Having the greatest product in the world will do a company
little good if it's depending on a distribution channel where its partners
have irregular, spotty contacts with the company and are not clear on the
company's goals and tactics. According to Drew Williams, vice president of
marketing at ChannelWave Software, Inc., 'worldwide, 30 to 70 percent of
all products flow through indirect channels.' Williams made the point that
PRM (partner relationship management) is more about the end customers than
CRM, as for many companies the majority of customer contacts are actually
through indirect channels, which makes having in place a coordinated system
of handling those contacts a priority.
Based on the open standards of J2EE and XML, ChannelWave's
PRM suite, ChannelWave 5, is designed to support pre-sales, sales and
post-sales activities through a suite of Web-based applications. With a
many-to-many architecture, the system can be modeled to map to a company's
distribution network.
The suite includes Partner, Market, Sell and Service
solutions. It supports partner relationships by providing collaborative
recruiting, planning and management resources. For marketing, it is designed
to improve demand creation through more effective communications, campaign
planning and lead generation. For sales, it is designed to support team
selling and channel commerce by streamlining partner orders and transactions
and improving opportunity forecasting and management. For service, it
provides access to online training, self-service support and maintenance
resources.
The feedback manager can be used to create a survey to find
out how partners or programs are doing and help partners improve their
margins through analytics. The channel promotions module can be used to
create incentives programs and the guided selling tool can provide info to
partners or route to call center, provide after-sale service and recruiting.
As the old sayings go, 'Two heads are better than one,'
and 'many hands make quick work,' but when trying to provide sales and
support for complex software, hardware or manufactured goods, perhaps it
should be added, 'provided everyone is on the same page.' Software
designed to keep everyone on the same page is the goal behind TightLink
Service 3 from TightLink Corporation, now available as a software license
model as well as an ASP service.
TightLink Service 3 is a multichannel, Web-based application
that allows agents, customers, partners, suppliers and employees to securely
view and participate in a shared, Web-based dialog to solve multiparty,
multilevel service issues. According to Mitch Bishop, vice president of
marketing at TightLink, Service 3 provides business rules and workflow for
case management, as well as integrated knowledge management for structured
and unstructured data. Service 3's workflow engine gives agents the
ability to pull others into the workflow when required, no matter if they
are in other departments or other companies through secure, roles-based
access with personalized views of collaborative case threads. This same
secure, roles-based access applies to customers, who can check the status of
a case and view any open action items. Workflow and notification features
are designed to ensure that customers get the level of service expected and
a system for automating the escalation of service issues is in place to give
accountability.
Beyond collaborative case management and workflow, TightLink
Service 3 components, which integrate into contact center routing systems
and existing enterprise applications, include: multichannel communications
support, including integrated phone, e-mail and Web in a common view;
cross-enterprise reporting; service level agreements; customer management;
employee and partner management; integrated knowledge management, where the
customer has access to a knowledge base and enhanced searching capabilities
are available to agents; and administration. Built on an architecture that
is pure Java, J2EE-compliant and supports XML, Service 3's configuration
tool can be used to add new components 'on-the-fly' without coding.
As companies have expanded the channels they provide their
customers for interactions, so, often, has the valuable insight given by
customers about products or services been distributed to the proper
departments, such as marketing, sales, service or human resources, too late
for effective action to be taken.
According to Cliff Apsey, vice president of marketing at
Informative, Inc., the Informative c-Feedback Suite provides businesses with
the tools to manage customer feedback in a way that immediately addresses
problems or finds business opportunities. Apsey said that, unlike
traditional market research data, the c-Feedback Suite provides real-time
management of attitudinal data in a one-to-one presence with the customer as
well as the ability to push customer data to the proper person or group who
needs it or can resolve the customer's problem. For example, customer
service reps can immediately connect to customers to solve problems or
marketing team members can collect user feedback about new products or
services to adjust marketing campaigns.
The Informative c-Feedback Suite provides a variety of
capabilities. The Enterprise Management module is used to control campaigns
and their status, users, privileges and deployments. The Authoring and
Business Logic module is used to design and deploy feedback campaigns
through various channels, such as Web site pop-up on entry or exit, e-mail,
call center, banner ad or hyperlink, or mobile devices. The Reporting and
Analytics module gives users real-time data collection and online reporting
capabilities so that customer feedback can be routed to key personnel and
they can take appropriate action based on that specific customer
transactional and intentional data. Expert Modules are expert libraries that
provide questions and feedback tracking and they include: Brand Interpreter,
for understanding comments on the company; Customer Satisfaction
Interpreter, for understanding products and services comments; and Website
Interpreter, for understanding comments on the effectiveness and the
usability of the company's Web site. c-Feedback Suite also contains
Question Libraries for Customer Feedback, Website Feedback, Employee
Feedback, Brand Feedback, Advertising Feedback and General Feedback.
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