Dagwood’s Help Desk Experience
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010Did you see the Blondie cartoon yesterday? If not, here is a brief synopsis:
Dagwood is shown at his desk with his computer blowing smoke and sporting a huge “ALERT” on the screen. Dagwood is on the phone saying, “Tech Support, I’m gonna stay calm, cool, and collected. This computer is driving me nuts!!
In the second frame, Dagwood is being told by a help desk agent, “Sorry, this is the help line for irate customers who are screaming their lungs out! Our cool, calm, and collected line is 1-888- . . . .”
In the last frame Dagwood is standing up and screaming, “ARE YOU KIDDING?!! The help desk agent is answering, “Attaboy! Much better! Now . . . what seems to be the problem?”
How many of us have felt that way? How many companies have customers who feel like that is how they get treated?
What is the solution to frustrated customers? How can we help our customers?
Try this 3-step process:
1. Purchase help desk software
2. Train help desk agents
3. Be proactive
Customer Relationship Management: Weathering the Economic Storm
Thursday, March 25th, 2010
Use CRM to Weather the Economic Storm
How can you keep the customers you have? You can and must deliver the best products available. You must deliver the best and most complete services and solutions available, but how can you do that? Start with Customer Service Software that helps you build relationships in ways that are convenient for your customers. For those under age 40 that would be using internet and e-mail solutions including web-based knowledge bases and internet chats and forums. For those over 40 it includes telephone calls with knowledgeable agents who have answers at their fingertips. A keyworded, searchable knowledge base will benefit both your customers and your help desk agents. The use of multiple channels to deliver information and help will appeal to a broad customer base.
How can you gain the confidence of prospective customers? First, you have to find prospective customers. This is the job of lead generation software. Then you have to keep them interested and you have to prove that you are trustworthy and understand their problems. One of the oldest tricks is through reliable information delivered piece by piece over a period of time. This is the function of a good e-mail strategy that is built into CRM software. By building a relationship with each prospect and delivering useful information related to their issues and problems, you will be assured of a long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationship.
A great and ongoing relationship with a customer will yield benefits in further sales and in recommendations for years to come. This type of relationship weathers economic storms.
Cynergy’s Help Desk Software Helps You Do More With Less
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010Every company needs to deliver a superior customer experience and reduce operational costs. Cynergy’s integrated, multi-channel Help Desk Software is your best option to exceptional customer experiences at reduced operational costs. In fact, Cynergy’s customer experience products lower your costs, increase your agent’s productivity, and provide a better customer experience in a number of ways. Typically, these benefits begin through the deployment of an effective self-service and email management strategy.
Your company may see phone calls and inbound emails reduced by 30 to 40 percent. Just think of the impact on your call center. Also by reducing the volume of inquiries that is flooding your call center, you can focus your support agents on the customers that really need the help. Reduced costs and better service, it’s a win-win for you and your customers.
A large number of customers is able to immediately get the answers they need 24 hours a day. Because of these successful self-service experiences, customers keep returning to the website when they have questions. So, the percentage of customer issues resolved through immediate online self-service continues to grow over time. This growing volume of self-service resolutions saves your company more and more money every month. Every time a customer uses web self-service instead of calling or emailing the contact center, your company could save between five and fifteen dollars.
To provide a great customer experience, and do it with less cost, you have to get information to your customers in ways that are convenient for them, and cost effective for you. Cynergy Help Desk Software’s tools let your customers help themselves while empowering your front-line staff. Our customer relationship management system includes web self-service, email management, live chat, ivr, and other call center applications, so your agents and customers can more easily work together to solve problems. You’ll have greater insight into customer interactions, your customers will be better served, and you’ll save money.
Help Desk Software: Your Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow?
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010Looking for a Pot of Gold Help Desk Software?
Help Desk Software can be a pot of gold
Does your Help Desk Software answer your needs or are you hoping St. Patrick’s Day will help you find a pot of gold? Help Desk Software can deliver like a pot of gold.
Follow the Rainbow to Your Pot of Gold Help Desk Software
The colors of the rainbow are “ROYGBIV” — Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. Let’s use ROYGBIV to understand how the correct Help Desk Software used with your company’s strategy can increase your business and deliver you a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
R – Relate to each individual customer or prospect through your Help Desk Software
O – Orchestrate a long-term relationship through a strategy of e-mails, phone calls, and up-to-date information
Y – You need to think of your customer as a person and visualize that person and his reactions and needs
G – Give your customers (and prospects) timely information they can use
B – Build a customer-centric strategy that answers your customers’ needs
I – Invest in the best software to accomplish your strategy
V – View your company through your customers’ eyes to see where to improve
CRM – Software or Strategy?
