Customer Service

While the retail industry crisis has been well-reported, particularly with respect to dwindling foot traffic to brick-and-mortar stores. However, even as consumers turn to shopping online and via mobile devices in droves, it’s shocking to learn that fully 97% of visitors to eCommerce and other sales-minded sites bail out without purchasing on their first visit. As concerning is that approximately 70% of shoppers who do add items to their online shopping cart do not complete the purchase.

Size doesn’t matter: 5 ways predictive analytics prove your customer relationship management methods are likely falling short

As more and more businesses go for cloud computing, it is inevitable that many companies will offer cloud computing solutions. Salesforce.com is an industry leader when it comes to cloud computing solutions. There are several reasons for this.

Variety

Salesforce.com offers a variety of cloud computing solutions, meaning all your business needs will be catered to and you do not have to deal with different vendors. The cloud solutions on offer include Community Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Analytics Cloud. Getting all your services under one roof means seamless integration, convenience, and cost benefits.

When it comes to tools that can help businesses reach out to more and more people, customer relationship management (CRM) systems are some of the most important currently being used. In a nutshell, CRM systems help companies keep track of customer information, with automation and organization of data being crucial elements of the software. As technology has evolved, so have CRM systems. Every year brings about new advances, and businesses have needed to adapt to keep up with all the changes. Predicting what’s to come can help organizations prepare in advance. As companies look to the future, they’ll notice several trends that they can be ready for well ahead of the rest of the pack.

Companies from the cosmetics industry to pet food are finding better ways to interact with customers, improve services and identify new markets through the capabilities they gain from using big data technology, like Google Compute Engine. Google Compute Engine allows companies to run extremely large workloads in the cloud, making big data more affordable and efficient to use than ever before. With this type of technology, companies are able to gather and store more data and, more importantly, they can take that data and perform dynamic queries and analyses that yield real-time results.

MindTouch, a company dedicated to creating self-service help experiences, announced today that its social help system now integrates with SalesForce.com Help Desk and support ticketing to dramatically improve support agents’ efficiency and customers’ help experiences. MindTouch believes their social help platform is revolutionizing the user manual and SaaS customer experiences through a web-based environment that includes a knowledge base, help center, ticketing integration, and help button.

Support agents using CRM and web-based support ticketing systems have instant access to MindTouch powered help articles and knowledge base assets, thereby speeding time to resolution for customer issues. For support agents using SalesForce.com, MindTouch enables them to quickly pinpoint customers the most relevant content and to easily publish new content to the MindTouch knowledge base, as well as identify gaps in product documentation assets–all without ever leaving the SalesForce interface.

Sheri Bigelow, Happiness Engineer at Automattic, gives tips on providing technical user support to WordPress bloggers. Her tips easily can crossover to other customer support tasks in the information technology field.

There are a couple new articles at ComputerWorld that peaked my interest and may be something you too will be interested in reading.  The first is an opinion piece by Frank Hayes, "Frankly Speaking: Rewiring Respect for IT".

Why don’t IT people get more respect? On this Labor Day, things are actually looking better for people who work in corporate IT. Budgets aren’t quite so tight. Companies are hiring. Interesting IT projects are getting a green light. But when it comes to how our fellow employees think about us, IT work is a train wreck. Users break the rules we set up, ignore the proc­esses we develop and generally act as if we’re clueless in what we do.

On a different subject, Bruce A. Steward has written an article to remind us that supporting our customers is more than just improving the business process.