by Shyamalee Pramod Samvatsar
In this era of product commoditization and soaring customer expectations, manufacturing companies are transforming their business model to reduce their dependence on product revenues and cash in on the demand for Services. Based on my experience and reading, I have noted the following trends in customer service:
by Amrith Rajasekaran
What are companies and corporations doing to enhance their presence on the social sphere? For starters, they create accounts on sites like Twitter, Facebook and mySpace. They use these forms of social media to spread awareness about products and also do a lot of branding and marketing activities through these.
Continue reading "Social Media – Be Aware or Beware? – Part 2" »
Here is what Mark Killens had to say on my last blog post on functionality coverage in CRM products for Marketing Automation: “CRM systems and marketing are very important sales enablement resources. They both must include tools to manage and report on how marketing is helping and enabling sales and how to keep track of the customer after a sale closes”. Please find the post, the comment and my response here.
I perceive Mark’s comment as referring to one of the long standing challenges for Marketers – how do you attribute the end Sales revenues to the original Marketing efforts? This ability to tie the eventual revenues back to the campaigns, thereby closing the loop, has largely been either impossible or a difficult task to accomplish for Marketers - thus making it a Holy Grail.
Continue reading "Closing the loop on Marketers’ Holy Grail" »
by Vinod Nag
A “dispute” in the context of credit cards pertains to questioning the validity of a card transaction. Most dispute complaints begin in a similar fashion - the card holder communicates with the card issuer bank through one of the channels – telephone, e-mails, direct mail (posts) etc. The customer service representative will then collect the necessary details and determines how this enquiry has to be dealt with.
Data streaming, so what does this mean? What does MDM means for data stream? Good question read on.
We have seen the tremendous rise in internet usage in the recent past. Even with such fast growth, internet penetration is only about 25% of the world population with a large scope for further growth. Also, commerce over the internet is growing due to increased transaction security and ease of operation. Companies should take advantage of this online channel for trade to increase customer satisfaction and reduce cost of operations through a self service facility. But in order to take the full advantage of online channel, companies should conduct a detailed study of the various factors involved before embarking on their online strategy.
Continue reading "Improve Customer Experience through a well planned Online Self Service Strategy" »
For companies to innovate, it is largely understood that there are two components involved: exploiting existing internal repository of knowledge and secondly, exploring new ideas, some of which can be directly adopted from external sources including customers, suppliers, partners etc. On one hand, managers may experience a cultural inertia on the idea of customer as a collaborator; on other hand, there is also an access issue - how do you make relevant customer feedback flow through the organization?
Some of you might have read the recent blog entry titled “How CRM products can aid Marketing” by fellow Infosys CRM blogger Vamsi Krishna. He ended his entry with the question “are marketers really using these CRM product capabilities to the maximum extent?”
While that certainly is a relevant question to ponder for small scale and stand alone marketing implementations, a deeper look at the needs of large scale Enterprise Marketing departments seems to indicate that functionality coverage in today’s CRM products is not sufficient.
The New Normal is the “Now” Normal. This was the theme of the key note address at SAP Insider conference currently underway at Orlando, FL (see my previous blog post, SAP CRM 2010 Insider Conference). As the economy is coming out of a major slow down, the organizations are not necessarily changing their cost structures that came under tremendous pressure but expecting to continue at the same levels and do more with less. New investments are being planned but only with an expectation to demonstrate better results on an immediate basis - the ‘now’ normal. SAP’s executives discussed ways how SAP’s suite of products can be leveraged in identifying such targeted investments which will help solve today’s complex business problems, be nimble, effective, profitable and quicker to implement.
Continue reading "SAP Insider CRM 2010- The New Normal is the “Now” normal" »
by Satyajit Swain
Each day brings another milestone in the constant evolution of Social Media. Recently, Google launched Google Buzz to give a social experience to its popular mail service and the other day I was going through OneYoungWorld(the world’s first global youth leadership summit ) forum website and was amazed to find that it was inviting registration/selection of delegates not through its own site but through an application hosted on Facebook. The last time I checked OYW’s Facebook campaign had 6619 fans and the One Young World Facebook application had 12,305 active monthly users; these statistics could indicate an emerging trend in the way Social Media can affect us in the coming days.
Continue reading "Rendering a social experience to your Social CRM strategy" »
The SAP CRM 2010 Insider conference is being held this year at Orlando from Feb 23 to Feb 26. This is by far the most important event for people following SAP in the CRM space. Customers, Partners, Solution vendors all demonstrate equal excitement to be a part of this annual event. With slight hope of economic recovery I am hoping this year the participation would be even better than what was witnessed last year.
