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.