CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT AND E-COMMERCE—could there be a more natural combination? In many ways, e-commerce applications, such as the online storefront, are great examples of CRM theory put into practice. Your storefront is like a laboratory, with the aspects of sales, marketing, customer service, and analytics all there to be adjusted, without the unknown variable of employee quality to contaminate the results.

Creating strong relationships with customers online—and, ideally, expanding those relationships to include offline customer interactions—presents special challenges, but new technologies are making it possible. In this White Paper, five leading vendors offer their insights on how to maximize your online channel.

WISDOM THROUGH UNDERSTANDING
In this White Paper you’ll find nine distinct essays covering best practices in business intelligence, analytics, and data mining. The common goal of these essays is to help organizations better understand the world around them by making sense of raw data. In fact, the first essay, "Turning Information into Insights," asks you to imagine every person in your business making better choices—every time, and in every situation. This broad and sweeping premise may sound a bit utopian, but it’ s at the crux of what these tools are intended to help us accomplish in the first place: recognizing patterns that help us make smarter decisions.

DIFFERENTIATE YOUR COMPANY WITH SELF-SERVICE THAT SATISFIES YOUR CUSTOMERS - AND SAVES YOU MONEYLearn the latest techniques and strategies from the latest installment in CRM magazine’s Best Practices series and get five different thought provoking white papers from these leading solution providers:

• Microsoft - REDEFINING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE THROUGH SELF SERVICE: Are your customers falling through the cracks?
• Genesys - THE INTELLIGENT CUSTOMER FRONT DOOR: Rolling out the Red Carpet for Increased Customer Satisfaction
• Oracle - "GOING GREEN" WITH ORACLE SELF-SERVICE E-BILLING: Reduce Your Carbon Footprint While Transforming Customer Relationships
• eGain - eGAIN BUSTS FIVE WEB SELF-SERVICE MYTHS
• Astute Solutions - AM I GETTING THROUGH TO YOU? Leverage the real "voice of the customer" to ensure your self-service doesn’t lead to dead ends

As marketing has grown in complexity over the pastdecade, the demands on those in charge—the ChiefMarketing Officers—have also increased to a point wheretheir positions are becoming increasingly untenable.According to a recent study by the CMO Council, theaverage tenure of a CMO is now less than two years. Thepressures of targeting, acquiring, and retaining customersin a hyper-competitive business environment are forcingCMOs to look to new solutions that can help themincrease their efficiency and effectiveness while providingmeasurable results.

Does your contact center deliver world class service to your customers and prospects?

Download this special supplement from CRM magazine's February issue and learn Best Practices in Contact Center Solutions from nine leading solution providers — all in one place.

In this 16 page section, you will get these concise viewpoints to help you gain competitive advantage:

• "Going Green" in the Contact Center - Reduce Costs and Improve the Customer Experience while Making a Positive Impact on the Environment Oracle
• Increasing Agent Productivity & Satisfaction - Winning strategies to improve agent effectiveness, increase profitability and ensure customer satisfaction Genesys
• Doing More with Less in Contact Centers: Strategies and Best Practices eGain
• Analytics-driven Workforce Optimization: Greater Insight for Enterprise Customer Service Verint
• Maintain Your Competitive Edge with Interaction Analysis Autonomy eTalk
• Solve Customer-Related Challenges and Achieve Operational Efficiency - Streamlining processes from the contact center across the supply chain moves retailers from multi-channel to cross-channel—providing an optimal customer experience. Sterling Commerce
• Best Practices for Survey Success DO's and DON'Ts Vovici
• Customer Insight 2.0: Managing unstructured data brings brilliance to Voice of the Customer initiatives Astute Solutions
• Essential Managers Guide to Extraordinary Customer Service Avaya

Amazing efficiencies have been realized in many of the processes making up customer relationship management solutions. Of course, all that call routing speed and those multiple channel contact points will eventually cause incoming customer inquires to pile up into a logjam unless effective knowledge management processes are imbedded deeply into the solution. Delivering effective customer service is all about answering questions quickly and efficiently.

In this White Paper, five leading vendors offer their insights into how to capitalize on knowledge management strategies and practices in your customer relationship management initiatives. Not surprisingly, the insight they offer has very little to do with technology but instead concentrates on the larger questions on project scope, best practices, and creating a knowledge management solution that is adaptable and dynamic.

