It's a tricky balancing act. Organizations today must do everything they can to provide fast, accurate and courteous support to their customers while at the same time holding down the cost of delivering such service.

Enter today's customer self-service solutions, including Parature's (News - Alert) customer support software. This powerful Web-based solution enables organizations to establish customer self-service Web portals that are seamlessly integrated with their websites, help desks and call centers. These fully-customizable Web portals can deliver a range of customer self-service options, including knowledge bases (i.e. FAQs) where customers can get fast answers to basic questions, without having to wait on hold for a live agent; Web forums, where customers can launch open dialogs with company representatives and other customers for a wide range of reasons, including making suggestions to improve products or services; downloads pages where customers can download brochures, manuals and guides to help them resolve their own problems; or Web chat, giving customers the option to chat live with an agent if they have questions that cannot be answered using other self-service resources. The solution also offers customer-generated ticketing for help desk operations, as well as many other features that help organizations both automate and improve the customer experience.

Perhaps most importantly, Parature's customer support software acts as a central repository for valuable historical and real-time customer data that can be packaged into detailed reports and analyzed to improve the customer experience, boost sales and drive strategic business decisions.

But as we all know, software alone does not make for a superior customer experience: People do. As such, organizations must also foster a "customer-centric culture," with employees who really care about getting the customer experience right.

Rosetta Stone, a leading provider of language learning software, is one such organization. Not only has the company implemented a complete customer-centric culture, it has fully embraced it; focusing on customers' success. In fact, the company's customer support is called "customer success" and its support agents are called "success agents." This customer-focused environment, including multi-channel customer service, enables Rosetta Stone to further promote its philosophy of listening to its customers and becoming better.

To learn more about how Rosetta Stone built a customer-centric culture -- including the role Parature's customer support software played in accomplishing this -- be sure to check out the upcoming free webinar, "Why the Customer Experience Matters Most -- Rosetta Stone's Customer Success Strategy," to be presented at 2 p.m. today, Tuesday, April 20.

Jay Topper of Rosetta Stone and William Band of Forrester (News - Alert) Research will discuss why the customer experience matters most and Rosetta Stone's strategy for customer success. Attendees will gain invaluable insight into an organization that has realized the power of the customer experience and the need to create a customer-centric culture.

To register for this free webinar, please visit www.parature.com/webinars.