CRM - November 2008 - (Page BPS9)

Sponsored Content November 2008 9 Planning for an Adaptive Support Organization consider in establishing a trusted system include the ability to author, manage and maintain content within the system, the ability to aggregate information from disparate sources throughout your organization and the ability of the system to integrate with the core applications of your support organization. The adaptive support organization recognizes that knowledge is created during every customer interaction. Whether it is a simple search request that improves the intelligent search engine's results, or a fresh set of procedures that lead to a better break/fix solution, a trusted system should capture relevant knowledge during each interaction. Content creation within the trusted system requires a robust workflow process, allowing for timely editorial review to confirm the validity of new solutions. The adaptive organization also recognizes that a great deal of knowledge resides outside of the support organization. A dynamic trusted system can incorporate this external knowledge - often times marketing material, manuals, and other formal documents - into its results so that support personnel have access to the best information that is available. By enabling external communities, through forums, the adaptive organization can also capture a wealth of customer knowledge within the trusted system. Critical to the success of creating and maintaining a trusted system is its ability to integrate into the key applications that power a support organization. A flexible, trusted system should seamlessly integrate into incident management systems, CRM applications, and web portals to allow for easy, in process access to both obtain relevant knowledge and create new knowledge in a timely and efficient manner. DEFINE AN ADAPTIVE PROCESS By Nitin Badjatia, Enterprise Solutions Architect, Consona CRM With accelerating business cycles, every part of a company must be ready to adapt to a fluid business environment. For the customer support organization, this often means being prepared to absorb corporate acquisitions, new product launches, and incremental product enhancements faster than anticipated. Gone are the days when company development cycles churned out new products in a predictable rhythm, when corporate growth was more organic than acquisition driven, and support managers had budgets that grew in parallel to the top line. Support managers today must struggle with a broad array of issues, often with little or no increase in manpower or budgets. A well developed knowledge management strategy can enable a support manager to handle rapid changes, while continuing to optimize resources and increase the influence of support throughout the company. A holistic approach to creating an adaptive organization takes into consideration both technology and process challenges. DESIGN A TRUSTED SYSTEM features. Traditional support organizations spend significant amount of time educating, both new hires and existing employees, on specific company products and features. In a dynamic environment, this training can be obsolete within weeks, and can create an endless cycle of re-training. An adaptive organization doesn't focus solely on product-oriented training: it relies on the trusted system to continuously generate and provide new and reliable knowledge to support personnel as they need it. Given this dynamic knowledge management approach, support personnel can rely on the process of interacting with the trusted system to find the best possible answer, instead of having to memorize a rapidly changing set of products and criteria. As new products, product revisions and acquisitions are absorbed by the company, support can be ready to handle these changes with the trusted system. THE REWARDS Customer support is increasingly becoming the primary connection that customers have with their vendor. Even the most dynamic organizations can look flatfooted if support is ill-prepared to handle a broad array of unplanned, unexpected support requests. By enabling a trusted system through a powerful knowledge management application, integrated with great CRM / case management, support can be prepared to handle a rapidly changing environment. The adaptive customer support organization can drive customer satisfaction, improve key contact center metrics, and often drive product improvement cycles. ABOUT CONSONA CRM Consona CRM offers the leading integrated incident management and knowledge management solution (formerly Onyx and KNOVA) to maximize the value of every interaction throughout the customer lifecycle. Industry leaders including AOL, Ford, Novell and H&R Block rely on Consona CRM’s award-winning service resolution management applications to power the customer experience on their websites and within their contact enters. For more information, visit www.consona.com/crm. The heart of any successful customer support organization is a trusted system, a common repository which holds the best information available across the company. Most often this is a knowledge management application. Key factors to A trusted system alone cannot enable an adaptive support environment. Along with implementing a dynamic knowledge management system, organizations often find a need to rethink how support personnel handle rapid changes within their environment. A key theme that emerges is the idea of training to process, and not to products and http://www.consona.com/crm http://www.consona.com/crm

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

CRM - November 2008 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Working with the Years CRM on Twitter Virtual Spenders Contact Centers Chatting to Success The Complexity Chasm Required Reading Generational Spending: A Special Report Who, What, Where, When, Y The Slackers’ X-cellent Adventure The Boomer Boom The Matures Endure Boosting Productivity North of the Border Changing the Channel Invicta’s Thrill of Victory Secret of My Success Connect Re:Tooling Pint of View

CRM - November 2008

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