Jive

Best Practices Series

PAGE 22

TRANSFORMING CUSTOMER
CONNECTIONS

Interactive Intelligence
PAGE 23

MANAGING THE NEW CUSTOMER

EXPERIENCE WITH PURECLOUDSM

TeamSupport
PAGE 25

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT:

A THREELEGGED STOOL

Calabrio

Why is
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
MANAGEMENT so important?
Customer Experience Management (CEM) is all about helping guide a prospect through the
customer journeyfrom the first marketing interaction through the transaction to the much
longer process of service and support. A formalized approach to CEM acts as an attentive tour
guide throughout this journey: anticipating needs, providing accurate and timely information, and
engaging the customer proactively, while soliciting feedback at regular intervals.
A well-managed customer journey strengthens brand preferences, reduces customer churn, and
elevates the brand beyond strict reliance on price. This is the space where brand advocates are
created, and profitability is optimized.
In the following pages of this Best Practices series, you will notice several themes: truly engaging
customers with conversations, engaging employees by empowering them with better information
and support, and soliciting feedback from the customers themselves to help stay on course.
There is some great information here for any company obsessed with customer service.
Bob Fernekees
VP/Group Publisher, CRM Media
Information Today, Inc.
SILVER SPONSORS

PAGE 26

UNLOCKING THE CONTACT

CENTERS HIDDEN ASSET:
How Multichannel Analytics Can
Translate the Voice of the Customer
into Business Intelligence

Verint
PAGE 27

CULTIVATING CUSTOMER
ENGAGEMENT
Best Practices to Help You Get Started

KANA, A Verint Company

PAGE 28

EMPOWER AGENTS TO ENHANCE

THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

LiveOps
PAGE 29

HAPPY CUSTOMERS, HAPPY BRAND

eGain
PAGE 30

ENGAGING CUSTOMERS
WITH A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT:
10 Tips to Go From Valet to Wallet

Pegasystems
PAGE 31

THREE WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

VoltDelta
PAGE 32

ENVISIONING AN EXCEPTIONAL
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
FROM THE OUTSIDE IN

SPONSORS

Clicktools
PAGE 33

7601 Interactive Way

Indianapolis, IN 46278
Phone: 1-800-267-1364
www.inin.com/whitepapers

877.780.4848
www.avalara.com

1717 W. 6th Street, #100

Austin, TX 78703
Phone: (877) 483-2777
Email: info@bloomfire.com
www.bloomfire.com

400 1st Avenue North

Suite 300
Minneapolis MN 55401
763.592.4600
calabrio.com

Phone: 818-280-4820
E-mail: info@fayebsg.com
www.fayebsg.com
twitter.com/fbsg
https://www.linkedin.com/
company/faye-businesssystems-group-inc.

25 Adelaide Street East,

20th Floor
Toronto, ON, Canada
M5C 3A1
1-866-454-0084
info@intelliresponse.com
www.intelliresponse.com

Poole, UK | Phoenix, US
Phone (US): 1-800-774-4065
Phone (EMEA): 0800 0432587
sales@clicktools.com
www.clicktools.com

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
MANAGEMENT MADE EASIER:
Integrate Feedback in CRM

IntelliResponse
PAGE 34

CRUSH YOUR COMPETITORS

WITH DIGITAL SELFSERVICE

Avalara
325 Lytton Ave
Suite 200
Palo Alto, CA 94301
+1-877-495-3700 toll-free
sales@jivesoftware.com
jivesoftware.com

1252 Borregas Ave.

Sunnyvale, CA 94089
Phone: 1-800-821-4358
www.egain.com

PAGE 35
2550 Walsh Ave
Suite 100
Santa Clara, CA 95051
info@kana.com
800-737-8738
www.kana.com

SALES TAX ACCURACY AND CRM:

Automating the Quote-to-Cash
Process to Increase Customer
Satisfaction and Retention

Faye Business Systems Group

PAGE 36

SIX WAYS CRM HELPS YOU GET

TO KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER
AND CLOSE MORE DEALS
555 Twin Dolphin Drive
Redwood City, CA 94065
Phone: 1-800-411-4700
www.liveops.com

One Rogers Street

Cambridge, MA 02142
617-374-9600
www.pega.com

100 Highland Park Village

Suite 200
Dallas, TX 75205
800-596-2820
sales@teamsupport.com
www.teamsupport.com

330 South Service Road

Melville, NY 11747
Phone: 1-800-4VERINT
www.verint.com

3750 Monroe Ave. Suite 4B

Pittsford, NY 14534
Phone: 1-866-436-1169
www.voltdelta.com

Bloomfire
PAGE 37

BUILDING CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

THROUGH SOCIAL COMMUNITIES
AND SELF-SERVICE PORTALS

Produced by:
CRM Media

WP22

Sponsored Content

November 2014 | CRM Magazine

Transforming Customer Connections

By Adam Mertz, senior director of product marketing, Jive Software

As marketings quest to accelerate new and

repeat sales remains unchanged, the means to
that end has entirely shifted over the past few
years. This fundamental shift can be tied, in
part, to digital innovation; however, its not
just about technology. Its about the lifestyle
shift, and what could be considered peoples
workstyle shift which Ill define as a persons
expectation and preference in how they work
and engage with a company.
This article explores how companies are
looking to transform how they engage with
customers and partners while connecting to
their existing marketing automation systems
specifically centering on three undeniable facts
that are the crux for the transformation:
1. Customer conversations and
engagement, not marketing
content, is king
The marketing funnel, technically, is
dead. Yes, prospective customers still move
through a buying cycle, but the difference is
that they have many more ways to learn about
a company throughout the buying process and
to connect with existing customers. Content
strategy is still important, but a conversation
and engagement strategy is now a pre-req. For
example, the majority of customers now expect
companies to offer social customer support (as
reported in The Social Customer Service Year
in Review: Insights for your 2014 Strategy).
The best path for companies is to move
away from the separate knowledge base,
support portal, partner portal, customer
blog, idea place, docs system, etc. and move
toward creating a central hub, or owned
online community for customers and partners.
Regardless of the technology used, there are
three key elements to a winning conversation
and engagement strategy:

Connect: Here is where youll build
relationships and create value among
customers and partners. Youll also
empower individuals to discover people
and information that matter to them.

Communicate: Through open
communications, youll ensure customers
and partners have access to the right
information at the right time. From there,
you can turn the communication into
accessible and valuable intellectual property.


Collaborate: Your customers are the
single greatest untapped resource for
driving innovation. And by really listening
you can not only create better products
but also optimize your marketing
approaches by adapting to their needs.
2. Within two years, the CMO will spend
more on technology than the CIO
According to Gartner, the CMO becoming
the #1 technology buyer is not only inevitable,
its right around the corner. CRM, marketing
automation, mobile, online communities,
customer analytics, and other tech purchases
are all driving this shift.
Additionally, a shift thats occurred
since 2011 and one that continues is the
investment focus on cloud technologies
where the hosting and technical aspects are
provided as a service vs. being handled by
the company. This trend means less internal
IT involvement while ensuring key systems
automatically stay up to date.
With this shift, and as the pace of
innovation by technology vendors accelerates
at an ever-increasing rate, the appetite for
building it yourself continues to decrease.
An analogy to this trend is this would you
prefer to buy a pre-built laptop where you can
choose a few key add-ons (memory, etc.) or
order a box of parts to then, with a lot of work,
build your own computer. Theoretically youd
get exactly what you want with the latter option
that is, if you didnt make any mistakes as you
put the computer together. However, it would
require the right skills, a long time to build
and custom on-going support. This is where
the old adage time is money comes into
play, underscoring that marketing leaders need
pre-built, cloud-ready, auto-upgraded solutions
to drive more business faster vs. being slowed
down by systems and support.
3. Connectedness between conversations
and marketing systems will be required
Ultimately marketers need to make
technology decisions that help them stay
on top of customer behaviors and emerging
market trends. This is where the dots get
connected between the marketing automation
system and the conversations occurring.
Intuitive and seamless connectedness
between customer dialog and the marketing

automation systems creates a competitive

advantage. Heres why companies should
connect the dots:
Although its hard to actually collect
much pertinent contact information from
a conversation occurring on Twitter or
Facebook, the opposite is true when a
company creates an online community, or
central customer hub, where they then can
more easily connect an engaged persons
profile information into the marketing
automation system. At that point, tomorrows
leading companies will have additional criteria to
score and rate leads and contacts.
The feedback and thoughts shared by a
customer in the central hub is information that
can be leveraged for further communications
and campaigns. At this point, the company
has both profile information and activity data
to better segment target audiences within their
marketing automation system.
Additionally, most companies will soon
be automatically tying activity within their
marketing campaigns, such as webcasts or
click-thrus on email campaigns, to rewards,
points, and potentially access to certain places
within their community.
Where many marketing organizations are
failing today is that they are not connecting
digital engagement investments to metrics
that drive the business - lead generation and
opportunity creation. And its not their fault.
For instance, all the investment made in social
over the past few years has often translated to
either little ROI or at a minimum an unknown
quantity when it comes to results. The roadmap
for customer interaction moving forward will
demand major improvement in this area,
otherwise marketers will risk showing up at
the executive table with little proof that their
investments are driving business results.
Weve taken a strategic look at the reasons
for and value of connecting marketing
automation with customer and partner
engagement. The rewards for accomplishing
this transformation can equate to a company
thriving vs. struggling to survive in the
coming years. And my last piece of advice is
simple move fast but deliberately, and
always be open to embracing new workstyles
and the technologies that encourage them.

