Web sites can be helpful and easy to navigate, or they can be a royal
pain. Some look as if the designers were more concerned about presenting
'cool' graphic effects than actually making the sites useful.
Vividence Corp. was founded on the principle of understanding why things
work and don't work on the Web and how to find unique insights into
customers so companies are able to predict customers' intent before they
come to the site. Vividence's XMS 2.0 consists of three components,
hosted software, Research Panels and a Knowledge Library, that clients use
to create large-scale customer experience evaluations on any live Web site
and generate dynamic reports combining comprehensive customer experience
insights with analytic tools. The software portion consists of two
Web-based applications (accessed through a secure client extranet): the
TestScripter, an application for building customized evaluations; and
CustomerScope, a reporting and analysis tool for generating insights from
qualitative and quantitative data gathered during an evaluation.
The Vividence Knowledge Library is a repository of methodology guidelines,
evaluation templates, industry benchmarks and publications that draw upon
Vividence's professional research expertise in such areas as customer
acquisition and retention, marketing strategy and product development. The
Template Library includes guidelines and examples for using and
customizing each question and task. The Vividence Research team develops a
comprehensive set of customer experience metrics to provide objective
comparison data for understanding evaluation results. The Vividence
Research team also produces monthly briefs and quarterly in-depth reports
that provide insightful analysis on industry best practices in Web site
design and customer experience management.
Central to Vividence XMS are the panels, whose members provide the
feedback that is used to evaluate a site. During an evaluation, the
Vividence Browser tracks panelists' detailed movements and captures
their feedback as they pursue a set of tasks and objectives. The Vividence
Research Panel (VRP) is a professionally managed panel of over 150,000
individuals representing a broad spectrum of demographic profiles. The VRP
allows clients to construct samples that match their specific criteria.
Clients can also create their own Private Panel by recruiting panelists
from their own customer or employee lists or through acquisition efforts.
Handling customer information coming in from various media
is perhaps the greatest challenge for contact centers, and finding a
solution that can efficiently and effectively handle these interactions is
also a challenge. The eGain eService Enterprise (E3) is designed to provide
a solution that stretches from voice to Web self-service to e-mail and live
Web collaboration. According to Max Fiszer, vice president of marketing at
eGain, eGain eService Enterprise supplies the tools to provide intelligent
escalation, passing along vital customer information as the contact
escalates. E3 is built on Internet-class architecture, is available on
multiple platforms and provides multi-language support across service
channels and user profiles for ease of use by corporations with a global
reach. The eGain Call Center Bridge is a CTI solution that integrates eGain's
Internet communication solutions with company ACDs so Internet contacts can
be centrally queued, routed, logged and monitored.
To help contact center agents provide the right answers to customer
inquiries, the eGain Knowledge Agent uses case-based reasoning to determine
the appropriate questions that will help them arrive at the correct answers.
User profiles help ensure customers receive documents that meet their
individual needs.
E3's Web self-service module consists of a customer service portal, a
virtual Web site assistant, guided help for complex questions and
dynamically generated FAQs. When a customer visits the portal or asks for
help at the Web site, the eGain Assistant (a virtual assistant) determines
the nature of the customer's inquiry through a series of natural language
questions. Different courses of action are then taken based on whether the
inquiry is simple, complex or uncommon. If the customer cannot find an
answer, he or she can immediately escalate to a live agent.
For e-mail inquiries, E3 provides routing rules that ensure the right agent
receives the inquiry, and provides agents with customer information profiles
and a complete history of prior interactions. Agents have access to customer
information profiles and a complete history of prior interactions. E3 also
incorporates list and campaign management tools, such as segmentation,
message personalization, secure messaging and automatic list updating.
To serve customers who are sending in inquiries from a company's Web site,
eGain Live and eGain Interact provide the agents with the ability to engage
in online text chat, cobrowsing and callbacks. For example, agents can guide
customers around Web sites or assist in filling in forms, and all the while
the agent has access to customer and company information to ensure a
successful experience for the customer.
In addition to these features, E3 provides reporting tools for performing
qualitative as well as quantitative analysis.
In busy call centers, agents may handle hundreds of calls a
day, repeating certain short phrases regularly for almost every call, which
means they must speak thousands of the same words day in and day out. This
accumulated repetition puts stress on the agent's voice and also leads to
rising stress levels on their bodies, which, as we have seen throughout the
industry, leads to burnout and turnover. Golden Voice Technology &
Training has developed a product designed to help reduce that stress by
allowing agents to record often-used phrases they can play over the phone at
the touch of a button. GoldenVoice's VirtualVoice hooks up behind the
phone and can record up to eight minutes or 81 messages for playback.
VirtualVoice has a solid-state memory built-in that will save the recorded
messages in the event of power outages. An agent can use VirtualVoice with
either a handset or headset. Up to nine users can have access to each
VirtualVoice, each with nine recorded phrases, and it is designed to
optimize the recordings for each user's voice. Additionally, it adjusts to
keep the recording/playback volume to that of the live voice. Applications
for the VirtualVoice include greetings and closings, intermediate phrases,
call branding, regulatory phrases and disclaimers.
Intelligent
Optimization From deuxo www.deuxo.com/877-923-3896
'What to do about sales?' has been a question posed, I would guess,
at least since accounting records were first written in cuneiform on clay
tablets in Mesopotamia. Obviously, over time there have been advances in
sales and marketing techniques, including the advent of sales and
marketing automation software in the past few years. deuxo has taken the
process further to produce its Intelligent Optimization (IO) product,
which is used to pinpoint undeveloped leads gathered from mailings, phone
calls, trade shows, e-mail, etc., and develop them over time. According to
Bob Merlo, chief marketing officer at deuxo, sales force automation and
marketing automation were just automating current processes, and IO was
developed to complete the continuum between marketing and sales.
IO includes Intelligent Qualification (IQ), an automated scoring engine
that intelligently determines the level of a prospect based on a
pre-determined profile that deuxo works with the client to create, so that
leads are qualified based on characteristics the client is seeking, which
are input from the sales and marketing teams.
The Lead Optimization Engine uses automated tracks that allow users to
determine the optimal path to a sales-ready opportunity. In a
point-and-click environment, campaigns can be customized for each 'level'
of prospect to determine, based on your previous responses, which 'touches'
to use when. Once a campaign has run, the responses can be analyzed to
determine if it was a successful campaign. If not, users can look through
the historical response data to determine what has worked before, or they
have the option of testing various touches and measuring the response.
IO includes Intelligent Assignment, which is a proprietary method of
assigning opportunities to make sure all opportunities are followed up
throughout the process, no matter how the business is set up.
The IO includes a set of standard reports as well as the ability to
customize reports, and integrates with Microsoft Excel. IO's reports are
printable and can be e-mailed, and there are options available to create
user groups that have various permissions to view reports.