Enhancing customer experience is always a challenge. In order to enhance business performance, organizations have to expand their customer base.
Growth happens only when customer relationships with the organization are robust and satisfied. And customer satisfaction can only be increased with effective CRM in an organization.
But how would one measure the effectiveness of CRM for an organization? Below are some criteria that can be applied:
Any product or service company would initially like to sell their products or services to acquire customers and in the long run, the focus would be to increase the revenues. While the company in the long run would aim at building a strong revenue base, the representative at the Point to Sale is bound by daily, weekly, and monthly sales targets. So where does that take things?
Anyone who has experienced the last fifteen years of generational shift in marketing would have seen every aspect of marketing strategy and varied focused approaches towards selling. We do remember a time when organizations were more ‘product’ focused, launching of products was not all that frequent and retiring cycles were long. Customers didn’t have many options other than sticking on (in fact, the term customer experience was not used very frequently) as there was less competition. Then came the era of competition, where organizations not only thought about acquiring new customers but retaining the customers became a key priority. This was the dawn of a ‘Customer’ focused approach with up-selling, cross-selling, loyalty etc being the new buzz words.
by Amrith Rajasekaran
‘Follow us on Twitter.’ ‘Become a fan on Facebook.’ These are now common messages on sites of so many companies wanting to reach out to their customer bases. The rate at which social networking has grown in the recent past is nothing short of phenomenal. Facebook crossed 250 million users as of July ’09 and Twitter has recorded a growth of over a thousand percent (year on year). What has that essentially done for the CRM space? Well, for starters it has really made the corporate world sit up and take notice of this new phenomenon of social networking.
Continue reading "Social Media – Be Aware or Beware? – Part 1" »
My previous post, “Marketing without measuring Marketing ROI is casualty” ended by stating that CRM products can help in enhancing marketing operations and measuring ROI more accurately. In this blog I will try to bring out how CRM products can aid marketers.
by Anshul Tiwari
We are living in an age where there is not only an abundance of information but also a massive flow of this information at an unprecedented rate. In this highly competitive and information rich world, the consumer is more aware than ever before. Steps have been taken both by the governments and NGOs in different countries to ensure that the consumer does not get exploited. A number of consumer awareness programs and campaigns have been taken up in earnest and every effort is made to make people aware of their rights and responsibilities.
Continue reading "Customer Complaints and the Role of CRM" »
There is always scope for improving customer service but somehow most companies seem unwilling to change their processes or systems to provide better service to their customers.
For example, whenever you dial a call center, the first thing you would hear is the IVR menu. The options in this IVR menu could change from time to time. This forces the customer to listen to all the menu options each time, making him spend more time and money on the call. This can be resolved by adopting the thumb rule of implementing an IVR menu with not more that 4-5 option. The other option is to permanently fix the IVR menu options. Neither solution is ideally suited to business needs. So, what is the real solution?
Continue reading "How to improve IVR menu options for better service" »
Sometimes I really wonder what matters most to the customer; is it cost of a product/service or the actual service element associated with it?
Consider this scenario – you go to a shop; you see that nobody is there to serve you; you wait for a few seconds/minutes and then call for someone. When someone appears, you ask for something and you do not get a proper response. Instead, the person just ignores you and goes to another customer just like that or with a curt response.
Or look at this scenario – you go to a shop and shopkeeper is on phone. The other sales men are busy and don’t make it a priority to serve you as a customer. You ask for something and even after waiting patiently you don’t get any response/service from anyone.
I recently called customer service of a leading telephone company for updating my billing address. I was surprised to receive response that I will need to go to the nearest office of the telephone company and fill out a change of address form. At another instance, I called the same company to change my call plan. Again, the agent expressed his/her inability to help me out, I was asked to submit another application – and, I was also required to provide my photographs and various other documentation, which I had already submitted when I enrolled with the company.
Busy day at Azune Solutions in Bangalore...
@impcust: @custsvc_azune: your prior solution did not work and i do not have enuff space to explain will send mail
@custsvc_azune: we value your mail and will respond back
Meanwhile in NY...
"The biggest question on our minds right now, here at the Corp HQ of Azune is the need to arrive at a strategy for our CRM offering with Social media in tow, the 'trend' of the year. We really wonder what we are doing with all the tweets/comments/bookmarks/Q&A aggregations!"
Continue reading "Let's get it straight - Social Media and Social CRM aren't twins!" »
