Hot Trends in Customer Care

Perspective

Hot Trends in Customer Care

By Rich Tehrani, Group Editor-in-Chief, TMC  |  July 24, 2014

The need for the integration of contact center solutions with customer relationship management capabilities has never been more important. Improving the customer experience is a top priority of enterprises around the world. In short, being able to have the requisite business intelligence, a holistic and accessible view of a customer’s profile, to meet customer demands in a timely and appropriate manner has become paramount.

Front line employees – contact center agents, sales and marketing resources, to put it simply – need as much information as possible to be efficient and effective. In fact, industry observers believe we are in the midst of a convergence of what had been siloed views of the customer. And, for those readers who went to TMC’s (News - AlertCX Hot Trends Symposium in Indianapolis, you know this subject was a major hot trend that several subject matter experts addressed.

An indication of this trend is the announcement from Huawei of the launch of eSpace Contact Center solutions for enterprise customers, which are certified for SAP (News - Alert) Customer Relationship Management. As Huawei notes, “The eSpace Contact Center empowers customers to move toward a customer contact center architecture, offering sales, marketing, and service information and insights, and providing high-quality customer experiences, enhanced customer interaction, and more efficient service.”

This is a significant launch given SAP’s large CRM footprint in large global enterprises, and certification sends a strong message to customers of both companies. In this regard, the SAP Integration and Certification Center has certified that eSpace Contact Center V2 integrates with SAP CRM and the Huawei (News - Alert) contact center platform which provides a multi-channel access gateway to interactive channels for customers, including voice, web, and SMS. In fact, the Huawei eSpace Contact Center is a fully-featured contact center solution that offers web-based customer services that incorporate a portfolio of collaborative applications, such as social media, remote desktop, whiteboard, file transfer, and annotation.

"We are proud to launch the eSpace Contact Center solutions certified for SAP CRM, which will enable our enterprise customers to offer first-class customer service experiences,” said Wang Junhai, Huawei eSpace Contact Center product management director. “Committed to forging open collaborations with partners, Huawei strives to bring high-quality and innovative ICT products and solutions to the enterprise business market. We look forward to more successful collaborations with SAP."

Huawei is no stranger to the contact center sector, having entered the market in 1993. It is now the market leader in China's growing contact center market and has achieved traction with its solutions around the world. Moreover, it is extremely successful in the carrier equipment market and is growing quite quickly in wireless as well. M2M is one of the new markets the company has entered… The company told me recently at a conference in Las Vegas how well its new IoT gateway is being received by the market.

Contact centers and CRM solutions are naturals for tight integration. In a world where customer demands are changing at an accelerating pace, where alternatives are only a click or a touch away and customer loyalty can be problematic, having the tools to understand the full extent of the customer relationship is as noted, no longer something nice to have but a must have.  It is in this way such integrations are a hot trend that bear close scrutiny and evaluation.

TMC’s Peter Bernstein contributed a great deal to this story and his efforts are appreciated.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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