Customer Care Solutions for High Technology Companies

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1 Customer Care Solutions for High Technology Companies Developing and maintaining profitable, long-term customer relationships Show skeptical customers that you re serious about service Overcome ineffective self-service and open high-quality communications channels that get the job done Effectively manage and access increasing volumes of content Increase cross-sell and up-sell opportunities Let s be honest. Widespread opinion is that high tech companies do not take customer service seriously. Satisfaction studies, social networks, and message boards reinforce this. Negative word of mouth/ mouse is rampant. Skeptical, tech-savvy customers are fed-up. They want responsiveness and effective self-service options resolution. It s a crowded market. Loyalty is up for grabs. As a service/support professional, you know there are numerous factors at play. You deal in the cool and complex. Customer inquiries run the gamut from basic product registration questions to configuration issues that require high-level resources to resolve. A help desk call can run anywhere from $15 to over $50. You re charged with controlling an unwieldy budget. Your contact center likely supports a lot of products that with each new generation bring added functionality and added complexity. Managing the basics is a challenge let alone delivering the level of service your customers demand. And you re probably facing some internal resistance from those who think service is fine as is. You know better. page 1

2 It is widely reported that landing a new customer costs upwards of $500. Once onboard, it s clear they are empowered to make or break your brand. Their requirements are reasonable. They want: The product they purchased to do what it s supposed to do. The option of seeking information/resolution through self-service with access to a representative if needed. Your undivided attention and commitment to seeing a problem through to resolution without detours and repetitive actions. To know you value their business and feedback best demonstrated through personalized and proactive service, permanently resolving issues and even embracing co-creation. But despite the clear business case for keeping your customers happy, you still have a lot to sort out. As a high tech company, your needs are extensive. Managing a growing array of feature-rich products, gadgets and software requires a powerful knowledge base. And fielding questions specific to model numbers, software versions, and distinct customer issues takes a solution with serious functionality. We can help. Our solutions move high tech and electronics manufacturers past information-related challenges and the other root causes of sub-standard service. Over 450 of the world s top consumer brands rely on Astute Solutions technology to increase efficiency and reduce costs, while developing profitable, long-term customer relationships. You can do the same. Our solutions enable you to: Reduce costs and increase quality by improving information access and delivery Empower contact center agents with tools and authority to deliver exceptional service Answer the call for functional, effective and personalized self-service Deliver a consistent experience within and between your communication channels Capture and share actionable consumer insights to quickly identify problems, trends and opportunities Increase retention and drive revenues through happy, satisfied customers page 2

3 69 percent of customers leave due to poor service, as compared to 13 percent that leave due to poor products, and 9 percent that leave due to high prices. Michaelson & Associates Reduce costs and increase quality by improving information access and delivery As a high tech company, you re contending with vast amounts of customer, product and service data - spread across the enterprise. With our solutions, the multiple knowledge base labyrinth is replaced by a single interface and powerful, unified platform. Providing streamlined access to multiple sources of customer information. Our epowercenter customer relationship management solution simplifies consumer interactions. Through a single, easy-to-use interface, it provides your agents immediate access to relevant data like the customer s contact details and case history - before an interaction even begins. Across all communication channels, your agents can instantly view or listen to valuable files attached to a consumer s interaction record such as letters, faxes, s, voice mails, screen shots, and call recordings. epowercenter can even pull data from multiple back-end systems onto a common screen. Your agents are no longer taxed with launching and navigating multiple applications (loyalty, warranty, repair, ordering, billing, etc.) in search of the information they need. Delivering consistent, accurate and timely responses. Our RealDialog knowledge management solution removes the biggest obstacle to service excellence. It provides your contact center representatives, employees, and consumers with access to consistent, accurate, and timely information about your products, services, policies, and brands. As a centralized knowledge source for multiple communication channels, it enables your company to rapidly disseminate updates on product issues or recalls to all service representatives and self-service channels. Simplifying your inherent complexities. The needs of the high tech industry are expansive. The sheer volume of information alone that must be accessible to your contact center agents, retailers, field service personnel, customers, employees, help desk representatives and stakeholders is confounding. But this is where RealDialog excels. It eliminates related complexities and provides a single point of access for everybody and everything. Cumbersome binders that require manual updates become a thing of the past. Your contact center representatives, field service technicians, help desk personnel, and all others access install and troubleshooting guides, product manuals, configuration specifications, warranty information, operations procedures, and much more through RealDialog. And they re not just accessing an online version of this information. They are accessing the exact details they need bypassing lengthy searches through documentation, irrelevant chapters, previous versions and models, and unrelated issues. page 3

