Interactive Chat as a support (and sales) channel

I just read an internal memo about the huge success of our (SAS) “proactive chat” feature and was thinking about my masters' thesis, where I stated that the standard triple of telephone, mail and email might not be sufficient anymore and additional channels help to establish a better relationship with customers.

I cannot disclose the numbers here, but in terms of revenue generation, I was actually stunned how the chat feature helps to make money and generate leads. Now given this success, one can only anticipate how this helps improving customer relationships through an outstanding support experience.

While SAS putting a lot of effort into this – like a real-time decision when and how to present the chat feature – and has a large Inside Sales team to handle these incoming chat requests, it is also possible for very small companies to extend their list of channels by a chat.

I recently bought a new TV and while looking for the best price I was stumbling across a very small shop (probably a one-man show) that had a very good price and was pretty close, so I could go there and get the TV the same day while saving the shipping cost.
I had some questions and wanted to get a better feeling (since the price was really low), but writing an email was taking too long and I felt calling him might be a bad idea because it might interrupt too much and I would need several calls to answer questions that were coming up while I was still reading about the TV in the internet and comparing other prices.

The intermediate between a telephone call and an email was a chat. There was no fancy web-chat feature on the store’s website, but he had simply put a Skype-Button on it that was showing if he was online and available..

Cost free and still very convenient!

He could answer my questions, make me feel good about his business and got the deal… simple as that.

Bottom line is that there are many ways to use technology to help build a better / trusted relationship with your customers and improving the customer experience.

Chat is one of the channels that is increasingly getting popular as it fills the gap between phone calls and emails. Chat messages are more interactive and faster than email while still not as interruptive as a phone call.

Have you had a similar experience? Is your company also supporting chat as a medium the get in contact with customers?

Technorati Tags: chat,customer experience,CRM20

Service Cloud2 – Salesforce.com taking Customer support into the cloud?!

Salesforce.com has always been very visionary and successfully pushing the SaaS model into the market for sales force automation (SFA).

In their presentation of the “Service Cloud2” yesterday, they showed that the same SaaS model can also work for customer service and support.
Marc Benioff said that the average service and support applications are about a decade old – and I would totally agree with that. Having seen some installations and the associated data centers behind these applications, I can imagine the potential that Benioff sees in this market and that customers see in potential savings.

SFDC presented some very important new modules of the Service Cloud2 that are indispensable for high quality customer support:

• A knowledgebase (competing with RightNow)
• CTI integration (powered by CISCO?)
• Integration to social networks (like Facebook and twitter)
• Customer portals and communities (competing with Jive SBS)

While all these elements are not new and there are solutions out there to handle them, SFDC is probably the first one that is able to deliver a fully integrated solution (including crowdsourcing) out of one hand and paid solely per usage. This will allow small and medium sized companies to deliver a great customer experience with very little upfront investments in infrastructure and licenses.

Very obvious that putting all CRM in the hands of SFDC also has the risk of a vendor lock-in. And realistically, even if they call this a cloud, it is still not what I would call true cloud computing and it will not be possible to easily switch parts of the CRM to some other vendors or ‘in-source’ the application in the future.

But still, this is a very nice vision that Benioff and his team are bringing to a life and I am very sure that it will be as successful as the SFA module was.

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Salesforce.com,Service Cloud,Customer Support

Call Center –> Contact Center –> Enterprise 2.0

While in the 90s Customer Support predominantly happened on the phone, with the rise of eCommerce new channels were added and the “Call Center” was renamed to “Contact Center”. Unfortunately some of the additional channels (other than Email) like online chat or instant messaging (IM) did not get very popular due to technical limitations in the pre-Web 2.0 era and the missing experience of customers with this kind of communication.

In the current economic climate the agent costs are being reduced by the use of tools like knowledge management or customer self service. RightNow is a CRM tool focusing on this area and  showing some popularity when the focus is short- and mid-term savings (without losing customer satisfaction).

With the rise of Web 2.0, there are additional channels that need to be supported like blogs, micro-blogs, forums, wikis, social networks, SEO, etc. Within a CRM 2.0 strategy, the increased transparency and the concept of an Enterprise 2.0 helps reducing the costs even further by allowing direct contact into the company (even right to the experts) and establishing conversations that not only reduce the need for specialized support agent, but also help building the self service capabilities and knowledge management repository. SalesForce.com is recently growing the number of partners to leverage these new channels for its new customer support strategy.

In addition to the savings, the conversations help analyzing the customer requirements and aligning the product development with the customer needs. Involving customers also helps creating advocates - opening additional (viral~) marketing channels.

It has to be kept in mind, though, that these new channels are mostly targeted towards a tech-savvy and younger audience that is familiar with the new technologies. It would be a bad idea to completely shut down telephone support or tele-sales, even if the target group is the generation Y and techies.

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Contact Center,Enterprise 2.0