Customer relationship management is a very broad term that conveys a horizontal and strategic approach to dealing with customers. Applying this strategic vision in a tactical setting demands that several levels of customization be considered—your vertical market; possibly your niche within that vertical market; and your company’s unique business model, which incorporates many business processes. Because all implementations within even a niche market probably have to be customized to the specific organization’s needs, some customization is unavoidable.

Probably the biggest innovation in sales forceautomation (SFA) since the early days was theintroduction of the "software-as-a-service" (SaaS) model,which offers two major benefits. The first is pricing, inthat SaaS allows for relatively inexpensive subscriptionsto be sold on a per-seat basis. The vendor takes care ofhosting, upgrades, and service issues, and the salesforce gets low up front costs, shared database access,and expandability. The second big innovation is theimproved capability of mobile CRM for salespeople onthe go.

But the success of SFA implementations still relies on theadoption and compliance of individual salespeople, andencourages as much by offering solutions that are easyto use, presenting a unified view of customer issues andhistory, and featuring useful personal productivity tools.Most SFA offerings available today have been able to findthe balance between making the process as painless aspossible for salespeople while giving managementaccurate reporting and forecasts. For many organizations,especially those in the business-to-business space, SFA isthe key element in their overall CRM strategy.

Multichannel contact centers are at the heart of one of the most exciting transformations in the way organizationscommunicate with their customers. It is this collaborationbetween people, process, and technology that promisesto bring the best customer service to users, whileenabling a crucial feedback channel to host organizations.

We’re all familiar with the reasons why superior customerservice is critical to retaining customers, improvingsatisfaction, and differentiating brands in this world ofincreasing commoditization. We are equally familiar withthe economic imperative to deliver superior service at alower cost per transaction. Here, leading solution providers take the evolution of multichannel contactcenters one step farther and describe the emergence of athird business driver, one that will prove to be asimportant as improving service at increasingly lower costs.

One of the biggest advances in recent years, in the way organizations interact with their customers andprospects is through web self-service. This around the-clock method of answering questions, solvingproblems, and serving customers has been a boon to both organizations and the individuals they serve.Corporations get to cut costs, increase customer satisfaction, and attend to customer needs whileconsumers can get the majority of their questions answered at any time it is convenient to them.

In this special section of CRMmagazine we have invited several leading vendors of web self-servicesolutions to offer their best practices for the successful implementation of web-based self-servicesolutions. You’ll notice that none of these best practices have much to do with the technologyitself, but instead are focused on the actual goal of eliminating the barriers to information whichfrustrate end users—their customers.

When the term knowledge management (KM) came to the forefront of business strategies in the 1990s, there was the generally accepted notion that it referred to a set of disciplines that enabled an organization to capture, categorize, and present corporate knowledge for improved business and competitive advantage. In many ways, KM started off as a method of institutionalizing corporate memory and knowledge, but it was largely restricted to the corporate intranet; many KM initiatives floundered because they didn’t have a clear goal, and supporters found it difficult to fund projects without clearly defined ROI metrics. As forward-thinking organizations quickly adapted their business goals and scope of their knowledge initiatives to the area of customer service, executives found it easier to match investments in KM against traditional metrics like call-handle times, reduction in repeat contacts, and problem escalations. Improving customer service with better informed center agents or a well-designed web self-service application is a goal that all customer-centric organizations strive to meet – and is one that drives revenue, customer loyalty, and marketing efficiencies.

Consumer’s expectations and the advent of broadband accesshave altered the way we interact with our customers and howthey expect to interact with us. People want product information24/7, want to place orders, track shipments, resolve problems, and getsupport at a time and through any channel of theirchoosing. In a very short period of time the expectations ofcustomers for good service and access to information hasmade instant access a true competitive advantage for SMBs.This white paper examines SMB solutions that offer clear businessvalue and complement—not compete with—the resources needed by thecompany’s core business.

In this special section of CRM magazine, readerswill understand seven distinct visions of how andwhy Web self-service should be conceived,designed, and implemented. There are recurringthemes about return on investment, scalability, andencouraging user adoption from the enterpriseaspect, and about personalization, functionality,and ease of use from the consumer's perspective.The most important theme to understand is, thatall these objectives depend on both parties,businesses and consumers, deriving true value andbenefit from the Web self-service channel. Simplypushing customers to a lower cost channel won'tachieve sustainable business objectives.

The following two sponsored-content pieces presentcomplementary considerations for today's speech applicationintegration strategies. They discusssecure interface necessities and clarify how toachieve extended business value from speechtechnologyinvestments. Both concepts are criticalto your operations and to the success of yourspeech-enabled initiatives.