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Next-Gen Customer Support Software Delivers a Holistic Approach

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Next-Gen Customer Support Software Delivers a Holistic Approach

 
September 18, 2014

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  By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor
 


Taking a holistic approach to delivering products and services to customers in the way that customers want them has always been a smart approach. But a new report by MarketsandMarkets highlights that a holistic approach is no longer a luxury for businesses as they compete in an increasingly competitive marketplace that is informed by heightened customer preferences.


“Traditionally, companies focused mainly on their products and not on customers,” MarketsandMarkets noted in an announcement of the report. “However, with the rise in competition across all verticals, companies now have a major need to maintain customer relationships apart from delivering product innovations.”

Customer relationship management (CRM) has emerged as a critical tool to focus on sales operations, sales force automation, customer analysis, and campaign management, the research firm noted, but firms must go beyond CRM and embrace a more holistic approach to the customer, known as customer experience management (CEM), if they are going to effectively deliver products and services that are responsive to changing customer needs.

“CEM is the overriding concept, which changes an organization’s internally focused view to externally focused customer experience solutions,” noted MarketsandMarkets.

With a CEM focus, customer support software needs to better link the customer support department with product teams and traditional CRM to capture customer sentiment better and link the customer experience with products and services.

This means that customer support software needs to deeply tie into CRM systems as a matter of course, not just provide surface details such as contact information. It also means that customer support solutions should facilitate interaction with other departments and be able to capture customer sentiment to a much higher degree than many customer support platforms currently offer.

Instead of letting important customer feedback during a customer support interaction get lost, good support software should be able to capture customer interactions via call and chat recordings so it can then be analyzed by product teams.

Instead of having customer support work in a silo and be viewed as just handle customer concerns, a good customer support software solution also will enable customer service to interact directly with others in the company from other departments. This can happen via chat and internal social networks within a company, which support software should facilitate.

“Each channel plays an important role in CEM,” noted the report. “CEM providers use various analytical tools such as web analytics, text analytics, and sentiment analytics to analyze the Voice of Customer (VOC) from these channels. The next evolution after CEM can be referred to as Customer Experience Analytics (CEA).”

Businesses need to ensure that their customer support software is ready for this next evolution. A holistic approach is no longer optional.




Edited by Alisen Downey
Customer Support Software Homepage





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