Salesforce.com's Chatter on Social CRM

CUSTOMER INTER@CTION SOLUTIONS — July 2010

Salesforce.com's Chatter on Social CRM

Salesforce.com has become an iconic firm by taking underexploited methods, most significantly cloud computing, marrying them to existing solutions, in its case CRM applications and successfully developing them to meet present and future business needs. The firm is posed to repeat its success in the fast-growing social channel, expanding CRM into social CRM…

Feature Articles

Call Center Technology

Automating (and Visualizing) the Conversations
Interactive voice response (IVR) - both DTMF and speech rec - enable contact centers to cut costs by diverting simpler calls away from expensive live agents and by shortening the time spent in person-to-person exchanges through capturing and screen-popping basic information to the staff. Yet too often many of these applications: the technology and the setup, including scripting have resulted in poor customer service, which risks alienating customers and their dollars.

How to Get Customers to Stay in IVR / Speech Recognition
The big challenge with IVR has been to get people to use and stay in the automated self-service systems. Even speech rec can be frustrating sometimes. Therefore automated voice solutions require fine-tuning to maximize their ROI.

CRM, BPO & Teleservices

The Social CRM Revolution
Instead of customers serving the companies, the companies are now being forced to serve them. If these outfits fail to do so, and/or not meet customers' satisfaction they will be locked in the stocks or for the most serious offenders by dragged into the guillotines in the virtual public squares.

Operations and Management

'Listening' to Your Customers
To succeed in business, whether for-profit or non-profit, you must deliver what customers want to buy with the right mix of features and pricing plus high quality in the offerings and the service, sold in more-than-sufficient volumes. To meet this prime objective you must find out from and "listen" (hearing and reading) to your customers and analyze in a very timely manner what they have said for insights that will guide you in developing and improving your products and services.

Predictive Analytics and EFM
Most organizations start their customer-focused activities with either a predictive analytics or an EFM approach, said Jethwa. In many cases, both may be undertaken to a certain degree, but each is deployed within different and siloed departments. For example, an organization's CRM department might use predictive analytics based on existing CRM data, while the customer insight/market research department focuses on more attitudinal data gathered from surveys or focus groups.

Awards and Recognition

2010 IP Contact Center Technology Pioneer Awards
Customer Interaction Solutions realizes that technology is the key to success of every contact center, and we have been editorially detailing the evolution of contact center and CRM technologies for our readers for nearly the past 30 years. We also realize that, with an ever-expanding range of new products and services and new categories of them in the contact center space, it can be challenging for our readers to keep up with the latest and greatest in these solutions.