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.
