CUSTOMER — November 2013

Easy, Personalized & Smart: Calabrio Helps Green Mountain Coffee Better Manage, Analyze Its Contact Centers

Green Mountain Coffee sells a wide array of coffee, tea, and other hot beverages, as well as the Keurig machines to prepare them. Its single serving canister approach to brewing is unique, and Green Mountain continues to expand on the consumable brand and flavor options it offers. The company also has a forward-looking approach when it comes to its contact center, which relies on analytics, quality management, and workforce management solutions from Calabrio.Read More >>>

Microsoft Lync in the Contact Center: Providing a Faster, Barrier-free Customer Experience
Within a unified communications framework, integrating CIC with Microsoft Lync brings the contact center to life. Organizations using Lync and CIC enhance contact center and customer care processes across media channels of all types - voice, email, chat, SMS, fax, and even social media. The integration's expanded collaboration features for IM, real-time presence, intelligent interaction routing, transfers, and reporting also bring contact center agents and enterprise users together more tightly, bridging gaps in collaboration across the organization.

Winning with Grocery Consumers is All About Convenience and Price. Or is it?
Time and again, surveys tell us that consumers value the same basic things in a grocer. It's all about convenience and price. In a recent survey that Market Force Information conducted among more than 6,500 consumers across North America, almost seven in 10 said that their primary reason for choosing a grocer was its convenient location. That was followed by 54 percent who said it was providing low prices. Good sales and promotions followed, along with a wide array of products and merchandise.

Focus on Value: How to Get a True View of the Customer Experience Your Company Delivers
Capturing the customer experience is kind of like photography. You can see a fair amount of detail if you focus on one thing, but looking at the larger scene can give you a more accurate idea of what's really happening.

M&A Mania: Leading Customer Experience Companies Expand via Acquisition
It's holiday shopping time. And consumers aren't the only ones opening up their pocketbooks this season. Companies in the customer experience space have also been in on the buying action so they are well stocked with a variety of cloud-based, inbound, outbound, and multichannel solutions as businesses do some shopping of their own.

Five Steps to Improve Webchat at Your Company
It's not uncommon for businesses to buy and implement a webchat system and then fail to take critical actions like evaluating its effectiveness, measuring ROI and improving functionalities. In some cases, businesses may have decided their webchat is unsuccessful because they don't have the knowledge or tools needed to measure ROI, or the system may have key - but correctible - lapses that aren't being addressed. Surveying customers about their experience can be very revealing in terms of surfacing pain points.

Unify & Conquer: The Bottom Line on One Line of Support
The trend in customer service over the last 10 to 15 years has been to divide up work, creating multiple support tiers and putting more technology in front of the customer to route customer communications and manage the volume - all to better serve company needs.

Spirits Company Beam Turns Up the Heat
Beam Inc. has a 218-year history of making spirits, with premium brands such as Jim Beam Black and Maker's Mark bourbon, Laphroaig scotch and Sauza tequila. Beam blends its rich heritage with the vigor of a startup. It has distilled its strategy for long-term, profitable growth into efficiency and best practices such as lean manufacturing, global procurement and global shared services. It's proving to be a successful recipe for growth and innovation. Beam had $2.5 billion in net sales in 2012, its first full year as a pure-play spirits company.

Relayware Opens Lines of Collaboration Among B2B Partners
Relayware CEO Mike Morgan tells CUSTOMER magazine that the company's main competitor is Salesforce. But Relayware is stronger in the area of marketing and program automation, he said. The Salesforce solution is also more expense, according to Morgan, who says it requires companies to get separate licenses for different partners. Relayware only requires one license from the company, which can then allow channel partners to leverage the solution.

Looking Beyond Marketing Automation: How to Use Big Data to Truly Get More Personal
When the concept of big data first infiltrated the marketing and CRM space, marketers across every industry rejoiced at the thought of having unprecedented access to minute details about their current and prospective customers. We reveled in the notion of mining this incredible treasure trove of information to uncover valuable insights that would help us hone our message, zero in on the right audience and, ultimately, grow sales and revenue.

Making Big Data Marketing a Reality Build or Buy?
Nearly every operator is exploring how to capitalize on the promise of big data. Functional groups, ranging from customer support to network operations to marketing, have identified strategic opportunities for using big data to drive better decision-making.

Navigating the Customer Communications Compliance Minefield
Consumers expect a certain level of communications and real-time updates on all aspects of their lives. From doctor's appointment reminders to missed payment reminders to flight delay notifications, consumers want proactive updates from the companies they do business with. However, considering the multitude of state and federal rules that govern how and when businesses can contact consumers, meeting these expectations is no easy task.

SAP: Avoid Mobile Ad Spamming, Embrace Precision Retailing
Personalization and tagging are prominent. And people are easily annoyed when they get communications, even from companies with which they've opted in, that don't speak to their interests.

Survey Says Low-Cost Options Threaten Giants' Prominence
That, and the desire for continued growth, has pushed companies like Qualtrics to try to go upmarket, she said, adding that some of freemium tool providers that flooded the market have gone belly up. To ensure Qualtrics doesn't follow in their footsteps, Qualtrics has modified its pricing, which is based on seats and responses (as opposed to the number of surveys sent out), with different tiers for smaller, medium and large-scale businesses.