With the explosion of connectivity, mobile device usage and social platform proliferation, it has become easier than ever for consumers to engage in dialogs about your organization, your brand and your products whether you are a part of that conversation or not.
With big data, the amount of usable customer information is exploding, as are the number of interactions taking place on a daily, hourly, and even minute-by-minute basis.
This puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the organization’s ability to store, manage, respond and engage with all these interactions while providing customers with the type of experiences they have come to expect.
In the last two years, the top CRM platforms (Salesforce, Dynamics CRM and others) have significantly evolved to help organizations take on this challenge. The CRM platforms are now providing a full suite of products allowing organizations to manage the customer across the full continuum from marketing to sales to order processing to customer care. These platforms are not only supporting multichannel communications to effectively store all interactions including chat, social dialogs, emails, notes, voice recording, etc. But more importantly, they are producing true omni-channel customer service by enabling customers to start an interaction on one channel and pick up where they left off on another. This wouldn’t be possible without the dialogs, notifications, workflows and analytics these platforms help create.
I was very impressed by the Microsoft CRM story at Convergence this year with the theme “Experience is the new currency.” It is clear that Microsoft has made a significant leap in the customer care space with the announcement of enhanced case management, Unified Service Desk, social listening and acquisition of Parature bringing customer portal and chat. The best part is that all these capabilities can be delivered via cloud.
If we put the Microsoft CRM capabilities with the Aspect capabilities in the cloud together, for the first time an organization can bring together an end-to-end customer care solution entirely in the cloud. In this case, going to the cloud is not limiting but in fact it is an enabler to more sophisticated features than what an organization can get to on-premise in a timely fashion. This type of a solution a few years ago would have required millions of dollars of capital expense. Now an organization can launch into this without a dollar of capex expense.
It is amazing and exciting to see how cloud solutions are taking the discussion completely away from phone lines, SLAs, peak season scalability, server architecture, and amortization to a discussion of use cases, business process and customer experience.
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