Customers.com Technologies

Can Your Customers EASILY Find and Buy the Right Stuff Online?

By Susan E. Aldrich
Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group

In the past 12 months, we've watched our clients who were unhappy with how difficult it was to get the right items in front of their customers take very different paths to achieve their customer acquisition and sales conversion goals.

We saw one client opt for SEO services to bring all visitors to exactly the right page – no site search and navigation required.

Another client chose a recommendation platform to bypass their site search inadequacies. They didn't want to replace several search engines providing keyword and part number search on the site, and they recognized that metadata was never going to keep pace with customer terminology.

A third client took the traditional approach of replacing a simplistic keyword-match site search with an ecommerce-focused search solution, selecting an offering that comes with what the vendor describes as a marketing suite: recommendations, targeted ads and emails, and SEO.

A fourth client continues to struggle with ineffective search, because as she says, "We have an ecommerce platform, and we all pretend to believe it will do everything for ecommerce. So there is no chance of augmenting the parts that perform poorly for us, such as search."

The first three are pleased with their results, noting that customers are getting a much better experience and that the Web site is contributing more to business results.Does this mean that search, navigation and discovery are no longer the leading mechanisms for marketing and for streamlining the customer experience?

This is the question we address in our Pocket Guide to Tools for Acquisition and Conversion.

Integrated Customer Service Knowledge Management Needs to Span Self-Service, Assisted Service, Case Management, and Contact Center Solutions

The Web and the contact center are the two critical channels for cross-channel customer service—the Web for self-service and the contact center for assisted-service. Customer portals are the mechanism for delivering self-service on the Web. Agent desktops are the mechanism for delivering assisted-service through the contact center.

Knowledge management-based customer service offerings can be the key to delivering customer service across both these channels. For Web self-service, they typically offer portal-like UIs. For contact center-based assisted-service, their integration with the case/incident capabilities of the agent desktops in contact center offerings can be the key to helping agents/CSRs deliver more effective, more efficient, and more consistent customer service. InQuira iConnect provides that integration between its InQuira 8 knowledge management offering and leading contact center products.

Customer Interaction Cloud from Cisco and Salesforce

On October 5, Cisco and Salesforce.com jointly announced Customer Interaction Cloud, a combined Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) "solution" that enables customer service organizations to implement their contact centers entirely "in the cloud." An organization can deploy its entire contact center in the cloud on Force.com, Salesforce.com's cloud computing platform. This includes case management and knowledge management customer service applications, call routing, call queuing, agent management, and CTI telephony applications, and the integrations between them are deployed entirely.

This is a very big, maybe market-changing announcement.

Think about it. Cisco and salesforce.com are providing an approach to contact center implementation that requires no computer system hardware or software and no telephony hardware or software—no hw/sw purchase, implementation, or management and support. A little provisioning and configuration, perhaps a little customization and, whammo, you've got a fully functional contact center. Train your CSRs, give them the URL to access the apps' home page through the Web browsers on their desktops and their IP phones, and turn them loose. (Yes, Customer Interaction Cloud assumes you're using VoIP.)

We cover several customer service suppliers with offerings that have SaaS deployments—Astute Solutions, Attensity Group, IntelliResponse, nGenera, and RightNow in addition to Salesforce.com. In addition, we know of several telephony suppliers that have CaaS (Communications as a Service) deployments of their applications—Mobivox, OnState, SipGate, and Voxeo, for example. But, we believe that Cisco is the first telephony supplier to offer SaaS deployment and, together, Cisco and Salesforce.com are the first to offer a complete and integrated SaaS contact center offering that combines customer service and telephony applications.