Sponsored Content

CRM Magazine | November 2014

WP23

Managing the New

Customer Experience
with PureCloudSM
Everything about the customer experience
is changing, continually, and at a faster pace
than many companies can keep up with. Its
Gen X, Y, Z and Millennial. Its mobile,
social and global. Its more interaction
channels to choose from, Big Data to gauge
consumer behaviors, and tools like faceted
searches that make online experiences easier
and more enjoyable. And like it or not, the
whole experience must be instant.
The trick for businesses, then, is
managing it all to engage customers
completely, on their terms.
Managing the new customer experience
is the approach Interactive Intelligence
has taken with its PureCloud suite of
enterprise-grade cloud services. In using
the power and breadth of Amazon Web
Services, PureCloud delivers just about
everything a business needs for effective
communications, collaboration, and
customer engagement. But what makes
PureClouds collective services so different
is the way theyre aimed at todays
consumers, and what they want their
experience to be.
MULTIPLE CHANNELS OF INTERACTION

PureCloud allows organizations to handle

all channels of customer engagement in one
integrated service: inbound calls, outbound
calls, email interactions, web chats, text
messages, instant messages, social media,
and faxes. Organizations can easily engage
customers in whatever way suits them,
while tracking all interactions centrally.
PureCloud also offers strong integration to
popular social media services, making it easy
to monitor your organizations Facebook
page and the Twitter stream and quickly
respond as needed.
CONTACT CENTER

The PureCloud Contact Center

automation service handles every aspect
of customer interaction. Speech-enabled

voice self-service (IVR). Automatic call

distribution (ACD). Skills-based queuing
and routing of phone calls, emails, web
chats, text messages, and video interactions.
Recording and archival of all interaction
types. Real-time monitoring and supervision,
insightful data analytics, speech analytics,
and more.
MOBILITY

For customers, incorporate customer

service into existing mobile apps, or create
new apps. Customers can then access
self-help services and request callbacks or
other customer service interactions. For
employees, PureCloud provides native apps
for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 8.
These apps enable workers to access the
corporate directory, instant message other
employees, manage phone calls, search and
view corporate documents, and complete
workflow assignments. In effect, employees
are able to manage work, along with any
associated customer service functions,
fromanywhere.
SOCIAL MEDIA

PureCloud Social Customer Service is a

unique way to provide VIP or conciergelevel service to your best customers. It
allows these customers to see photos of and
information about your agents and then to
choose the agent with whom theyd prefer to
interact. You control what information you
expose for each agent. Customer interaction
requests are queued and routed just like
an incoming phone call or other type of
interaction. Customers can access Social
Customer Service from a web page or from
their mobile devices, and choose to interact
by phone call, email, web chat, orvideo.
CASE MANAGEMENT

Handling customer interactions in

contact centers is only the first step
in providing an exceptional customer
experience. Case management allows
organizations to pull customer interactions

of all types together into a single, integrated

view of the customer experience. For
example, your organization might send
an email generating a phone call from the
customer. This might later lead to a web
chat from the customer on the same topic,
followed by a call to the customer from
your organization. Without an overarching
case management solution, theres no way
to tie all these interactions together to
understand the customers experience and
how well your organization achieved the
customers original goal. PureCloud Case
Management provides this birds-eye view,
allowing you to optimize into customer
experience results. Case Management
works in conjunction with PureCloud
Contact Center, Content Management,
and Workflow to offer a level of insight not
possible with less capable services.
CUSTOMER PORTAL

The PureCloud Customer Portal is

the ultimate destination for customer
engagement. With this service,
organizations easily create a customizable
customer engagement platform accessible
via standard web browsers and directly
from mobile devices. The Customer Portal
leverages the latest in social media and
gamification techniques and provides:
Registration and login for customers
requiring authentication with
integration to your CRM system.
FAQs that allow customers to search
for answers to frequently asked
questions.
Knowledgebases and collections of
content including documents and
videos.
Direct access to customer service
representatives with PureCloud
Social Customer Service available as a
configurable widget. This provides a
dynamic view of the agents currently
available who meet the customers
requirements, with configurable
display of agents names (or

WP24

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November 2014 | CRM Magazine

pseudonyms), photos, skills, and other

selected background information.
Direct access to PureCloud Case
Management as a configurable widget
from which customers can open and
manage trouble tickets and other types
of cases.
A complete social media interface
for employees, affiliates, and even
expert customers. Topics of interest
(product lines, etc.) can be configured
with comment threads, attached
documents, and so on.
INTERACTION RECORDING

Monitoring customer interactions for

quality these days requires a business to
record all interactions across all channels,
yet still be able to choose exactly which
interactions are to be recorded. PureCloud
provides these capabilities. Organizations
can record voice calls, web chats, text
messages, instant messages, and social media
interactions. As importantly, an organization
can configure policies to determine whether
(and which) interactions are stored in the
Amazon cloud or on-premises. Cloud
storage can take advantage of Amazon
Glacier to store recordings and keep them
available for years at low cost. All recordings
are encrypted for maximumsecurity.
SPEECH ANALYTICS

A newer aspect of monitoring customer

interactions for quality and customer
sentiment is speech analytics. PureCloud
provides built-in real-time speech analytics
that automatically send alerts when various
words and phrases are detected during a
customer service interaction. Alerts can be
triggered differently for utterances detected
on the customer side of a call or the agent
side. Speech analytics results are stored with
recordings, and are usable for searching or
data analytics. PureClouds speech analytics
capabilities are available for a variety of
languages, meaning they can be used for
consumer markets globally.

BIG DATA ANALYTICS

Businesses require powerful data analytics

capabilities to spot customer trends and
unlock value in the masses of data they collect.
PureCloud logs every facet of customer
interactions, plus critical information
for document access and cross-company
workflow. Organizations can additionally
use visualization technologies and analytic
tools such as Hadoop and Google Analytics
to make sense of valuable information, and
even to make predications based on it.
FACETED SEARCH

If youve used Amazon.com, youre

familiar with faceted search whether you
know the term or not. Faceted search
allows you to quickly cull through a large
set of search results by clicking on various
attributes to dynamically narrow the results.
For your online customers, they may only be
interested in results that apply to a particular
product line, a certain timeframe, or even
an individual employee. PureCloud employs
faceted search throughout its suite of services
in order to provide a consistent customer
experience, and to make sure your business
derives value from all the data itcollects.
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Collecting knowledge and making it

available to customers and employees
is increasingly a requirement for the
customer experience. PureCloud
Content Management allows you to
automatically create and maintain
knowledge management services in the
form of intelligent search and FAQs. This
knowledge can be selectively made available
to customers, partners, and other third
parties for self-help, and for the creation of
social communities.
DISTRIBUTED CONTENT MANAGEMENT

PureCloud provides an optional

content management service that provides
a centralized, cloud-based index of
important documents spread throughout

the enterprise. Organizations also get

support for Amazon-based storage of
selected documents in the cloud, with rapid
access from anywhere in the world, and
with document encryption for maximum
security. PureCloud further provides the
ability to store documents on local file
servers or storage networks, or in existing
systems such as SharePoint or FileNet,
while still taking advantage of centralized
management and searching.
WORKFLOW

Recall that todays customers come from

generations in which technology has made
everything instant. Automating key
business processes helps keep that pace.
PureCloud Workflow is a powerful means of
visually laying out business processes and then
automatically pushing work to employees
throughout the organization. PureCloud
Workflow uses the same advanced queuing
and routing technology available in
PureCloud Contact Center to choose the
employee to whom a given task is assigned
based on skills and availability. Employees
can automatically be alerted to assigned work,
and then complete many assignments even
from mobile devices. PureCloud Workflow
operates synergistically with other PureCloud
services such as Content Management to
provide a comprehensive solution for
processautomation.
This article is adapted from the PureCloud
white paper by Don Brown, CEO of
Interactive Intelligence, Inc. Note that
the white paper, as well as this article, are
forward-looking narratives intended to
help the reader understand the vision for
Interactive Intelligence PureCloud. Neither
narrative makes the attempt to differentiate
those services and features currently
available in PureCloud from those that are
still under development.
Download the full PureCloud white paper at
www.inin.com.

