We Blog CRM

Last week, Salesforce.com announced it will partner with Cisco to deliver “the new face of customer service” by building a new contact center in the cloud. Combining Salesforce’s Service Cloud 2 with Cisco Unified Communications, the new solution uses gives SMBs the ability to run customer service entirely in the cloud. Both Cisco and Salesforce share a faith in cloud computing, and both encourage leveraging social networking sites for customer service.

Service Cloud 2 and Cisco’s Unified Contact Center—which helps companies smoothly integrate inbound and outbound voice call with Internet applications—are integrated by a connector, allowing customers to use Salesforce CRM as their primary agent desktop while having access to Contact Center’s capabilities. The solution is for companies with 30 to 300 customer service representatives, and features the Customer Interaction Cloud, a tool providing more efficient communications.

Salesforce and Cisco consider this new integration the answer to growing demands for cloud-based customer service solutions within the SMB market, as well as a new model for customer service. The cloud model allows companies to deliver “the expertise of the community” to their customers, and Salesforce reports that some 8,000 customers have already turned to Service Cloud 2 (launched earlier this fall) for their customer service needs.

Call center software provider inContact announced this week it would be releasing an integration to cloud-based CRM. An undisclosed provider of performance solutions for the casualty claims industry will be using inContact’s product with Salesforce.com for several call centers that deal with about 200 insurance agencies total. Over the past couple of years, the solutions company used Salesforce.com for CRM and inContact for call center operations, and by integrating the former product into the latter, the company will expand the Salesforce presence throughout their business.

Aside from eliminating the hassle of switching between the two platforms, the integration will merge routing, call resolution, and reporting, thereby improving the general call-center cycle. Agents and managers will use the same UI to answer calls and create reports.

Being that both inContact and Salesforce are cloud-based platforms, the integration will provide the typical benefits of a SaaS model—fast deployments, measurable ROI, and a lower cost. The economy has recently made SaaS solutions of all breeds popular, so this is surely not the last cloud-based call center integration we’ll be seeing. Another coup for inContact this week: a report by DMG Consulting showed their on-demand solutions were the most implemented hosted contact center products of 2008.

According to a new research commissioned by Oracle, customers in the UK face the brunt of inadequate services from call centers. The exhaustive study carried out across Europe surveyed 1500 customers and 250 contact centers. The results showed that there was a substantial disconnect between contact center performance and customer expectations. The discontent of British customers was the most telling in Europe where more than 50% of the customers are unhappy with the service levels.

Financial services scored high for customer satisfaction and telecom companies fared poorly as far as call center performance was concerned. The most common grievances were the usual ones such as long call queues, having to interact with multiple staff members, and inconsistent communication from the call center employees. This, when call center managers profess to having customer satisfaction as their number one concern. Apparently there is a disconnect between the thoughts and actions of the call center executives.

The call center customer service was rated just average or outright ineffective by most of the respondents. The call centers on their part stated that the staff was poorly equipped in terms of training and tools. Top factors that call centers said they would like to work on included better information for the staff, better training procedures, distributed decision making capabilities, and keeping the caller interested while on hold.

The report goes on to mention that call centers are surprisingly loath to explore the internet as an option for extending customer service inspite of customers expressing a strong inclination for the internet as a medium for communicating with businesses. Hardly any of the call centers reviewed had any plans of introducing self-service customer portals online to reduce the workload of their contact center employees.

Virtual call centers depend heavily on home agents and with good reason. A distributed workforce offers several benefits such as around the clock service covering different time zones, tapping into an experienced workforce that may for some reason be unable to travel, reducing the number of shifts of the on-site call center, reduced overhead costs and saving of real estate expenses, etc.

By giving the agents the flexibility to choose their timings call centers promote productivity, the virtual employee only needs an internet connection, a computer, and a phone to get started. Contact center solutions aimed at virtual contact centers and intuitive graphical user interfaces make it easy for an agent to breeze through the learning process. You do not need to purchase and set up expensive hardware to set up a virtual call center. Instead you can direct your resources elsewhere.

Managing a distributed workforce is also not an issue because of solutions that offer real-time call center metrics same as those available in a bricks-and-mortar environment.

