs that can quickly add up. We’ve done it for hundreds of organizations. 6. TURN YOUR SERVICE AND SUPPORT INTO POWERFUL SALES RESOURCES. High volumes of customer emails, calls and repetitive inquiries eat up valuable staff time. Your company’s knowledge is gold. Give your customers access to an online selfservice knowledgebase and watch tickets disappear and satisfaction rise as customers find their own answers 24/7. With high quality content, you achieve both call deflection and call avoidance. By driving problem resolution to self-service channels, more support issues are deflected and wait times are shortened. This lets your support team focus on higher value tasks. The Association of Support Professionals says that the average cost per phone transaction is around $37, email about $25. A successful self-service transaction comes in at around $8. Today some customers are even reducing incoming calls and email by up to 80%. With average attrition rates at 25%, how much valuable knowledge walks out the door every time you lose a support team member? Getting new reps up to speed costs less when you have a knowledgebase – you’re not starting from scratch. A knowledgebase is a great training resource, reducing ramp up time and ensuring better, more consistent customer answers, while safeguarding your valuable company knowledge over the long term. Good customer service software keeps you ready for future customer growth, makes your team more productive, all without extra headcount. 4. GROW BUSINESS WITH YOUR CURRENT CUSTOMERS. Now more than ever, excellent service and support are important differentiators. Show prospects your support portal and give them a glimpse into the quality of support they’ll receive with your organization. Parature Customer Service software is also a great Intranet resource. Use tickets to give team members worldwide an easy and effective way to request support from key personnel across departments to assist in closing deals. 7. STAY ON THE SAME PAGE WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS. Your customers will be carefully evaluating their purchasing decisions more than ever, so make sure you’re making it easy for them to get the information they need. When the latest product information is readily available online, customers are more inclined to act. Communicate changes through the knowledgebase. Offer downloads of manuals or contracts. Listen and learn from your customers. Be proactive. Know what your customers are saying and thinking. Keep the lines of communication open, and pay close attention to feedback. Conventional survey tools are expensive. With Parature you can leverage surveys and forums to understand more about the products they want today, and what they’ll want tomorrow. Invite customers to chat one on one with you. Let them register products online. Use reports to measure your effectiveness and be better prepared for high support volume times.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - January 2009

CRM - January 2009 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point The Shots Heard ’Round the World 30,000-Foot Views Of the Cloud Stuffing the Ballot Box— With Complaints The Marketing Line for ’09 CRM on Twitter Technology Helps Insurance Weather the Storm Required Reading The Google-ization of CRM The Feedback Funnel Email: What’s Inside? Shake Your Moneymakers Lead Sweet Lead Incentives at the Speed of Lightpath Sales Contentment for Content Management A Worthwhile Excursion Into Call Recording Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - January 2009

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.