Customers.com Technologies

Two Hot Trends in Customer Service Technology

By Mitchell I. Kramer
Sr. VP & Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group

What are the two hottest trends in customer service solutions? 

1. The ability to integrate social networking conversations into your self-service and assisted-service knowledge bases and case management

2. The ability to integrate assisted-service with contact center technologies

Here is our 3Q2009 Customer Service Product and Company update. Yes, it’s a little late, but two of the ten suppliers we track, IntelliResponse and Salesforce.com, end their quarter a month later than calendar quarters.

3Q2009 was another good quarter in KM-based customer service, the second quarter in a row, even though third quarters are typically seasonally soft for all IT suppliers. All of our vendors showed improvement in at least one of the three areas that we track—customers, products, and company. Four of them improved across all three and earned Customer Service Stars (alphabetically): Consona CRM, IntelliResponse, RightNow, and Salesforce.com. This is the first Customer Service Star for Consona CRM. Its acquisition of SupportSoft, KCS v4 verification, and new versions of its case management and knowledge management offerings position it well for continued success.

The two hot trends are integration of social media and integration of contact center-based assisted-service. Customer service is increasingly cross-channel. Facebook and Twitter have become important interaction channels as customers use them to communicate with their suppliers and with each other to seek answers and solutions. Facebook Fanpages are a knowledge source for customer service. Make sure that you’re on the social Web both for visibility and customer sat. Your customers live there. That’s where they expect to find the right answers and solutions.

Integration with assisted-service is a back-to-the-future trend. It was also a hot one five or six years ago. KM suppliers are, again, integrating their offerings with contact center/case management systems. For example, InQuira iConnect for Siebel Contact Center puts InQuira’s KM capabilities on the Siebel (now Oracle) agent desktop, or Salesforce Knowledge puts new KM capabilities on the Salesforce.com agent desktop. Why is this integration hot again? After all, customer service has always been cross-channel. Well, we think that organizations have been over-focusing on customer self-service. Self-service is a great strategy in tough economic times. But customers still need help, help on the telephone and, now more than last time, help via Web chat.

One more thing. There were a ton of new products announced late in 3Q and early in 4Q. We’ll be quite busy evaluating them in the next few months. Our evaluation of Salesforce.com Service Cloud 2 is just about ready.

IBM’s Enterprise Content Management Strategy; Bigger than SAP?

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

You'd expect anything with "enterprise" in its name to be pretty big. IBM's Enterprise Content Management platform is breath-taking for its breadth. First of all, it redefines the meaning of "content." IBM expands the definition of content to include all types of records and archives (paper!), tweets, audio, and video. IBM's platform also provides a broad set of services covering all the ways organizations interact with unstructured information. IBM's ECM platform embraces services to store, analyze and annotate content so that some structure (metadata) can be imposed on it and value extracted from it, mine it to extract insights and correlation, classify it, report on the sentiments expressed therein, search it, organize it for discovery and compliance, provide business process management services, manage digital assets, and deliver information to portals and other agile interfaces.

IBM's picture of its ECM Platform is so broad and deep it calls to mind SAP's enterprise resource planning. If you're still thinking of content management as a few tools to help you with revising and publishing articles or Web pages, you are so last century.

As you'd expect from an IBM vision, ECM is a layered architecture. The ECM Platform is comprised of multiple repository technologies, the ECM framework, and user interfaces.