Sponsored Content

CRM Magazine | November 2014

WP25

Customer Experience
Management:
A ThreeLegged Stool
When it comes to your business, its a
no-brainer that customers are the successful
ingredient to success or failure. So why
are companies still struggling to keep their
customers happy?
Its because most companies fail to view
the customer experience as a multifaceted
strategya three-legged stool, with each leg
of the stool an equally critical component in
finding and retaining customers, hopefully
for a very long time. Without one of the
legs, the stool would fall.
LEG #1: MARKETING.

Companies often invest most heavily in

their marketing and sales functions. After all,
these are the folks whose positions exist solely
to acquire more customers. Most marketing
teams use innovative and sophisticated
systems to find prospective buyers, then they
hand them over to the sales team.
LEG #2: SALES.

The sales team will often go to the ends

of the earth to develop relationships with
qualified prospects and, over time and
with great care, convert them to paying
customers. In many respects, sales is an
obvious part of any companys customer
experience strategy.
LEG #3: CUSTOMER SUPPORT.

Once a customer signs on, its up to the

customer support team to understand their
unique business needs and care for them
throughout the rest of the relationship.
In many companies this stage is the
weakest link in their customer strategy, yet
its arguably the most critical. Customer
service (if done well) will have the longest
relationship with a customer. It is during
this stage of the customer experience where
customer issues are most resolvable and
relationships the most recoverable. It is also
where customer turn-over happens the most.
If you lose a sale, you never really had
the customer anyway. But if you lose a

customer, youve lost not only todays

business, but also future sales and possibly
even reputation.
So how can you equip your customer
support team with the tools and resources
to make customer service an equally strong
leg of the three-legged customer experience
stool? Here are a few best practices:
Understand the whole customer.

Most customer service teams are built

around individual interactions, focused
entirely on tickets. A customer reaches
out to the support team with an issue, a
ticket is assigned, the issue is addressed,
and the support representative moves
on to the next ticket. In a business to
business environment, this limits visibility
at the customer level. Imagine 5 different
people at the same company open tickets
about the same issue. A ticket-based
model means 5 different agents are
addressing the 5 different tickets, and no
one is aware that this is a recurring issue
for the customer, because they cant see
tickets at a customer level. So when the
customer leaves them for a competitor,
everyone is surprised they never even
knew there was a problem. By contrast,
the most strategic customer support
teams manage issues at a customer level not just one problem at a time.

Automate operations.

Bringing your customer support

operations together within one unified
system ensures that every customer
support representative has the information
they need at their fingertips - and that
the information is the most current.
Cloud-based software is especially vital
for companies whose support agents are
spread among multiple offices or even
multiple regions of the world.

Collaborate as a support team.

Customers want their issues resolved as

quickly as possible. They dont want to
be escalated through multiple agents.

The best customer support teams use a

collaborative approach where support
agents can get answers from colleagues;
internal groups can have conversations
about customers or tickets; and product
developers and sales team members
are kept apprised of customer issues.
Exceptional service draws upon the
collective wisdom of the group and
enables first-call resolution.
Anticipate the customers needs
before they happen.

Superior support teams anticipate

customer pain points and develop
solutions before the customer even
realizes it. Look for customer support
software for your team that helps you
track issues by product, user, or company
to identify trends as theyre developing,
and manage your customers at a
company level.

Even if your customer experience stool is

a little wobbly right now, by moving your
service team to a more collaborative and
customer-centric model, youll deliver
support thats as integral to the customer
experience as marketing and sales. After all,
better support leads to happy customers, and
happy customers lead to more sales.
TeamSupport is an award winning, Webbased service-desk solution optimized for
team collaboration. For a free two-week trial,
visit www.teamsupport.com/web-helpdesk-support-free-trial/.

WP26

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November 2014 | CRM Magazine

Unlocking The Contact

Centers Hidden Asset:

How Multichannel Analytics Can Translate the

Voice of the Customer into Business Intelligence
Think talk is cheap? Not in the modern
contact center where multichannel
analytics solutions are unlocking a wealth
of wisdom hiding in plain sight: the voice of
the customer!

wide. Best of all, these programs are intuitive

and easy to use. Executives and managers
in all areas of the company can reap the
rewards: from the contact center all the way
to the executive suite.

A business information revolution is

underway. Thanks to sophisticated new
analytics programs, vast stores of previously
ignored customer data are being transformed
into business intelligence gold. Business
decision-makers are reaping exponential
rewards, from operational efficiencies
and product development to customer
interactions and management processes. At
the center of this revolutionthe spring
from which this rich data flowsis the
modern organizational contact center.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER: APPLYING

MULTICHANNEL ANALYTICS TO BOOST
CONTACT CENTER PERFORMANCE

Theres just one problem. The vast

majority of contact centers ignore the ocean
of unstructured data they collect. Most
organizations only analyze 12 percent of
their total customer data (Forrester), with
other estimates putting the number closer to
a mere one percent.

Monitoring call compliance is easy with

pre-defined searches, enabling compliance
managers to reduce risk thanks to automated
precise findings. Multi-channel analytics
solutions also allow managers to swiftly
identify the most relevant conversations and
agent actions for evaluation. In addition,
analytics solutions improve the customer
experience through agent and operation
optimization, as well as reduce call escalations
and increase first contact resolutions.

WHY THE DISPARITY?

In the past, analyzing customer data was

difficult, if not impossible, to convert to
useful information. This was especially true
with voice data. Customer calls that, by their
very nature, are unstructured and complex:
full of meaning, but also extremely varied in
syntax and structure.
Times have changed. Todays analytics
programsfor speech, text and desktop
now provide cost- and time-effective methods
for analyzing data. Instead of employing
overwhelmed contact center managers to
manually slog through a tiny portion of
available data, analytics programs quickly and
efficiently filter enormous amounts of organic
data to determine what is useful.
In fact, analytics programs, such as
Calabrio Analytics, can convert 100
percent of a contact centers data into useful
information that can be easily analyzed and
used for better decision-making enterprise

Contact centers benefit tremendously

from sophisticated analytics software.
Compliance and quality management
improve with the addition of Workforce
Optimization tools, such as the integrated
suite from Calabrio, which Gartner
positioned as a Visionary in its Magic
Quadrant assessment of similar tools on the
market today.

solution, consider Calabrio. One of the

fastest-growing analytics providers, Calabrio
designs its integrated suite to deliver all of
these benefits and more. Calabrio ONE
provides direct value to front line agents,
supervisors, specialists, customer experience
executives and other key stakeholders,
including sales, marketing, human resources,
legal/compliance and operations.
With an intuitive personalized dashboard,
Calabrio Analytics, part of the Calabrio
ONE Workforce Optimization Suite,
highlights priorities, pinpoints problems and
uncovers opportunities. Powered by a series
of clear, intuitive, analytics-enabled widgets,
the solution enables everyone with a stake
in the company to clearly see whats critical.
Flexible, user-oriented reporting allows
users to easily customize the form in which
information is presented. A unique webbased architecture allows contact centers to
easily integrate new applications and features
as business needs evolve.
Dont be left in the dark. Use
multichannel analytics to shine a light on the
voice of your customer and accelerate your
organization ahead.

For all of these benefits to be realized,

in the contact center and enterprise wide,
data analysis from multiple channels must
be accessible. In other words, analysis must
support problem solving by being easy to
obtain, set up, understand and share.

About The Calabrio Innovation Center

Innovation requires a commitment to
continuous improvements. Resources like
the Calabrio Innovation Center provide
customer service organizations with keen
insights derived from thousands of customer
service organizations, practical technology
knowledge, and expert resources to help
you bring innovation to your contact center.
Calabrio can help you make vision and
innovation the driving force that takes your
business to the next level and gives you the
competitive edge. Thats the standard we
hold ourselves to each and every day, and
the commitment we bring to each customer
engagement. Were inspired by results driven
by that standard every day, working with
innovative organizations just like yours.

