CRM - August 2008 - (Page 38)

Enterprise Strategies That Stink Rationalizing Instead: Act now, no excuses. Keeping data and communication channels siloed Instead: Unify your data—all of it. Throwing away customer feedback Instead: Treat what your customers tell you as unmined gold. Being rigid and controlling Instead: Be nimble and agile. Keeping secrets from customers—and employees Instead: Breed trust—and build business—through transparency. complex and foreign opens the door for employee frustration and dissatisfaction. CRM provider Avidian perceives the ease of user adoption as its main benefit. Built on top of Microsoft Outlook, Avidian’s CRM product, Prophet 5, gives clients an already recognized platform that takes little time to adjust to. For Sean Combs and Steelhead Productions, this was crucial.“When we went to buy a CRM product, my big criteria [was] that it [could be] implemented really easily,” Combs says. Avidian, he says, “just plugs into Outlook—there’s virtually no learning curve for our users.” He goes on,“We created an internal point person—not a tech person, just one business-development person—[to] collect any comments, concerns, [or] questions, and [that person] works with Avidian’s tech support.” Steelhead, he adds, didn’t even have to buy Avidian’s training program: The ease of implementation made it unnecessary. tomer satisfaction, in a direct correlation, took a hit. “We saw a general decline in customer satisfaction that took years to win back,” Bois says. He notes that decision-makers are setting themselves up for disaster if they stop investing in the customer experience. You can’t let a temporary trend or issue affect how you treat your customers over the long term. 7. STAY THE COURSE As the economy sputters and businesses begin to re-examine spending, there’s a general fear of budget cuts. Bois points out that, during the last recession, technology budgets were cut, on average, by about 1 percent. Companies were spending less money on software—and cus38 8. BE PROACTIVE AND REACTIVE “Reactive support means, ‘I’m a technology vendor, I create a product, and I sell it.’ One day the product will break down and the customer will discover that and will call the support department while the product is down,” says Nimmy Reichenberg, vice president of marketing for NextNine, a company that provides proactive support automation technology. Reichenberg points out, however, that in most cases support is more complicated. In fact, he says, NextNine’s client Allscripts, a Chicago-based provider of clinical software and information solutions in the healthcare industry, is a perfect example. Allscripts runs its software on PCs, often in hospitals or pharmacies. The company prides itself on excellent support and maintenance—but customer service had become a challenge. Allscripts would often receive support calls sprouting from a customer’s problem with its PC or desktop programs. For instance, a computer’s memory would fill up, causing Allscripts to crash—and the customer would call, thinking that Allscripts was the problem. John Nebergall, vice president of support for Allscripts, says the company struggled with the burden. “Where’s the line with things that we can support and what we’re capable of supporting? How far does it go? Do I fix their computer and network?” he asks, rhetorically. The company soon began to realize that it needed to intervene before the problem occurred, providing not just reactive support, but proactive support as well. Soon after turning to NextNine for increased support, the company saw a reduction in customer confusion and complaints. “It gave us the opportunity to have intelligent software built into our offering that could continue to monitor the critical performance of clients’ system, as well as our application,” Nebergall says. “It monitors our application specifically and looks for conditions that could be a tip-off that the application needed to be adjusted to make sure end-user experience stayed as we wanted [it] to.” The NextNine support program sends customers alerts of something that might go wrong and that might affect the Allscripts application, such as a system overload. Alerting customers of potential problems before they create actual problems for end users is powerful customer service and promotes a dialogue between vendor and client.“Our customers are very happy to not have seen an issue that impacts end users,” Nebergall says. “What we are really trying to do in partnerships is not just fix things that are broken, but be proactive and avoid problems before they happen, to stay ahead of the curve and not fall behind it. The best problem is one you avoided and [didn’t have] to react to.” Editorial Assistant Lauren McKay can be reached at lmckay@destinationCRM.com. www.destinationCRM.com CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | AUGUST 2008 http://www.destinationCRM.com

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

CRM - August 2008 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Maximum Security A Code Win Doesn’t Blow Forming the Platform CRM on Twitter CRM Class Is in Session Making CRM Mandatory for University Administration Required Reading Cover Story: Calling it Quits Wouldja Look at That? 8 Enterprise Strategies That Stick CRM Searches for Search All Lines Are Not Busy UC: As Easy as A-B-C Even Contact Centers Have Room for Improvement Money Lying Around? Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Scouting Report Pint of View

CRM - August 2008

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