From June through September Opus Research mounted a Web-based
survey to gain insights into the deployment plans and levels of
interest in a variety of channels and networks for customer care
and marketing efforts. Here are the top line findings:
• Transformational times in the Contact Center – Contact center
personnel are increasingly engaged in multi-modal, multi-channel
and social interactions.
• Monitoring and call recording are high profile – In response to
questions about technology in...
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Unica and IBM recently released their annual
“State of Marketing” survey findings.
Key highlights include:
·
Social Media Interest Wanes:
More than half of marketers use social media, but based on
responses, their enthusiasm is on the decline, suggesting that the
peak of inflated expectations has passed; marketers are focused on
finding the value that social channels can yield.
·
Small, but Growing Use of Mobile: By the end of 2011, 1 billion consumers will use their mobile
phones to...
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A great deal has changed in the contact center and CRM technology
landscape in the past ten years, and most companies lag way behind
in taking advantage of new functionality. An obvious example is
social media.
DMG Consulting estimates that more than
93% of existing servicing/CRM applications do not have the ability
to access, route, queue and respond to social media
interactions. However, this is not the only capability missing from
servicing/CRM solutions. Unified communications, desktop...
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The days of ‘telephone-only’ customer service are long gone. Our
customers now expect to contact us through email, chat and the web,
including social media. Managing service across all these disparate
communication channels can be a challenge. Businesses that do this
well have a distinct and potent competitive advantage. Their
customers are more satisfied, less apt to take their money
elsewhere and inclined to increase the business they conduct.
One key to improving customer satisfaction,...
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One trait successful companies have in common is the ability to
detect impending change and adapt to it. The world of customer
service is undergoing one of these major shifts right now, moving
away from the traditional reactionary service mode towards a more
proactive engagement model. I like to call this Customer Service
2.0.
Customer Service 2.0 extends the boundaries of the
company/customer interaction into social media and moves away from
the call/respond service model. This entails much...
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Text analytics has been a recognized IT sector for more than 15
years, yet it remains one of technology’s best-kept secrets. With
an estimated 3,500 text analytics implementations globally, there
is a huge opportunity for vendors to better educate the market on
the practical application of this technology in the marketing and
business worlds. And end users have a real chance to utilize this
application to gain a competitive advantage by knowing exactly what
is being said about them, over what...
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Customer service organizations are not rapidly embracing social
media, despite this channel’s growing popularity among customers in
most age brackets and its ability to uncover valuable insights on a
timely basis. In a
May 2010 benchmark study of 230 contact center, enterprise and
IT executives, VPs, managers, directors and decision-makers around
the world, DMG found that only 6.5% of contact centers support
social media today. More significant and telling is that only 23.9%
of contact centers...
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Social media interactions are quite different from any other type
of communication handled by a customer service or contact center.
Enterprises have to evolve and adapt their servicing policies and
procedures to address the needs of this new channel.
Every time a customer, prospect, partner, investor or a member of
the general public elects to write about an organization, they are
voluntarily investing their time to provide what could be highly
valuable or even strategic feedback. In the past,...
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In the world of recruiting, using social media as a recruiting
source has become one of the hottest trends lately. Dr. John
Sullivan, writing at ERE.Net, calls social media “the most powerful
recruiting tool since the telephone.”
How viable is social media for volume hiring in the call
center?
Recently, my colleague at FurstPerson, Tim McDaris, a Director at
FurstPerson, conducted some high level research to determine
candidate views on social media. FurstPerson asked over 350
contact center...
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CRMXchange sat down for an
executive
interview with Mariann McDonagh, Chief Marketing Officer,
inContact. We asked how the volatile economy is
affecting the users’ decision making for technology? Mariann
told us that in the case of contact center technology, the
economy is actually helping drive our business for two reasons: the
capex/opex advantages of cloud-based call center infrastructure
compared to premises-based solutions, and the need for tools to aid
customer retention as well as...
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According to a new DMG
Guide for Building a Customer Support Strategy, here are some
tips to help in initiating a customer service social media
program:
1. Decide what enterprise and contact center goals you want to
achieve with social media. This will guide the things you say and
do.
2. Make sure to continuously monitor what's being said about your
organization. Don't wait for a “blow-up” to happen.
3. Have a plan in place for responding rapidly and appropriately to
any event that is a major...
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Despite the popular predictions about endless growth in social
media, consumers have a different opinion. According to a new
social media engagement study from
Strativity,
70% of consumers already see time constraints
as an obstacle to further adoption of social
media.
The time concern is closely followed by concerns about privacy (59%
of consumers) as well as over commercialization of social media in
the form of junk and advertising (58% of consumers). It seems that,
in a short period of time,...
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Quality management has stood as a cornerstone of contact center
performance management for many years, and for good reason. It
focuses on the interactions between agents and customers; those
little moments of truth where customer satisfaction hangs in the
balance. For the most part, quality management hasn’t changed much
through the years. The advent and rapid adoption of analytics
technologies in the contact center is about to change that.
A new white paper from Ventana Research explores...
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According to
Gartner, through 2013, four major initiatives will
dominate overall customer service strategies:
•Tying together service interaction channels
•Integrating social CRM capabilities
•Analyzing the customer experience
•Applying business rules and knowledge in real time
Two major challenges will impact the definition of market leader in
the CRM customer service contact center space, which focuses on
tools for the human agent or service representative:
•A new generation of customers has a...
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Few phenomena have generated as much interest and hype over the
last several years as social media.
Social media are not a new way of doing business, but rather they
represent an alternative approach; utilizing the Internet, a single
posting or broadcast can be sent around the world almost
instantaneously. No one is in charge and no one owns the
conversation. And once a thought has gone “social” it cannot be
retracted. Social media have been around in one form or another
since the Internet...
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Getting ahead of your customers’ expectations, and even reactions
to doing business with your organization, can present great
challenges. Coupled with the breadth of multichannel service and
communications media, it begs the question: “How well are you
equipped to anticipate, analyze, and act on customers’ requirements
and their experiences with your organization?”
Customer Interaction Analytics are solutions that include speech,
data and text analytics, along with customer survey feedback....
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The rapid growth of social media is forcing businesses to
develop strategies for integrating it into their operations.
Unfortunately, the poor attempts greatly outnumber the successful
ones so far. A primary contributing factor in many failures is the
tendency to view social media channels as just another marketing
medium, a new way to push out press releases and sales campaigns.
More enlightened companies realize that social media is more about
pull than push.
Social media provides its users a...
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I don’t know how many times I have heard contact center
professionals extol the virtues of using remote (at-home) agents to
extend their agent resources beyond the infrastructure of their
organizations. But apparently, (in my brief survey),
many companies with centers in multiple locations have not taken
the benefits of virtual contact centers to the next level.
Combining these resources into one big agent pool allows an
organization to balance the demand fluctuation across...
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AWeber Communications helps more than 80,000 small businesses
manage their email marketing campaigns. Between May 20th - May
24th, 2010, AWeber customers who logged into their account were
asked to participate in a brief survey designed to capture their
current and projected email marketing usage and behavior. A
total of 2,579 respondents participated.
Below are Survey Highlights:--Email marketing continues to bring significant value to
businesses with more than 82 percent of respondents...
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