If that sounds like a lot to expect from a

single workforce optimization and analytics

Contact Us
calabrio.com

Beyond the contact center, voice analytics

yield business intelligence for the entire
organization to help executives recognize and
act on industry trendsbefore competitors.
Not only can analytics provide marketing
campaign and messaging validation, it can
support customer retention by detecting early
signs of defections.
MAKING MULTICHANNEL
ANALYTICS ACCESSIBLE

Sponsored Content

CRM Magazine | November 2014

WP27

CULTIVATING CUSTOMER
ENGAGEMENT
Best Practices to Help You Get Started

Todays customers can switch brands

with the swipe of a screen or a click of
a button, making it critical to develop
strategies for engaging them. But customer
engagement requires more than just
surveying consumers, sending out tweets, or
rolling out rewards programs. Cultivating
true customer engagement requires a
multifaceted approach that involves many
areas of your business. Here are some
best practices that can help you lay the
groundwork for developing a customer
engagement program:
1. Identify your assets. You arent
likely to engage anyone without knowing
something about themand the more you
know, the better your chances of success.
Valuable data exists in many places within
your organization, and you want to be able
to tap into it to develop a clearer, more
defined view of your customers. Identify
the different types of information you have,
such as customer identity data, transactional
information (online and offline), online
activity information (including social
media), customer feedback, and customer
value and history. Dont overlook billing,
ERP, and service provisioning systems. If
your organization operates multiple lines of
business, youll also need to factor this into
your assessment.

Be sure to note where the data resides,

in which formats, and which stakeholders
are responsible for collecting and
maintaining it. If you can identify the
most useful subset of data sources across
your enterprise, you can use it to help you
deliver much more targeted, contextual
servicea critical component for building
customer engagement.
2. Leverage your internal resources.

Employees can greatly impact the quality

of the customer experience. Since training
and coaching staff can be critical, now is
the time to assess the effectiveness of your
efforts. Are you providing employees with

the opportunity to
extend and enhance
their skills? Do your key
performance indicators
measure behaviors that
actually foster customer
engagement, or are
they focused solely on
delivering service at the
lowest cost possible?
Staff empowerment
is another key factor.
Employees need to have some level of
input and control over their work to be
able to engage customers effectively. This
can mean being able to go off script and
make decisions without always having to
ask a supervisor. It also means being able
to access information quickly and easily
to make decisions that are appropriate
for the customer and situation at hand.
Customers dont want to wait for
extended periods of time while a service
representative hunts down information
or struggles to decide the next step in the
process. Give your employees the tools
and skills they need to drive engagement.
3. Pick a starting point. Even if
you offer customers a variety of ways to
interact with your organization, it may
be more practical to focus on optimizing
customer engagement in one channel at a
time. Maximize the benefits you get from
that insight, and then move on to the
nextchannel.

Begin by systematically capturing and

analyzing data from the channel youve
selected to obtain key insights that can
be operationalized across your business.
Plan ways to leverage this information,
and be sure to engage the stakeholders
you identified back in step one to help
facilitate the internalization of the data.
By gathering and assessing data both
structured and unstructured across
channels, you can gain actionable insight

into customer sentiments and the overall

customer journey, then use it to drive
customer engagement.
4. Take advantage of technology.

Verint Systems and KANA, A Verint

Company, offer a portfolio of customer
engagement optimization solutions to help
transform customer engagement in todays
omnichannel service environment. It
includes workforce optimization, customer
analytics, and customer service solutions
that can provide your organization with
valuable insight for enriching customer
interactions, optimizing the workforce, and
improving business processes. These
powerful solutions can help your
organization engage customers across
multiple channels and deliver consistent,
contextual, and personalized experiences
that can drive sales and revenue. Contact
Verint today to learn more.
Verint. Powering Actionable Intelligence.
Verint Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: VRNT) is a
global leader in Actionable Intelligence
solutions for customer engagement
optimization, security intelligence, and fraud,
risk and compliance. Today, more than 10,000
organizations in over 180 countries use Verint
solutions to improve enterprise performance
and make the world a safer place.
1-800-4VERINT
www.verint.com
2014 Verint Systems Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

WP28

Sponsored Content

November 2014 | CRM Magazine

Empower Agents
to Enhance the
Customer Experience
Organizations know the value and
importance of exceptional customer
service. And, todays customers expect
that exceptional service to be available at
any time and on any channel. This is why
companies have implemented tools to help
with this, such as Web self-service, live
chat and others. But, sometimes, while
focusing on improving the technology,
organizations can overlook a still-critical
piece of customer service the agent.
Organizations must ensure that the
agent doesnt get overlooked when
implementing new and improved
customer service initiatives, and should
also look to implement an agent desktop
to improve agent efficiency and provide a
better customer experience.
IMPROVE AGENT EFFICIENCY

Despite all of the available ways to

interact with an organization, many
customers still prefer to contact a live
agent, sometimes while shopping but
usually when they have a problem. It is
just comforting to speak to a person in a
time of need.
However, that comforting feeling can
quickly turn into frustration and anger if
the agent isnt able to provide answers or
solve an issue in a timely manner. Or if an
agent cant find the necessary information
and has to keep transferring the customer
from one agent to another.
An agent desktop can help eliminate
these issues, as it helps provide unified
access to all the applications and
information required by the agent across
different channels. Agents no longer
have to switch from screen to screen and
application to application while searching
for answers.
In addition, all of the various types
of customer cases, be it a service outage,

billing issue or another, are presented to

the agent so he or she can quickly open a
new case. Agents shouldnt have to switch
from one screen to another to simply open
a new case.
An agent desktop can also provide
scripts that guide agents through the
entire customer service process. The
information in these scripts can be
updated live and in real time on the
agents screen, helping the move through
the customer request quickly or solving
the issue on first contact.
Finally, managers can also take
advantage of an agent desktop. Process
management steps can be created to
ensure that all customer cases are logged
and monitored using service-level
agreements. In addition, managers can
monitor live interactions between agents
and customers, helping ensure that the
agent is not only working efficiently, but
also providing the quality experience that
your customer expect.
PROVIDE A BETTER
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Organizations know that providing

an exceptional customer experience is
critical to their business. By empowering
agents with an agent desktop, they can
provide a better, more personalized
customer experience.
When a customer contacts your
organization, the agent can quickly
and easily access all of that customers
information, including the customers
profile, a list of all previous interactions,
and all of the products and services used by
the customer. Armed with this information,
agents can avoid asking redundant
questions and quickly get to the heart of
the customers issue. An agent at a financial
institution, for example, wont need to
ask which type of account the customer

has with them. That information will

automatically be presented to the agent.
In addition, with a full customer
profile, the agent can become a potential
salesperson, providing proactive service
or targeted offers. For example, when
a customer contacts his or her wireless
provider with a question about paying
a bill online, the agent can see the
customers data plan and offer an upgraded
plan based on the customers usage.
Finally, with the myriad channels
available to customers, an agent desktop can
route a customer from one channel to the
agent who is most skilled for that channel.
When a customer contacts your organization
via a live chat, for example, the customer
expects that the agent on the other end is
experienced in live chat and can quickly and
efficiently navigate through the session.
CONCLUSION

Providing an outstanding customer

experience is more critical than ever to a
companys success. While numerous tools
and solutions are available to help improve
your customer experience, overlooking the
role of the agent could be costly. Provide
your agents with the tools they need to
give your customers the experience they
want and deserve.
Contact KANA, A Verint Company:
info@kana.com
North American Sales: 866-672-3791
North American HQ: 800-737-8738
EMEA: +44 1628 509 006
APAC: +61 2 92 649 566
www.kana.com
Connect with KANA, A Verint Company:
@KANASoftware
KANA Software
KANA Software, Inc.
KANASoftware

Sponsored Content

CRM Magazine | November 2014

WP29

Happy Customers,
Happy Brand

By Ann Ruckstuhl, SVP & CMO, LiveOps

Disney. Zappos. Nordstrom. Apple.
Trader Joes. State Farm. Amazon.com.
Recognizable brands, yes. But different
industries, different products, different
target customers. What do they all have in
common? Widespread acknowledgement
of providing top-notch customer service
for every customer, every time.
Theres an old saying: Happy wife,
happy life. It also applies to customers:
Happy customers, happy brand. The
customer service experience can vary
greatly among companies. Brands
must remember that customers usually
have a choice, and will do business
with the organization that treats them
best. What can brands do to treat their
customers better than the competition?
Here are five best practices in customer
experiencemanagement.
ACT, DONT REACT

Brands and their agents must engage

with customers in real timeand
real-time contextual routing can help
them engage. Whether its responding
to a tweet, sending an automatic follow
up email when a customer has left
the website with product still in their
shopping cart or opening a live chat
session to keep the customer from
leaving the sitethere are many things
brands can do to engage customers and
save sales. Real-time customer experience
management may seem like a mouthful,
but it pays dividends.
PROVIDE AGENTS WITH
MULTICHANNEL INSIGHT

Happy customers will stay with a

brand for their lifetime and become
brand advocates. The best way to create
those loyal for life customers is to provide

outstanding customer serviceand

agents need outstanding tools and
technologies to do so. Empower your
agents with the right tools, like an
integrated, multichannel agent desktop.
When agents can quickly and easily
access information, they can respond
to customers quickly and effectively.
Being able to view customer information
and the history of interactions across
channels, and then respond on any of
those channels can be effortless. The
ability to pivot a customer interaction
from one communication channel
to another (from a public tweet to a
phone call to a private message follow
up), all from the same screen, means a
360-degree view and response across
channels is not only possible, but simple
and efficient.
KEEP THOSE TOOLS SHARP