Thursday, March 11th, 2010Is CRM a Software or a Strategy?
Before CRM software, customer relationships occurred slowly — one-on-one in person or on the telephone. Someone said, “Technology does not drive change; technology enables change.” That is especially true of the technology for customer relationship management (CRM). Now that there is technology for customer relationships, there must be a plan or a strategy to go with the use of the technology.
What do you want to accomplish through CRM software? CRM solutions can help you get to know your customers better, understand their needs, and respond to those needs to create a valuable customer experience.
CRM can even begin prior to the customer relationship with lead generation and qualification. CRM software can help you target the right groups of people and the right people within those groups. And CRM solutions can follow customers through various purchases and upgrades to better meet customers’ needs and to build or refine products or services to meet those needs.
Your CRM solution must fit your CRM strategy. But if you don’t have a CRM strategy, you won’t know what solution fits that strategy. However, every business has a CRM strategy which is implied through its business goals. If those goals are only concerned with the financial bottom line, you will quickly realize that your company is not customer-centric, or even client-friendly.
Start by evaluating your short-term and long-term business goals. Which ones are or can be customer-facing? What do you want to accomplish in lead generation, lead qualification, customer satisfaction, cross-selling and up-selling?
Next, look at your market and your industry. What are the customer drivers? What is your competition and what are they doing? Consider how your company can differentiate itself from all the others through customer experience. Don’t forget to consider the impact and requirements of your strategy across different geographies, languages, markets, and channels!
Your company’s CRM strategy is unique – driven by your company’s goals, customers, conditions, and environment. When done right, CRM strategy creates differentiation across the firms of an industry. For that reason, a variety of CRM solutions exist and must be explored for their “fit” with your strategy.
Put “Relationship” Back Into CRM Solutions
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010Put “Relationship” Back Into CRM Solutions
Organizations should use their CRM software to recognize and honor consumer preferences. 77% of consumers say that companies should let them decide how they want to be contacted, yet only 33% of companies even capture their customers’ preferred method of message delivery according to Forrester Research (2009).
And only 14% of 4,700 consumers say that the ads they receive are relevant to them. Most consumers prefer a dialogue rather than a monologue.
The consumer wants to feel “listened to” and in control rather than being told what to think, feel, or do. These things would result in benefits for the company and benefits for the consumers.
What is needed as part of the CRM Solution:
- Automated solution
- Capture preferences including opt-ins and opt-outs
- Simple, easy-to-read results
- Real-time updates
- Campaign tracking and reporting
Let your customers tell you what they want to hear about and how they want to hear it. Information such as opt-ins and opt-outs needs to be captured in real-time and accessed automatically in real-time.
Benefits:
- Visibility into customer contact status
- Increase sales productivity
- Greater management visibility
- Significant cost savings
- More effective marketing campaigns
- Improved customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Increased lifetime value of customers
Transform customer communications into profitable relationships. Achieve a one-on-one relationship with your customers.
When you have greater visibility into your sales activities with your customers and you have real-time access to the contact preferences of your customers and prospects, key metrics can be used to determine your pipeline of future growth.
Contacting a customer or prospect by his preferred method eliminates risk and maintains a positive, productive relationship. This results in creating value for customers which increases sales and customer satisfaction and loyalty. Productivity is then increased resulting in an overall increase in lifetime value of the customers.
Selecting CRM Help Desk Software
Thursday, March 4th, 2010CRM Help Desk Software: What You Need to Consider
CRM Help Desk Software is not a priority for someone starting a business. Their customer relationships are built one at a time through personal contact. However, once the company grows to the point of adding employees, the customer-company dynamic begins to change. The challenges faced by small businesses become more similar to those of larger organizations – to get a unified view of customers throughout the company and to keep in contact with those customers.
All companies want to provide a consistent customer relationship management service, which also yields profits for the organization. As businesses grow, informal customer communication cannot be sustained, so some other method must be instituted. That is when CRM Help Desk software becomes a possible solution.
When considering what CRM Help Desk software to purchase, it often does not matter how large the company is. The concerns are basically similar. Three C’s must be considered: Customization, Communication Strategy, and Cost.
