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DSC Tech Library
This section of our technical library presents information and documentation relating to CRM Solutions and Customer relationship management software and products. Providing customer service is vital to maintaining successful business relationships. Accurate and timely information provided in a professional manner is the key to any business and service operation.
Our CRM software application TELEMATION, was developed with this in mind. But the ability to change is just as important in this ever changing business environment.
Telemation call center software was designed from the very beginning for this environment.
Many call center managers, with unique and changing requirements, have chosen and continue to use our CRM software as their solution of choice.
Our contact center CRM solution is ideally suited for call center service bureaus.
Reinventing CRM Through Technology
The following is an extract from the article "10 Technologies That Are Reinventing the CRM Industry" by Coreen Bailor from CRM Magazine:
"Technology: VoIP
Why You Need to Know About It: Cuts costs and erases location barriers while improving customer service.
Few technologies have been generating a louder buzz than VoIP, particularly among contact centers. "If there is a major driver in the call center space it's VoIP and it's finally come into its own," says Rich Jaso, Northern American managing partner, CRM practice, at Unisys.
The ability to augment the traditional contact center with remote, home-based, and outsourced agents adds to VoIP's flavor. "You begin to transcend the idea of location or geographic handcuffs," says Ross Daniels, manager of product marketing at Cisco, in the customer contact business unit.
Reducing costs and converging channels like voice, email, and Web chat may also help to extend VoIP's growth curve. "Voice over IP allows the contact center manager to manage all of these interaction types over one network," says Sean O'Connell, manager of product marketing for Cisco.
Yet its growth doesn't come without concerns. Some analysts argue that VoIP falls short in certain arenas when stacked up against time division multiplexing (TDM). According to Daniel Hong, CRM analyst for Datamonitor, VoIP is hyped as being as reliable as TDM. "When you [have a] power shortage, essentially your whole network will be down, but the phones are still working. So for business continuity measures TDM is still the number one choice," Hong says. "That's why they offer hybrid IP solutions. But eventually all the companies will make the jump to pure IP."
And although VoIP reduces toll, network, equipment, and administration costs, according to Hong, it is not yet widely deployed. "It is becoming mainstream, but a lot of that is...in the beginnings of being deployed right now."
Over the next two or three years "you're going to have massive and radical adoption of VoIP infrastructure," Jaso says.
Technology: Web Services and Services Oriented Architecture
Why You Need to Know About It: Provides an increased span of flexibility.
Flexibility is one of the prime reasons Web services and services oriented architectures are technology platforms to watch, as are open standards like Speech Application Language Tags (SALT), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and Extensible Markup Language (XML).
Web services and services oriented architectures "provide more adaptable and flexible applications so the applications can change more dynamically in context to a business process," says Sheryl Kingstone, The Yankee Group CRM program manager. "It also helps for standardization, so now you can share information across heterogeneous platforms easier."
The industry is already beginning to see how Web services can positively affect the way applications work together, according to Denis Pombriant, managing principal at Beagle Research Group. "Many major vendors...have programs in place to help them extend their own application functionality by incorporating other third-party applications through Web services into their suites," he says. "We're going to see that approach becoming increasingly important."
However, although Web services can allow organizations to work across applications, the hype around it now is massive, says Liz Roche, CRM vice president and practice lead at META. "On a scale from one to ten, the hype factor is, like, twenty-seven," Roche says. "The reality is, every organization has to start preparing [itself] to consume Web services and Web services oriented technology."
Technology: Speech Applications
Why You Need to Know About It: Properly done they can reduce costs while boosting amount of transactions a company can process without increasing head count.
Self-service applications, with the aid of VoiceXML, can help organizations--especially contact centers--strike that happy medium between slicing costs and satisfying customers.
VoiceXML uses open standards for building telephone and speech applications, says Ken Rehor, vice chair of the VoiceXML Forum. "What having a standard like this does for you is enable a choice of vendors and technologies that best fit a particular solution."
VoiceXML is just one pixel, albeit large, that helps create the speech technology picture. "Touchtone technology in the past, whether we loved it or hated it, could handle a certain range of transactions. But there was a whole other range that touchtone just didn't quite work well for," says Art Schoeller, Yankee Group senior analyst. "VoiceXML helps move it along by giving us a pretty solid standard upon which to do speech technology applications."
Agents still handle about 80 percent of calls coming in to the contact center and touchtone IVR systems handle only 10 to 20 percent. But with speech applications gaining ground, that IVR percentage is poised for growth, according to Steve Tran, cofounder and vice president of marketing and client solutions at BeVocal, which provides hosted speech solutions. "I see the next ten years really shifting that balance on its head," he says....."
To review the entire article, visit
www.destinationcrm.com and locate the article entitled
"10 Technologies That Are Reinventing the CRM Industry" or contact Assistant Editor Coreen Bailor at cbailor@destinationCRM.com
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