There seems to be no end to the

tools brands can implement to help
with excellent customer service. CRM
integration with customer service
operations can improve the customer
experience with integrated screen
pop, which provides insight into each
customer, such as a customer profile,
case details and interaction history.
Agents are able to offer personalized
service when they can access more
information in one place. There is also
co-browsing, which allows an agent to
connect to a customers browser and
show them around a brands website
or even help them fill out and submit a
form. The right tools help create the best
customerexperience.
LIVE SERVICE IS OFTEN THE
NEXT BEST ACTION

Not all customer interactions are the

same. They can take place on different
channels, with wildly different issues

at different times of the day. While its

helpful to have scripts to respond to
and interact with customers on various
issues, sometimes those scripts just
dont fit the situation. Thats when its
essential to have live agents interacting
with customersnot chat bots or
automated systems. A live agent can
dive into an issue and work to get the
customer to the next best action,
whatever it may be. That may be the
difference between saving a customer
relationship and losing itand we all
know its easier and more cost effective
to keep a happy customer than gain a
new customer. Check out this handy
Customer Experience ROI calculator to
learn more (http://www.cxengage.com/
customer-experience-roi-calculator).
MAINTAIN A CULTURE OF
CUSTOMER OBSESSION

Those brands mentioned at the

beginning are known to be obsessed
with customer service. Most brands
have some level of obsession with
their customers, since customers are
the reason they are in business. Soon,
customer obsession will become a
mandate for brands to survive and
thrive. Brands will have to walk the talk
to keep satisfied customers.
Happy customers, happy brand.
There is some work involved to reach
that goaland now youre prepared.
Like the best things in life, it may not be
easy, but it will be worth it.

For more information on tools and

technologies for outstanding customer
service, visit http://www.liveops.com/whychoose-liveops.

WP30

Sponsored Content

November 2014 | CRM Magazine

Engaging Customers
with a Virtual Assistant:
10 TIPS TO GO FROM
VALET TO WALLET

Trick question: Who works 24x7, engages

customers and answer questions in a smart
and fun way, gives website tours, offers
relevant web pages, and never calls in sick?
Answer: A virtual assistant (VA)!
Also called chatbots, avatars, and
concierges, VAs help businesses wow
customers with distinctive self-service,
increase brand equity, and cut costs. eGains
award-winning VAs are even multilingual
and, unlike other alternatives, integrate
with human-assisted interaction channels
for a seamless customer journey! As a
pioneer in this domain, eGain has compiled
best practices in VA deployment over the
years. Here are some popular ones:
1. GET AN ANYTIME, ANYWHERE,
ANYHOW VALET.

Deploy the VA not just on your website,

but also mobile and social channels. VAs
are perfect as personal attendants. They
can greet customers, chat with them (good
VAs can discuss the weather, too!), show
customers around, and answer questions.
2. MAKE THE VA YOUR
BRAND AMBASSADOR.

VAs are meant to represent your brand.

Best-in-class VA solutions include offthe-shelf avatars, letting you choose from
cartoon or realistic characters, and static
or animated options. You could choose
to design your own VA, even model it on
your spokesperson if you have one for the
brand. Good solutions also let you easily
create a conversation style and tone that is
unique to your brand.
3. DONT BURY YOUR VA IN
THE HELP SECTION.

Lead with the VA. Make it available

on every page. Better still, make it

proactively offer help and tours of your

website. On your mobile app, you could
even use the VA to start and guide all
customer interactions.
4. KEEP IT SNAPPY.

One of the main reasons consumers like

VAs is their speed. Pick a solution whose
infrastructure will allow performance to
scale with system load.
5. BE UNDERSTANDING.

VAs can do their job only if they

understand natural language queries. Make
sure yours is also tolerant of bad spelling
and grammar. Enable various modes of
conversation: modern VAs support text
to text, speech to text, text to speech, and
speech to speech communication modes.
6. BE POLITE.

This is most important when the VA

is unable to understand the question.
The following real-life example borders
on rudeness: Please, one idea at a time.
Instead, say, Im sorry, but that is a rather
complicated request. It will be easier for me
to help, if you could break it up into a series
of simple questions.
7. SHOW RATHER THAN TALK.

Keep answers shortespecially for

mobile and speech interactions. Instead,
push relevant pages. Many customers dont
know their way around; in fact, that may be
the reason they summoned help!
8. BE CONSISTENT.

The VA should talk the same talk as

your other agents and self-service options.
Make sure your VA does not run off a
siloed, inconsistent knowledge baseit
should be based on a unified platform for
multichannel customer engagement and
knowledge management. Provide longer

knowledge base articles as links to keep the

VAs answers short.
9. BE CONNECTED.

For complex questions, make sure that

the VA knows its limitations and can
escalate seamlessly to live agents. The
customer should not have to repeat context
in escalations. The VA should also be able
to direct the customer to more advanced
self-service methods such as guided help.
10. PERSONALIZE.

Good VAs can remember a detail such

as the customers name, once it is given to
them, and use it through the conversation.
In authenticated portions of your website,
you could integrate the VA with other
systems to provide account information
such as details of the customers phone plan
if you are a telecom company. The next
step would be to make targeted offers to the
customer through the VA.
A good virtual assistant is like PG
Wodehouses famous butler, Jeeves: Always
present yet never in the way. It is
knowledgeable, capable of keeping up with
the workload, and able to summon
additional help when needed. Top-rated
VAs provide all this and more, and are an
integral part of a unified multichannel
customer engagement hub. Isnt it time
your sites valet added value to the customer
experience and your business?
About eGain
eGain customer engagement solutions
power digital transformation for leading
brands. Our top-rated cloud applications
for social, mobile, web, and contact centers
help clients deliver connected customer
journeys in a multichannel world. To find out
more, visit http://www.egain.com.

Sponsored Content

CRM Magazine | November 2014

WP31

Three Ways to Improve

Your Customer Experience

Delivering an excellent customer

experience is now important across
all phases of the customer lifecycle.
Increasingly, it is service organizations
involved in these touchpoints.
Unfortunately, most organizations
neglect to monitor and improve their
customer service experience.
If your service organization is like many
others, you actually do damage to your
customer experience every time a customer
contacts you for help. Customers are
dissatisfied, because they have a disjointed,
disconnected customer experience when
they make contact, especially across
more than one channel. Employees
are inefficient, because they deal with
multiple, overly complicated systems that
get in the way of delivering a high-quality
customer experience. Inconsistent systems
bog down IT teams struggling with
changing business requirements and an
interminable backlog of requests.
We often fail to deliver customer service
suitable for this digital age, putting up
obstacles that require sometimes Herculean
levels of customer effort to work through
internal deficiencies. So how can you
deliver a satisfying, efficient, and consistent
customer experience?
To deliver a great customer experience
and overcome these obstacles, your
customer service should invest in three
areas: the Power to Engage, the Power to
Simplify, and the Power to Change.
THE POWER TO ENGAGE

Customer service has long stopped

being confined to phone calls. Nearly
three quarters of all customers use three or
more channels for customer service issues.
Whether its mobile apps, social media,
instant message, video chat, co-browsing
on your website, or even in-person your
customer service needs to be able to switch

between these channels without restarting

their conversation with you each time.
You need to break down the
organizational silos that detract from
your customer experience. If you can
empower your employees with the right
information, guidance, and authority, and
connect them to centralized information
no matter what the channel, then your
agent can connect the dots instead of
hoping the customer can do it.
THE POWER TO SIMPLIFY

Take a walk around many contact

centers and youll see some decidedly
un-digital artifacts. Screens are crowded
with way too many applications. Sticky
notes and workarounds get tacked to
cubicle walls. Many have binders full of
company policies, procedures, or special
product offers. Manual processes and
paper shuffling take care of whatever
agents cant by themselves.
To solve this problem, at a minimum
your contact center needs a unified
desktop that pulls all your customer
information into one view. But even
thats not enough simplifying, because
youre still overwhelming your agents with
information. You should provide intelligent
guidance to your agents so they can make
sense of that information. Tell them what
to say next, step by step, based not only on
the customers issue but also based on your
business goals for that specific customer.
Automate busy work and take care of
decisions that dont require their experience,
so they can spend less time escalating
or chasing workarounds and more time
delivering a quality customer experience.
THE POWER TO CHANGE

Any failure to adapt to changes limited

time offers, new policies and procedures,
exceptions to the rules is a terrible blow
to your customers expectations. Yet every

customer service organization faces change.