Customization
Most CRM Help Desk solutions for small business often do not fulfill the expectations the firm has of the software. If the CRM system cannot closely integrate with the other existing systems or does not store information within the customer database in a centralized manner, it can deprive the small business of leveraging the complete potential of the CRM software. If the CRM database cannot be customized or configured as per the organization’s requirements, it can result in the CRM system being completely inflexible.
Communication Strategy
Small businesses should consider only those CRM help desk systems which can be incorporated easily into the existing IT infrastructure. Ideally, CRM solutions should be considered as a strategy as opposed to just technology. These need to be implemented directly to curtail costs as well as errors pertaining to sales, thereby raising revenues. Since most customer information is already available within current systems in the organization, creating a new application, which contains entirely new information, is a redundant process and in the case of small businesses with limited resources, this can be a painstaking process.
Cost
Before any purchase of CRM software solutions are made, the small business should ask if the software will truly communicate with customers and be easy to use by the employees. You also need to know the overall costs for integration of the CRM Help Desk system.
Since most small businesses have limited resources, they cannot spare their employees on a full-time basis to carry out CRM Help Desk Software implementation. Ideally such companies should consider a web-based application. This eliminates installation and licensing costs and nearly eliminates all labor costs for installation and maintenance. Yet, it gives them regular updates and upgrades and access to expert advice and help as needed. This ensures the success of the relationship management system implementation.
Help Desk CRM Software
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010Help desk CRM software provides internal service and support solutions that automate the help desk and service desk function. Typical help desk CRM software functionality includes call management, call tracking, knowledge management, problem resolution, remote control, and self-help capabilities.
CRM and call center software specialize in solutions that help automate the call center and customer management process including customer identification, communications, segmentation, analysis, sales and marketing. Some vendors in this category offer complementary solutions in the form of sales force automation (SFA), help desk software, and related front/back office solutions.
Knowledge management enables companies to more effectively manage structured data, unstructured information, collaboration, and document management. While a majority of these vendors focus specifically on knowledge sharing, search and categorization tools, some offer complementary products in the form of help desk automation, customer relationship management (CRM), call center management, and related front/back office solutions.
Web-based Software
Friday, February 26th, 2010Web-based software, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions, will account for 25% of all new business software by 2011, according to Gartner. Why are decision-makers increasingly turning to SaaS for application deployments?
Find out how to achieve business benefits through SaaS, which include:
• Higher productivity and ROI
• Lower upfront software license and staff costs
• Increased agility to scale software in meeting business change
• And more!
SaaS can make a great impact on your business’ bottom line.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or web-based software is software that is delivered via the web and priced as a monthly, quarterly, or annual subscription. It transfers the burden of implementing, maintaining and keeping the application up to date and running smoothly from the customer to the vendor. It eliminates the costs and complexities of installing and integrating hardware to support the software and hiring additional staff to support the application.
SaaS permits users to more quickly and fully leverage the software functionality. It also enables users to immediately benefit from the software vendor’s latest technological features without the disruptions and costs associated with software updates and upgrades.
All types of businesses and all sizes of organizations can benefit from web-based software. Mid-sized organizations using help desk software or customer management software stand to benefit most from this new innovation.
Today’s economic environment has intensified these companies’ needs. Customers expect more service than they got in the past couple of decades – and research shows that customers’ expectations are rising. Customer loyalty is fleeting. Competition is rising and intensifying due to globalization and eCommerce. Employees are being encouraged to work from home or forced to spend more time on the road meeting with customers and partners face-to-face. Rising costs and tightened credit are forcing organizations to tighten their operating and capital budgets.
If you are wondering if SaaS, or web-based, help desk software or customer management software would work for your company, please contact Cynergy Software at 800-349-0527.
Web-Based CRM Software Features Online CRM
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010Cynergy Help Desk software is web-based software that can be utilized for online CRM. It features tools to submit and track sales activities as well as lead generation activities.
CRM Performance Tracking allows sales staff to view the percentage of deals they have closed. Staff members can view or attach files when updating customer requests. Pending sales and forecasted closings are shown on the screen. A knowledge base management system is incorporated for quick solution of problems.
Cynergy Software allows managers to create user accounts, view staff performance and response time, and configure the software and displays to fit their needs. It allows easy access of customer databases and easy creation of templates.
Cynergy Software is the choice of software for many sales and support-center organizations. Many of the features that are optional in other software packages are standard in Cynergy.