CRM - April 2008 - (Page C5)

Sponsored Content April 2008 5 waiting on hold or in line. This frees up contact centers for more serious or complex issues, and saves the company money. With a Single-Sign-On approach, users can complete several transactions without having to explain their needs to more than one agent. In addition, portals can be personalized to an individual user or market segment. With a personalized portal, features or functions that are relevant to a particular user can be grouped together. The user is also able to customize the look and feel. That encourages the user to use the portal more and call the agents less. NEEDS-BASED SELLING. This means both cross-selling and up-selling. Portal users need not see those ad banners on the screen as annoying and distracting, because they can be tailored to a customer’s probable needs. For a cable TV company, for example, it wouldn’t benefit them to show an ad banner for introductory pricing for a lower-tier programming package than what the customer already has. They should show this customer a higher-end and more expensive programming package. Most modern advertising puts customers into groups, and then advertises products to different groups. This may be better than a non-selective, blanket approach, but it is still over-generalizing. With customized portals, companies can create a precision marketing mechanism which determines a user’s need based on different data sets— demographics, self-descriptive, and transactional. PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER To be effective, they must operate as part of a larger, interconnected system. This system must be easy to update and flexible enough to work with legacy systems and the unique demands of your business. Microsoft CCF 2008 makes it easy to create just such a system. A LOOK AT CUSTOMER CARE FRAMEWORK 2008 CCF 2008 can help your employees improve the timeliness and quality of their customer interactions and maintain focus on customer needs, while lowering the cost of providing world-class customer care. With CCF 2008, agents handle calls efficiently, in a single session, avoiding unnecessary call transfers and frustrating handoffs. If a handoff becomes necessary, a unique transfer capability in the software retains the information from each customer session. Now you can achieve consistent, high-quality customer care that is designed to comply with corporate standards and regulatory mandates. Customer Care Framework 2008 supports the rapid, flexible, and cost-effective development and deployment of customer care integration and improvement. Using Web services and workflow, it works with a contact center’s existing collection of business applications, linking agent desktops to systems such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Customer Relationship Management), billing, payment, ordering, trouble ticketing, and knowledge management. With CCF 2008, your customer care team will have near-immediate access to the relevant information they need to successfully and efficiently help your customers. Based on industry standards, it can be easily integrated with existing applications and systems, and is flexible enough to easily support future integration and the IT needs of customer care. The heart of Microsoft CCF 2008 is a core server component called the Aggregation Layer that ties together various line-of-business applications such as CRM, billing, trouble ticketing, knowledgebase and order-taking systems. Its flexibility allows it to integrate information from almost any existing software into a customizable desktop application. This Integrated Agent Desktop provides customized, automated “workflows” which suggest appropriate tasks and courses of action for the agent, based on context of the task steps, customer-specific data, and session attributes. INTEGRATED AGENT DESKTOP The Integrated Agent Desktop is where all the business functions of the Customer Care Framework 2008 come together. Existing line-of-business applications are integrated with data management functions, workflow design and process management tools. Information is delivered to the Agent Desktop, ready to be used by contact center staff. The desktop prompts an agent through tasks, and launches applications as they are required—helping agents be more efficient, and yielding a consistent customer experience. WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT “I heard about a great promotion on the radio. So I tried to go to their website to sign up for it, but it was nowhere to be found! I ended up having to call the company, and the person who answered the phone hadn’t even heard of the promo, and had to ask someone else. It’s the same company—don’t these people talk to each other?” As useful and efficient as self-service portals are, they are only part of the answer. The Workflow Management window provides step-by-step guidance for the administrator to simplify call-resolution processes and standardize agent activities. An administrator can easily create separate configurations for various agent groups, with different workflows triggered for each incident type, based on agent input, existing customer data, or other activities within the Desktop. The framework can extend process workflow management across the enterprise and to external customer communication channels, on-line applications such as e-commerce sites, or self-serve Web portals. Microsoft CCF 2008 is a great fit for sales, marketing, and customer support centers in virtually any type of business. Organizations can focus on the customer and be more competitive in their field, building customer loyalty and increasing retention. Improvements in customer service http://www.microsoft.com

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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