Whoevers maintaining your systems,
in traditional do-it-yourself software
development, is constantly struggling to
keep up with the requests.
You need to eliminate the lag time
between when your business decides it needs
a fix in place, and when you can deploy those
changes to your business. You want those
changes those new products, decision
points, and processes to propagate across
all channels, so you arent simultaneously
reprogramming how you interact with
customers across separate silos of disjointed
customer experiences. For that to work,
you need an environment in which business
and IT can work together, with a common
understanding of the steps in place from
point A to point B. That way your team can
rapidly adapt and quickly deploy changes.
Your service organization is at the heart of
most touchpoints in your customer journey.
But to deliver a superior customer experience,
youll need to meet the increasing expectations
of this digital age. By engaging customers,
simplifying operations, and quickly adapting
to constantly changing market needs, you
can deliver a satisfying, efficient, and
consistent customer service experience for
your connected customers.
About Pega
Pegasystems Build for Change Platform
is the heart of Better Business Software. It
delivers business agility and empowers leading
organizations to rapidly close execution gaps
and seize new opportunities. Pegasystems
leverages its recognized leadership in Business
Process Management (BPM), Multi-Channel
Customer Relationship Management (CRM),
Business Rules, and Adaptive Analytics to
uniquely give its clients the power to engage
customers, simplify operations and Build For
Change. For more information, please visit us
at www.pega.com.

WP32

Sponsored Content

November 2014 | CRM Magazine

Envisioning an Exceptional
Customer Experience
from the Outside In
Organizations often develop a customer
service strategy based on internal resources
and budget constraints. A more successful
approach is to first determine what type
of experience you want customers to have
when interacting with your organization.
The customer experience should be one
that sets your company apart from the
competition and is not bound by resource
or budget constraints. Then determine
what you will need to realize that goal.
With the advancement of cloud contact
center technology, the gap between the
exceptional customer journey and your
current deployment may not be as cost or
resource prohibitive as you might think.
Here is how one VoltDelta customer
successfully approached this challenge:
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE VISION

This customer is a pharmaceutical

provider that offers cost effective
prescription medication for an underserved
population with exceptional customer
care in all 50 US states. They refused
to accept the notion that economically
challenged individuals do not deserve
premium support. Service metrics that
were implemented by this pharmaceuticals
provider put customer satisfaction first
with cost savings as an important, but not
primary driver.
SITUATION ANALYSIS

The pharmaceutical provider evaluated

their current service and determined
they needed to do the following to meet
theirgoals:
Reliably answer every call. Frequent
outages occurred with their existing
contact center technology vendor.
Improve the efficiency of their
voice self-service menu options and
integration to other communication
channels, such as the web or live agent
support, to provide a more satisfying
customer experience.
Add channels of communication such
as SMS as the company grows.
Create a feedback loop to continually
improve quality of service.

THE SOLUTION

VoltDelta provided the following solution:

Reliable Cloud Contact Center
PlatformA pay per use hosted
contact center with no capital
investment provided a cost-effective
solution. A platform with a history
of proven reliability and security was
essential to the customers business
success. VoltDeltas cloud platform
answers over two billion calls per year
with exceptional reliability.
Voice Self Service ExpertiseThe
new voice self service intelligently
anticipates the reason customers are
calling. It uses their phone number
and name to check whether they
recently placed an order, are up for
re-enrollment, or various other issues.
Menus dynamically shift based on
that knowledge to more quickly
resolve the call. Also, IVR dialogs
incorporate built-in patience for
explanations and caller input which
VoltDeltas voice user interface
designers determined was needed for
an olderdemographic.
Integrated Multi-Channel Solution
Agent insight from past interactions
regardless of channel enables immediate
problem anticipation. It allows
customer care to be more effective at
converting frustration to success.

agents for training. The ability to

track a call as a single entity from
voice self service to an agent also
makes it easy to pinpoint any issues
at transfer.
Real-Time ReportingInstant
access to voice recordings, survey
data, and other metrics provides an
important mechanism for timely
process improvements. Real-time
centralized management allows
supervisors to quickly assess agent
performance.
RESULTS

This VoltDelta customer creatively

uses cloud technology to reach a larger
population of prescription medication
users with more frequency. In the first
few months of implementation, the
resultswere:
Calls completed without agent
assistance have risen between
7%12%.
Overall prescription refills have
increased.
The survey results show positive
feedback from customers. In fact,
happy customers occasionally
provide unsolicited donations to
assist this organization with
futureendeavors.

SurveysFor process improvements,

automated voice surveys have been
implemented post-call or as part of
an outbound campaign. The ability to
capture specific answers from a menu
and free-form recorded comments
adds metrics and subjective analysis
for evaluating customer care success.

About VoltDelta
VoltDelta is a global cloud-based contact
center provider with 35 years of experience.
We rapidly tailor and integrate our
multichannel contact center solutions to
enable you to increase revenue, boost
retention, and reduce operating costs with
proven scalability and reliability.

Voice of the Customer Call and Screen

RecordingVoltDeltas technology
records every call at no extra cost to
the customer. It provides agents and
managers with evidence to identify
a problem and improve quality.
Recorded calls are also reviewed with

Contact Us
Phone: 866-436-1169
Email: info@voltdelta.com
www.voltdelta.com
twitter.com/voltdeltanews
linkedin.com/company/voltdelta
youtube.com/voltdeltachannel

Sponsored Content

CRM Magazine | November 2014

WP33

Customer Experience
Management Made Easier:
Integrate Feedback in CRM

The bulk of companies are beginning

to rise to the challenge of formalizing
customer experience management. As they
do, many are also quickly discovering that
measuring customer experience comes
with its share of difficulties. For one,
customer feedback comes through a larger
number of sources than ever before and
two, sentiment can be tough to accurately
assess even when properly captured.
A recent MarketingProfs blog explains
that ...with the ubiquity of social
channels and mobile devices, customer
behavior is becoming increasingly
fragmented, complicated, and hard to
track (February2014).
Similarly, Giles House, CMO,
CallidusCloud, blogs that customer
experience is the most elusive metric
inB2B (September 2014).
The simple days of summarizing
customer experience with the results of
marketings annual customer satisfaction
survey are long gone. True customer
experience management is complex
to say the least. It requires companywide representation, strategic planning
and processes, and the right mix of
technologycomponents.
WHICH REPORT TRACKS
CUSTOMER EMOTION?

Customer experience is different from

other business metrics. Counting dollars is
simple enough. Counting loyalty is another
story. It can change very suddenly and
unlike hard numbers, customer feedback
leaves room for variance in interpretation.
To successfully manage customer
experience, companies must collect,
centralize, and act on customer feedback
from numerous sources, along the entire
customer journey. They must blend the
human aspects of business (customer
emotions and reactions needing personal
attention) with technology systems
to monitor and automate responses
wheneverpossible.

The technology at the center, experts

agree, is CRM. By channeling all customer
feedback into CRM, you leverage existing
processes and familiarity with the system,
and can establish appropriate workflows for
feedback requiring one-on-one attention
versus input that can receive automated
communications. Plus, CRM provides
a powerful hub for secure, role-based
visibility, direct customer interactions, and
flexible reporting across the organization.
HOW DO WE INTEGRATE
FEEDBACK INTO CRM?

To lay the groundwork for solid, longterm customer experience management,

choose a solution that meets enterprise
requirements for end-to-end, multi-channel
feedback management. This solution
MUST deeply and easily integrate with
your CRM system. It should let you control
every aspect of your feedback program,
especially how and where data can be
mapped into CRM.
Next, define an outside-in customer
journey map and establish key points along
the way, at which youll ask customers for
input via surveys, call scripts, and various
web forms. Not all input points, however,
will be defined by your organization.
Youll also need intelligent data loading
capabilities to integrate feedback from
customer-driven points, such as social
media, and potentially from other cloud
applications into CRM.
Beyond the basics, be certain that the
feedback solution also supports this short
list of technical criteria:
Deployment Power & Flexibility:
Since your customers are on-the-go,
your feedback mechanisms need to
keep pace. Consider new options for
reaching customers wherever they
are, beyond the standard web and
email deployments for surveys. Look
for progressive delivery options such
sending SMS (text message) surveys,
IVR (interactive voice response)
surveys, and allowing users to take

surveys in offline mode all with

responses integrating directly with
CRM. This is a surefire way to
increase response rates and tap into a
broader pool of customers than just
your most vocal, usual suspects.
Device-first Approach: In a multiscreen world, surveys need to adapt to
different devices without sacrificing
look and feel. Verify that your
feedback solution enables advanced
branding and design capabilities
to reflect your companys image
accurately and consistently across
platforms, whether respondents are at
their desks or on their mobile phones.
Theyre more apt to share their
opinions if they see a familiar, cleanly
presented brand.
Strategic Insight: Ensure that your
feedback solution has built-in,
real-time reporting and analysis. This
can not be overstated. The end-game
is to make sense of feedback and use it
to gain insight into the wants and
needs of your customers. Text
analytics must be part of the equation,
as well, so look for an out-of-the-box,
text analysis solution integrated with
CRM. Remember that the whole
point of asking for input is to translate
that information into meaningful
intelligence to better manage and
improve customer experience.
About Clicktools
Clicktools develops cloud applications that
integrate with CRM to help businesses better
understand and serve their customers. Since
2001, companies have relied on Clicktools
flagship offering, SURVE, the premium survey
software for business, to integrate customer
feedback in CRM. Syncfrog, Clicktools low-cost,
intelligent data loader, empowers non-technical
users to centralize data from multiple cloud
applications. Clicktools is owned by Callidus
Software Inc. (NASDAQ: CALD), which operates
as CallidusCloud, the leading provider of sales
and marketing effectiveness software.