High street British optician Specsavers, which has around 600 stores in the UK, has decided to deploy Infor CRM Epiphany. The CRM system is expected to help the company achieve that most desired position – one where it has a single view of its customer. Specsavers intends to use the Sales and Service modules of Epiphany to boost its call center program with a view to support its client retention efforts. Epiphany is a big leap forward from the spreadsheets and notepads which the company used to process customer data. Infor CRM should enable the company call center to react more swiftly and with greater certainty to customer queries and resolve issues faster.

In-depth, real-time customer information will surely enhance the staff working experience as well as the customer experience fostering loyalty amongst both for Specsavers. Another advantage is that with accurate customer information, the company can personalize its services to suit the needs of the customer. 

Looks like a likely partnership between two companies with catchy names. SugarCRM, which is one of the premier open source CRM developers out there has helped Geeks on the Way offer improved call center services. Geeks on the way, by the way, is a technology support firm based in Western Canada.

The self-proclaimed geeks provide technical support to residences and small offices and have had around 45,000 calls handled till date. When we consider that its 45,000 calls with 20,000 unique customers serviced then we know that these geeks are running a well-co-ordinated unit.

SugarCRM has helped the geeks to manage increasing call volumes more effectively by providing an integrated voice and CRM system. The open source technologies has made it easier for the geeks to integrate the call center environment with other technologies such as mapping technologies and the result is superior service and timely attendance to calls. Call handling time has been reduced drastically from 2-3 minutes to around 20 seconds. The open source SugarCRM
architecture also fits in nicely with the Geeks expansion and growth plans.

Clearly, Sugar has won over the geeks at Geeks on the Way and the company now plans to extend SugarCRM to other departments; it has already integrated Sugar with its accounting and e-commerce systems.

Sage Software today announced ACT! by Sage for Financial Professionals 9.0, a contact and customer management solution that provides data management, activity tracking, reporting and sales productivity tools for financial advisors, brokerage firms and teams of financial services professionals.

Users can synchronize contact, calendar and to-do information with their Palm OS or pocket PC devices. The standard purchase of ACT! for Financial Professionals also includes one year of maintenance and support.

Two versions of the solution are available: ACT! for Financial Professionals is for individuals or up to ten networked users, and ACT! Premium for Financial Professionals 9.0 is designed for larger workgroups.

ACT! for Financial Professionals is available for $519.99 and $349.95 for customers upgrading from ACT! + Fact for Financial Professionals. ACT! Premium for Financial Professionals is available for $739.99 and $469.95 for customers upgrading.

ACT! was first introduced in 1987 and for that span, Sage has prided itself on ACT!’s status as the number-one selling contact and customer management solution. Today, 2.7 million registered users and more than 38,000 additional corporate customers use ACT!

A big win in the Middle East came to Frontliners this week, as Saudi Arabia’s National Flight Service selected Frontliners and Altitude software to deliver contact centre outsourcing services for airline Air Arabia.

A specialized multilingual team of experienced customer service agents has been promised to handle Air Arabia inbound calls, and all agents have reportedly been fully trained on the Air Arabia offering.

Employed by Frontliners, Altitude uCI is a platform-independent contact centre solution with a universal queue and full blended support for voice (i.e. inbound handling and outbound dialling), IVR, email response management, web collaboration, and web chat. Altitude uCI was deployed at Frontliners’ contact centre in October 2005.

Puredata CRM, a provider of services and software solution to B2B organizations, yesterday launched its Customer Intelligence Lifecycle Management or – yes, unfortunately enough, it’s time for another acronym – CILM.

In explaining CILM, Puredata CRM managing director Julian Bradder said that “CILM is the integration of business processes from multiple disciplines that serve to provide effective and legal management of customer databases. Through the provision of project management, data management, contact centre, solution sales and technology we are able to deliver a rigour in the management of these systems.”

Puredata was formed in 2006 after a number of years of managing major corporate accounts for a US software provider.

Over there in the United Kingdom, Graham Technology today announced the company had won a tender with Falkirk Council to “help the organisation improve the experience of its customers.”

Falkirk will be deploying contact centre CRM based on Graham Technology flagship product Ciboodle, a customer interaction software product.

Falkirk Council is a authority which provides all local government services for the Falkirk area. Covering 112 square miles, the council has a workforce of around 7,000 employees, serving a population of around 145,000.

Falkirk itself is probably most notable for its great bloody Wheel with a capital “W.” The Falkirk Wheel is a rotating boat lift – said to be the only one of its kind in the world – which opened in 2002. The contraption connects the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal; a great tourist site, too!