CRM - April 2008 - (Page C14)

14 April 2008 Sponsored Content Am I Getting Through to You? Leverage the real “voice of the customer” to ensure your self-service doesn’t lead to dead ends AM I THE ONLY ONE WITH THIS PROBLEM? This is accomplished with key capabilities and functions, including: Understanding the “Real” Voice of the Customer. Communicating “naturally” requires understanding multiple word forms, synonyms, pronouns, company/industry specific terms, common slang, and incomplete sentences. Precision. Delivering precise answers, such as direct text responses, documents at the paragraph level and/or multimedia files, eliminates the need to evaluate a long list of links. Intelligent Interaction. Solutions that answer and ask questions through interactive dialogs can enhance satisfaction and revenue. Conversational Agents, such as RealDialog™, leverage computational linguistics techniques and natural language technologies to understand and address questions, retrieve specific information, and engage users in human-like “conversations.” Response Consistency. Solutions that leverage a substantial base “dictionary” to understand language and syntax can derive the true intent behind user expressions and deliver highly consistent responses. Self-service systems relying on keyword search are far less consistent because they only return results based on pattern matches among words and phrases. Personalization. Contextualizing responses around user- and product-specific information retrieved from CRM systems, customer databases, order and warranty systems gives users immediate solutions, not generic information. Multi-Channel Support and Applications. Supporting multiple customer- and internal-facing deployments ensures consistent, high-quality service through your Web site, intranet, CRM application, kiosks, and/or IVR system. The ability to “tune” responses for specific roles and delivery channels gives users the best responses. Automatic Learning. Deploy a solution that automatically “learns” which responses are most accurate. It should ask users to rephrase unclear questions, offer related topics, and/or escalate interactions to a live agent when appropriate. The scenario is familiar. You purchase a shiny new gadget – perhaps a PDA or MP3 player. You’re excited. Once you’ve synched with your computer, you’ll have a whole new level of portability. But you soon discover your computer doesn’t “see” your new gadget. This is when the real fun begins. You try everything, and finally end up on the manufacturer’s Web site clicking on “Support.” Among other phrases, you type in “player not recognized by computer.” You receive a long list of FAQs and links to articles. After 45 minutes of reviewing these links, to no avail, you find an FAQ topic that describes your issue. You then learn it doesn’t apply to your particular model. Infuriated, you pack up your gadget and contemplate how you are going to express your anger. I’M THROUGH WITH YOU! Continuous Improvement. Identifying or categorizing unanswered questions in a meaningful way uncovers inaccuracies and gaps in the knowledge base, and enables organizations to take immediate action. Most self-service solutions break down here, leading to poor accuracy rates (around 50 to 60 percent). Conversely, solutions with this capability can quickly reach accuracy rates exceeding 97 percent. Low Cost of Ownership. Enabling nontechnical subject matter experts to author knowledge base content eliminates the strain to on IT, reduces costs, mitigates risks, and improves the accuracy, speed and ease of information dissemination across all channels. Real ROI. A solution that captures and analyzes the voice of the customer — in their own words, across all channels—positively impacts the entire organization. It uncovers explicit and implicit customer needs (without market surveys), improves product development, and drives competitive advantages through improved products and services. ABOUT ASTUTE SOLUTIONS’ REALDIALOG™ RealDialog ensures that your consumers, contact center agents, employees and partners receive the accurate, timely and precise information they need — whenever and wherever they need it. Users input a question via your Web site, CRM desktop and/or Intranet portal, and receive a “conversational” and personalized response, supported by the precise document, file, or data they need to address their question most effectively. As a single knowledge engine powering Web self-service, contact center interactions, email, chat and more, RealDialog enables your organization to consistently deliver high-quality and efficient services. By capturing and analyzing the “voice of the customer” in their own words, it provides unmatched insight into customer wants and needs. Please visit www.astutesolutions.com/realdialog for more information. This experience is problematic on many levels. You were forced to reduce your issue to a handful of key words. Then, without the self-service system truly understanding what you needed, you were presented with excessive and irrelevant links. You also invested a lot of time and effort, without solving your problem. Meanwhile, the manufacturer remains oblivious – their self-service reports may lead them to believe that your “clicks” equal “successes.” Organizations deploy keyword search, FAQ and IVR systems believing they’ve found an inexpensive (and easily maintained) way to appease customers and deliver sufficient results. They would find them cost-prohibitive if they calculated the price of damaged customer relationships, increased per-incident costs, brand damage, and lost sales resulting from the poor service experience on the front end. IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY… Eliminating dead ends requires a self-service solution that: • Allows end users to express themselves in their “natural language.” • Enables organizations to make continuous improvements based on information gleaned from interactions. • Delivers value to the end-user and the organization. http://www.astutesolutions.com http://www.astutesolutions.com/realdialog

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - April 2008

CRM - April 2008 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point A Tenancy of One’s Own The Rebirth of Taxes destinationCRM Dashboard Labor Disputes Reach The Contract Center The Plight of the Wirelines Required Reading The 2008 Service Awards The 2008 Service Leader Awards Customer Self-Service Microsoft Genesys Oracle eGain Astute Solutions The 2008 Rising Stars The 2008 Service Elite Awar Re:Tooling Scouting Report Pint of View

CRM - April 2008

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