WP34

Sponsored Content

November 2014 | CRM Magazine

Crush Your
Competitors with
Digital SelfService
THE DIGITAL ECONOMY IS
MERCILESS: THERE WILL BE EITHER
CLEAR WINNERS OR ABJECT
LOSERS NO SPLIT DECISIONS

The modern digital era brings two

characteristics that organizations find
enormously challenging to manage. First,
the volume of knowledge being created
in digital form each day is astronomical.
And second, todays consumers expect
to be able to go online and self-serve for
answers to their questions. This puts the
onus on organizations to ensure their
digital channels are equipped to accurately
match every incoming customer service
question with its single correct answer.
Not to mention, provide this answer
instantly, with no live agent interaction.
The only way to achieve this with
any accuracy is with technology that
understands the intent behind every
customer question, regardless of how
the question may be phrased. For
organizations that fail to deliver an
accurate and complete digital self-service
experience like this, the news is not good...
Organizations that win in the digital
economy are those that clearly understand
the new expectations of todays consumers
when it comes to digital self-service.
GETTING DIGITAL SELF-SERVICE
RIGHT HAS TO BE JOB ONE

The consumer of today is discerning,

impatient, self-reliant and intolerant
of being let down. Considering the
modern consumers unforgiving attitude
toward service missteps, securing
and protecting customer loyalty
with superior online self-service is
mission-critical. But meeting customer
expectations is just the first step...
The second step is to capitalize on
the earned goodwill of a satisfactory

resolution with a RELEVANT marketing

offer that naturally opens the door to
online purchases.
And the third step is to systematically
extract data from these transactions into
actionable customer insight, to continually
refine your customer offerings. This is the
1-2-3 punch you need in order to knock
competitors out of contention. And todays
leading Virtual Agent solutions combine all
three capabilities in a single technology.
WHAT ARE VIRTUAL AGENTS?

At their core, Virtual Agents are software

services that answer customer questions in
self-service environments across multiple
interaction channels like the corporate
web, mobile, and social. The best of them
combine a unique front end consumer
experience and conversational style with
advanced knowledge management platform
capabilities to help enterprises manage and
utilize their vast stores of knowledge.
WHY DOES TRADITIONAL SEARCH FAIL
IN SELF-SERVICE ENVIRONMENTS?

Traditional website search algorithms

are not optimized to interpret questions.
As a result:

Less than 50% of traditional website

searches actually return expected results.
Users must parse through a list of
potential options that may contain the
information they requested in customer
self-service environments, task-oriented
customers want the one right answer to
their question, which requires specialized
search methodology. Virtual Agent
software uses a combination of machine
learning technology and Natural Language
Processing to match the intent within a
question to a specific answer. As a result, it
consistently delivers the one right answer
an unbeatable 80% to 90% of the time.

PRIMARY BENEFITS OF VIRTUAL AGENTS

1. Leading Virtual Agents equip your

customer interaction channels with the
ability to answer customer questions
by intelligently recognizing the
intent behind each question. In this
way, a Virtual Agent can deliver the
single accurate answer to a question
regardless of the hundreds of ways a
question can be phrased.
2. Using this same intent-recognition
technology, Virtual Agents can
deliver relevant marketing offers to
your customers, right alongside the
delivered answer.
3. Virtual Agents provide high-value
voice of the customer insight, by
automatically capturing every question
asked, in the natural language of the
customer and delivering this insight in
a highly visual, interactive way.
NEXT STEPS?

Gartner predicts that by 2020, the

customer will manage 85% of the
relationship with an enterprise without
interacting with a human. The time to
deploy a virtual agent solution is now.
IntelliResponse Virtual Agents deliver
cost savings, revenue opportunities, and
voice of the customer insight to hundreds
of organizations worldwide. Contact us
today to see how we can help your
organization meet the needs of todays
digital customer.
Get a Free, No Obligation Analysis of
Your Websites Self-Service Performance
Compliments of IntelliResponse and
Forrester Research, Inc.
Contact us at info@intelliresponse.com
or call us at 1-866-454-0084

Sponsored Content

CRM Magazine | November 2014

WP35

Sales Tax Accuracy and CRM:

Automating the Quote-to-Cash Process to

Increase Customer Satisfaction and Retention

Quote-to-Cash (or QTC) is the

information technology term for the
integration and automated management
of an end-to-end sales process. More
and more businesses are automating key
elements of the QTC process, extending
their CRM to automate the entire order
lifecycle.The result is higher revenue
optimization and better customer
satisfaction scores.
Even with the most technologically
advanced CRM systems, however, sales
tax accuracy is often overlooked. Without
accurate sales tax calculations, quotes
submitted to a customer can be lower
than the actual final invoice. And project
estimates and pricing that dont match
initial quotes can ruin a deal before its
finalized. This inaccuracy is an especially
important problem on large orders or highticket goods. On many deals, an invoice 9
or 10% higher than the initial quote can
cause customers to walk away.
Too often, businesses are stalled on their
climb to the top of the deal mountain.
Knowing how to navigate the critical steps
between quote generation and revenue
collection can be what gets them over
thehurdle.
Ensuring correct sales tax calculation is
important at several steps in the QTC cycle:
Pricing products to reflect current
exemptions, discounts and inventory
levels
Quote creation for a prospect or
customer, and price/project negotiation
Changes to the order
Supporting credits/returns
Contract and order management
Invoicing
Payment receipt
For omni-channel sellers using a robust
automation and CRM environment, the
customers expectation is that the quote
theyre given will match the invoice.

THE PRICE

Quoting the correct price and securing

approval for that pricing is trickier than
it seems. Depending on the technical
sophistication of the seller, pricing resources
may be manual or automated. Key questions
include: What products should be offered
at what price point. How does the sellers
internal approval process for pricing work?
Is it clunky and manual, or is it automated?
Providing incorrect pricing impacts
everything from the initial deal, to returns and
credits. Using a high quality CRM provides
a consistent flow that should include sales
tax and supports the sales tax management
process. The customer experience is
improved, and deals close faster and more
frequently as the customer sees full price
(including sales tax) up front. The nuances
of sales tax might include sales tax holidays,
accurate sales tax exemptions, product
taxability needs and bulk purchase discounts.
Revealing the true cost including the
right sales tax all the way from quote to
final invoice can make or break a deal.
THE QUOTE

In order to create a quote that includes

any tax-exemptions, sales tax holidays, and
applies the right sales tax where applicable,
the sales team needs real-time sales tax
information. When managed manually,
quotes can take an inordinate amount of
time and are prone to error. An automated
system for sales and sales tax, that takes
into account not only the product or service
purchased, but any product taxability rules,
sourcing rules, and whether or not shipping
is taxable, can make for better quotes
and more customer satisfaction. Without
accurate sales tax calculations, quotes can be
lower than final invoice. Project estimates
and pricing that dont match initial quotes
will doom the deal before its finalized.
THE APPROVALS

Getting approvals from supervisors to

move ahead with deals can stall a deal-inmotion. Like the car salesman running

upstairs to speak to the manager about

the car price hes quoting, the process of
manually getting supervisor approval can
seem like a bait and switch to a customer
waiting on estimated price.
THE FULFILLMENT PROCESS

How tax applies to the whole fulfillment

effort is one of the more complicated parts
of the process.
This includes stock level maintenance,
order tracking, shipment and various
approaches to tracking customer data against
product levels. If any of the customer or
product data is incorrect, it could result in the
wrong order being shipped to the customer
and have cascading inventory mistakes.
THE INVOICE

Whether generated manually or within

an ERP or accounting system, or an
integrated tool, the invoice needs to be
accurate and correct. This accuracy must be
presented to the customer throughout the
QTC process in order to maintain customer
satisfaction and grow the customer base.
THE PAYMENT RECEIPT

