With ACT! software having been around 15 years, Best Software, the producer of ACT!, has had a lot of experience in providing usable contact management software to its more than 13,000 corporate accounts, and it has used the feedback from those customers to enhance the latest version of ACT! As an example of how many users there are of ACT!, Michaela Zwinakis, vice president of Product Management for ACT!, said they receive 10,000 downloads a month for the Palm version.
The primary new features of version 6.0 include a new e-mail client with integration with Microsoft Outlook (the ACT! 6.0 e-mail client has been upgraded to enable users to view Outlook, Outlook Express, SMTP/POP3 and Lotus Notes e-mail folders from within ACT! as well as set up multiple accounts), but the release contains more than 50 new features, including: Active Libraries, which allow users to directly attach Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint/ MapPoint documents, Adobe Acrobat documents (PDF), JPG files and BMP files to the contact record and view them from within that contact record; Excel Integration, which allows users to map fields from their database to fields in Excel for quoting; Contact Activity Look-ups, by which users can perform a contact activity look-up to dates customers were last contacted and then schedule follow-up activities, send an e-mail or derive a call list; Annual Event Tracking, which allows users to specify any date fields in their database as annual events; Enhanced Internet Services that allow users to access Web sites from within ACT! using the built-in Internet browser and attach relevant Web pages to one or more contacts; and 10 HTML E-mail Templates that are designed to allow users to correspond with their customers in a professional and efficient manner.
Also available is ACT! Suite for QuickBooks Pro/Premier, which allows users to import or link contacts from QuickBooks. ACT! Web Access allows for remote access and can be hosted or run on your own server.
Providing great products and services is a way to engender loyalty, but it also takes a dedicated effort to keep those customers loyal (and it also helps if you can find out who your truly loyal customers are and which are likely to defect). Founded in 1939 and solely dedicated to stakeholder measurement, Walker Information has developed the Walker SmartLoyalty System to help its users gather useful customer information that can be spread throughout the enterprise to help them realize customer loyalty management. Users can conduct global, Web-based surveys to get a snapshot of customer satisfaction. From the results of the surveys, customers are segmented into a matrix consisting of behavior and attitude (Truly Loyal ' customers who like your company and choose to associate themselves with it; Accessible ' customers who are willing to give you opportunities to earn their loyalty; Trapped ' customers who feel they are forced to do business with your company but will leave if they can; and High-Risk ' customers who are dissatisfied and actively looking for alternatives) so the customer base can be analyzed not only as to where they currently stand in relationship to the company, but also to discover what can be done to change their rating. Users can also design customized reports that are segmented by geography, customer type and other management information fields or customized for individual accounts.
The main modules of the SmartLoyalty System (which can be integrated with a company's existing CRM software) include: Project Overview, which displays the tools available to provide a summary of individual projects underway; Manage Contacts, which provides the tools for maintaining and adding to account and contact information; View Activity, which provides the tools for viewing, inspecting and monitoring activity within a survey; View Reports, which provides the tools for monitoring the
results of surveys; and Follow-up, which allows users to track survey results, follow-up actions and status of follow-up.
With service providers scrambling for customers and new services to offer them, the latest release from NetCentrex is designed to offer them another tool for their arsenal. The NetCentrex Saga 800 products are designed to give service providers a suite of contact center solutions to offer their enterprise customers. End users will be provided with a spectrum of contact center offerings, no mater the number of agents, location or equipment they may have. Saga800 is available in configurations from 120 to 24,000 agents and as an example of its scalability, it is currently deployed by France Telecom and contact center ASP Prosodie, which implemented the solution to support the multichannel customer interactions of 8,000 agents across 700 sites receiving 15 million calls per year. By using a network contact center, end users will be able to eliminate their need for premise-based IVR, PBX, ACD or CTI equipment.
Among the functionality included in the Saga800 is: interactive voice response (IVR) (the IVR/Voice Portal solution automates switchboard and telephony services through touchtone navigation and speech recognition); automatic call distribution (ACD); intelligent call qualification and routing (ICR); contact data presentation via computer-telephony integration (CTI); Web call and collaboration via MyCallWeb; connectors to various CRM applications; and a unified graphical user interface (GUI).
These solutions sit on top of the Media Control Server, which manages network connections and enables applications to remain protocol-independent. The Saga800 solution supports voice communications for both PSTN and VoIP networks (using the SIP or H.323 protocols), and can also manage e-mail, Web and video communications.
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