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Customers to the Core: Tactics for Successful Service (3 of 5)

Technology

Advances in technology have enabled businesses to better understand and respond to customers. They are better able to offer product and service recommendations, to answer questions promptly and succinctly, and to make product and service improvements based on feedback. Many product and service providers on the market today bear the sole purpose of helping businesses develop better relationships with their customers.

Personalization Technologies

Companies specializing in personalization may offer a bundled set of software and services that integrate across an enterprise. The primary function of these tools is to deliver personalized content and recommendations to online customers. While these tools can provide benefit to businesses and customers they are just that: tools.

Businesses must understand both the value and the limits of personalization technologies. They can provide up selling and cross selling opportunities while providing customers with personalized suggestions that are timely and beneficial. Still customers are very aware when they're receiving recommendations from a machine. While these technologies can help to increase revenues through incremental sales and reduced customer service costs they are not substitutes for human interaction. Personalization has limitations due to the amount of data necessary to make it work. As data is collected over time it allows for better personalization, still this takes considerable time and reaches points of diminishing returns where other methods are needed. Amazon utilizes a combination of book recommendations based on the personalization engine while they also offer a variety of thematic and categorized suggestion lists from a wide variety of real people.

BroadVision (www.broadvision.com) and NetPerceptions (www.netperceptions.com) are two well-known providers of personalization technologies.

Live Online Customer Service

Live chat and related technologies, like Voice-over-IP and screen sharing, allow business representatives to interact with customers by answering questions real-time, making product suggestions, and offering assistance. Companies providing these services include: LivePerson (www.liveperson.com), ClientReps.com (www.clientreps.com) and NewChannel (www.newchannel.com) among others.

Servicebots

Servicebots are customer service mimics or avatars that reply to natural language queries. One such company, NativeMinds (www.nativeminds.com) recently unveiled a virtual representative called Nick. The cyber assistant answers questions for Nicorette and NicoDerm CQ at nicorette.com, nicoderm.com and committedquitters.com. Other companies providing servicebot technologies include: Ask Jeeves (www.askjeeves.com), Artificial Life (www.al.com) and Extempo (www.extempo.com).

Online Measurement

It's important to have tools for tracking, collecting, and measuring customer interactions with a company. Metrics and analytics are important not only to determine whether an eCRM solution is being used, but also to provide direction for refining the technology and interface. Some examples include: WebCriteria (www.webcriteria.com) and OpinionLab (www.opinionlab.com).

Customer Relationship Management

CRM activities are typically performed by sales, marketing and service professionals and divided into three processes: Sales-force automation, which includes the prospecting of potential customers and general sales operations; Enterprise marketing automation for managing customer contacts and making sure the right information is delivered at the right time through the right channel; and customer service management for responding to customers' requests for information and assistance as soon as possible. Many companies are still struggling to integrate a CRM solution across these three processes when in fact they need to further integrate their entire organization. The challenge is big and CRM implementations will not meet ROI expectations over the next eighteen months. Still, the companies that do will have significant advantage. Siebel Systems (www.siebel.com) and PeopleSoft (www.peoplesoft.com) are among the many major players in the CRM solutions space.

Electronic Customer Relationship Management

The "e" prefix simply means the CRM processes are applied to business on the Internet. In many cases, the customer relationships are inherently more dynamic and interactive in this space. Vividence (www.vividence.com) and Kiwilogic (www.kiwilogic.com) are examples of eCRM solutions providers.

Wireless Customer Relationship Management

Wireless CRM technologies are currently focused in areas where mobility and portability are more important than instant access to information. Wireless will eventually deliver instant access and mobility as bandwidth increases. Interact Commerce (www.enteract.com), PeopleSoft, and Neteos (www.neteos.com) are currently offering wireless CRM solutions.

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