Whether automated or manual, payment

receipts must be in place to handle the
inflow and capture of payments from
customers, as well as booking and
categorization of customer receipts. Also
crucial is the capturing of additional
discounts the customer may have after the
fact and include the impacts that would
have on sales tax liability.
About Avalara
Avalara makes sales tax compliance simple and
automatic for thousands of customers every
day. Its SaaS-based, sales tax and compliance
automation software solutions span the
compliance spectrum; each year these
solutions deliver billions of tax decisions,
manage millions of exemption certificates, file
hundreds of thousands of sales tax returns, and
remit billions of tax dollars to states nationwide.
More information at: www.avalara.com

WP36

Sponsored Content

November 2014 | CRM Magazine

Six Ways CRM Helps You

Get To Know Your Customer
and Close More Deals
By Jesse Heller, Marketing Director, Faye
Business Systems Group, a SugarCRM
platinum partner
According to the US Golf Association, a
golfer may have as many as 14 different golf
clubs in their bag for a given round. It seems
like a lot clubs, doesnt it? Why would
anyone need 14 different clubs when most
holes can be completed in less than 5 shots?
If you asked a professional golfer, theyd
tell you they would love to add more clubs
to their bag if they could. Golf is game of
millimeters, and the more options a golfer
has to achieve precision the better chance
they have at shooting a lower score. Even if
a golfer carries a club that may only be used
once per round, just having the right club
available to them at every moment makes
it so that they have the best chance at
shooting the lowest score in the field.
When it comes to giving you the
best opportunity to increase sales and
productivity, having the right tools, and
knowing how to use them, is the simplest
way to enhance your ability to become an
expert on your customer, thus giving you
the best chance of closing more deals.
If the CRM platform by SugarCRM
were a bag of golf clubs, youd have more
clubs than you needed to win business.
There are more than 100 different
functions in Sugar that can give you the
ability to get to know your customer better
and close more deals.
Here are six ways Sugar by SugarCRM
can help you:
1. Increase sales growth and productivity
2. Turn customer support into customer
satisfaction
3. Improve marketing and sales
collaboration
4. Collaborate with activity streams and
social integrations
5. Stay connected anywhere
6. Experience the benefits of a flexible
platform

INCREASE SALES GROWTH

AND PRODUCTIVITY

Sugar enables you to control every

stage of the sales lifecycle.
Track and share contacts and
opportunities, manage and upsell
into existing accounts, and monitor
performance
Improve revenue forecasting and make
sure you stay on top of quotes and
contracts
Help sales reps connect and sell, not
get bogged down with data entry
Focus sales reps on the right
opportunities and tasks to help
make quota
Provide expertise and team
collaboration to sell more efficiently
and effectively

TURN CUSTOMER SUPPORT INTO

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

Improve service and reduce handling

time with Sugars customer insight
Provide consistent service across
customer touch points
Deliver expert service backed by the
power of shared knowledge

IMPROVE MARKETING AND

SALES COLLABORATION

Build customer mindshare by using

personalized information across
your business to engage and drive
responses
Create, manage, and analyze
sophisticated marketing programs
Deliver results by placing useful
prospect insight in the hands of the
sales organization
Increase lead conversions by
understanding which campaigns, leads
and accounts contribute the most to
your sales pipeline

COLLABORATE WITH ACTIVITY STREAMS

AND SOCIAL INTEGRATIONS

Visibility into data updates,

activities and interactions with
Sugar activity streams
Engage customers socially through
Twitter

Meet and collaborate from within Sugar

using IBM SmartCloud Engage, Google
Docs, Cisco WebEx, GoToMeeting
STAY CONNECTED WITH SUGARCRM MOBILE

Work seamlessly with no-cost native

apps for iOS and Android as well as
Sugars mobile browser support for any
smartphone or tablet
Reduce training and boost productivity
with Sugars shared interface for
desktop and mobile devices

EXPERIENCE THE BENEFITS OF

SUGARS FLEXIBLE PLATFORM

Collaborate your existing business

applications with Sugar by integrating
seamlessly with: Sage 100 ERP,
QuickBooks, NetSuite, Authorize.Net,
Intacct, Act-On, Constant Contact,
Box, Jira and ShoreTel.
Run Sugar anywhere: on premise or
on demand
Take advantage of Sugars developer
and partner ecosystem to grow Sugar
with your business

CRM is about enabling businesses to build

deeper and longer-term customer relationships
that is, enabling businesses to optimize
customer engagement. CRM software
addresses the needs of the individual user who
interacts with the customer, the needs of the
customer who interacts with the business and
the consistency of that interaction.
With Sugar, your entire organization can
build better customer relationships that set
you apart from your competitors. Start your
free Sugar trial today.
About Faye Business Systems Group

Software and technology specialists with over

25 years of expertise in CRM and ERP software.
FayeBSG is a leading SugarCRM Platinum Partner
and 2014 Inc. 5000 honoree.

Contact FayeBSG

Phone: 818-280-4820
E-mail: info@fayebsg.com
www.fayebsg.com
FayeBSG LinkedIn
FayeBSG Twitter

Sponsored Content

CRM Magazine | November 2014

WP37

Building Customer Engagement

through Social Communities
and Self-Service Portals
Customer support and post-sale service
is a component of sales enablement that
many companies overlook even though solid
customer relationships are one of the most
important factors in driving revenue growth.
Happy customers recommend your products,
provide key insight into how or why they
do business with you, serve as critical
indicators of what you should (or shouldnt)
be focusing on, and can often become your
brand champions and evangelists.
How do you derive that kind of value
from existing customers? By being
proactive and providing mediums that
give them a voice and allow them to access
the information they need on demand,
wherever they are. Proactive community
engagement via forums, portals and/or
training sessions can be a highly effective
way to deliver information to a wide swath
of customers without having to engage in
time-consuming one-to-one interactions.
Two relatively simple tactics your business
can use to optimize its sales enablement
function and create portals in which
customers largely self-service themselves are:
1) Creating branded communities
that encourage many-to-many
conversations
According to Jonathan Spira, Chief
Analyst and Founder of knowledge
management consultancy Basex, just 20%
of the knowledge in an average enterprise is

Knowledge Management (KM)

and Customer Experience
Social communities and self-service
portals are a piece of the bigger
Knowledge Management picture.
Full KM enables sales and customer
support representatives to efficiently
and effectively share information,
locate experts, ask questions, easily
find answers and more. This capability
reduces time to resolution and increases
customer satisfaction.

explicitly recorded and

shared, while the other
80% typically exists in
the heads of employees.
Generally, the bulk of that
knowledge goes untapped,
or its shared in mediums
where the information
isnt recorded and cannot
be digested by the masses.
Online customer
forums and social
customer support
communities change that. An open forum
approach allows questions to be viewed
and answered by larger communities of
experts and peers, and dramatically improves
the time to resolution. It both eliminates
duplicate support questions and equips
customers to more easily help one another
creating a virtual encyclopedia of rich
customer support content that can be easily
indexed, searched and consumed on demand.
2) Delivering on-demand, selfservice training that helps
customers access information
when and where they need it
On-demand customer training can help
customers access the information they need,
when and how they need it like when
theyre working against a deadline on a major
project or in the field and need to quickly find
a way to come up-to-speed on a new offering.
By creating videos, webinars, step-by-step
instructional content or hosting regular online
customer support sessions, youll encourage
customers to use your product more effectively
and give your business a better chance of
developing a legion of brand loyalists.
That wont just help your business
improve the customer experience.
IBMs Institute for Knowledge-Based
Organizations suggests it can also lead to
lower customer churn and more frequent
customer upsell opportunities, as well as help
you build a much stronger brand reputation.
Transform your customer experience
when you employ these two techniques

using Bloomfires social customer service

software. Equip customer support
representatives with quick access to upto-date documentation and expertise,
dramatically improve customer engagement
with branded communities and self-service
portals, and employ powerful analytics to
continually decrease time to resolution and
improve customer satisfaction.
Companies who implemented Bloomfire
realized the following benefits:
20% improvement in customer
satisfaction
35% reduction in customer support
costs
20% drop in call escalations
15% decrease in call response times
30% reduction in support call volumes
About Bloomfire
Bloomfires easy-to-use enterprise knowledge
and collaboration software enables people
to efficiently share and leverage group
expertise. With rich analytics and strong
content creation and curation tools, we
connect people with experts, facilitate social
interaction, amplify knowledge and power
teamwork at new levels. Our software fosters
increased employee engagement, higher
sales productivity, more responsive customer
service, and strong communication.
Visit www.bloomfire.com for more information
or schedule a demo with a Bloomfire expert
today. To read the complete 3 Phases of Value
Driving Sales Enablement eBook by Bloomfire
and MarketingProfs, click here.