4 When anyone who touches, buys, develops, sells, services, or markets your products/ peripherals/software can simply log on to access anything they need to know, you re equipped to differentiate through service excellence. Built-In Savings. How do you measure the impact of resolving information-related challenges for improved speed, quality and efficiency? The short answer: In dollars saved by shaving seconds, minutes, hours even days off of your processes and interactions. The short version of the long answer: By controlling operational and IT-related expenditures, leveraging existing assets, mitigating risk, minimizing fraud, reducing agent turnover, and keeping your customers happy and loyal by giving them what they want, when they need it. Empower contact center agents with tools and authority to deliver exceptional service Why are so many high tech companies pulling a bait and switch on their agents? They re hired to deliver customer service, but it seems their job is fighting back-end inefficiencies, while frustrated customers complain. We believe there s a logical solution: Equip agents to do the job they were hired to do. Assisting agents in resolving issues. Within the epowercenter interface, your agents can easily access helpful, contextual information such as scripted answers, graphic images, and full multimedia files. They can tap into other internal and external applications and databases such as order, shipping, warranty, returns, and loyalty systems in real time. This helps them resolve issues and offer valuable information in a fast and personalized manner without escalating the call or involving other departments. When integrated with our RealDialog knowledge management solution and agent assist tool, the solution helps agents deliver expert-level service, regardless of their experience. They can simply enter or select a customer s question, verbatim, and immediately receive an accurate response they can deliver, or are guided with a series of questions to diagnose and resolve the problem. Facilitating successful recovery efforts. One of the biggest gripes about high tech customer service is that companies do not empower their agents to fully resolve issues and situations. It s an easy fix. You take the first step by authorizing your agents to issue compensation and extend recovery efforts. Our technology takes care of the rest. Through intelligent suggestion rules, flexible letter and templates, and powerful fulfillment capabilities; our solutions help to deliver the optimal response and followup communication for each consumer and issue. epowercenter enables you to define and pre-approve compensation types along with follow-up letter/ content for each type of situation. Representatives can extend goodwill and issue cash and non-cash compensation on the spot, as appropriate. page 4

5 This improves recovery efforts, removes agent guesswork and dramatically reduces your service representatives workloads. This also ensures that all of your follow-up communications are effective, timely, compliant, and consistent to help mitigate risk. Safeguarding against abuses. Providing your agents authority to issue goodwill doesn t mean you are open to misuse. Through repeater checking and threshold alerts, our solutions can protect your company from goodwill abuse and fraudulent claims, dramatically improving your profitability. They help manage and monitor customer goodwill programs to determine their success and to protect against excessive loss. Answer the call for functional, effective and personalized self-service As a high tech company, what do you get out of self-service that can only address your most basic questions on a generic level? More importantly, what don t your customers get? According to widespread customer satisfaction surveys, one thing is clear: Primitive self-service is working against you, not for you. Our RealDialog self-service solution enables customers to receive a personalized service experience on the Web, 24X7, with an unmatched level of quality. It provides customers instant access to accurate information and answers for tier 1, 2 and 3 inquiries, improving issue resolution while deflecting calls (and costs) from your contact center. In fact, it can reduce your overall interaction costs by up to 33 percent. Personalizing service, engaging users. Through a simple, text/chat-type interface on your website, RealDialog enables your customers to ask questions the way they prefer in their natural language. The solution interacts like your most knowledgeable live agents, engaging the customer in a conversation to ask clarification questions and gather specific details. This could include the brand and model number of their computer, a software setting, or account information. It applies these details, along with what it learns about the customer throughout the conversation, to deliver exceptionally specific and personalized responses. This capability enables RealDialog to resolve technical and complex tier 2 and 3 issues better than any other. Ensuring accuracy builds trust in Web-based service. RealDialog offers an exceptional accuracy rate of up to 99 percent because it truly understands language and intent, and learns automatically. It even understands synonyms, pronouns, slang, and company/product/industry specific terms. Its built-in dictionary is easily customized, so you can always add information. This greatly improves adoption rates to your lower-cost channel, while building satisfaction. And because it is so successful in resolving issues online, customers using RealDialog have reduced inbound volume by up to 80 percent. page 5

6 Tech-savvy customers who use and Web-based service options expect fast service, but are often disappointed in company response times. Research indicates that high tech companies ignore as much as 20 percent of all received. The technology industry knows it must make service improvements, but large volumes of interactions undermine their efforts. Delivering a quality IVR experience. For phone-based self-service, we provide integrated voice response (IVR). Our intelligent IVR solution leverages information in epowercenter, your customer loyalty databases, and more to personalize interactions and ensure proper call handling and routing. Deliver a consistent experience within and between your communication channels With our solutions, you delight your customers by providing a consistent experience across all communication channels. Our technology integrates the management of all customer interactions, including self-service, , telephone, and chat. Your customers won t receive different answers to the same question as they move from channel to channel. Escalating between channels seamlessly. In some instances, escalation is unavoidable. A question just can t be answered effectively without agent or expert assistance. Our solutions enable seamless escalation in the contact center and online. All relevant details are passed along to the receiving representative, including those collected during self-service interactions. The interaction picks up precisely where it left off. Your customers are spared the annoyance of repeating their information and issue details. Capture and share actionable consumer insights to quickly identify problems, trends and opportunities What good is feedback if it s going to be forced into one of just a handful of general categories? epowercenter s sophisticated reporting capabilities allow real-time, actionable customer feedback to be captured, analyzed and quickly distributed across the organization. Making continuous improvements. Our solutions provide valuable insights from all of your service interactions that can help you identify changes in customer preferences, issues impacting loyalty, and retailers and manufacturing partners that are not meeting company standards all in real time. This unbiased feedback offers ongoing input for improving the customer experience. A finger on the pulse of your customers. When you re equipped to listen to and leverage the voice of the customer, you quickly uncover opportunities where their wants and needs are not being met. This enables you to fine tune marketing, sales and product development efforts. page 6

7 From the highly-detailed information captured in our reports, you can develop better messages, execute more successful campaigns, respond faster to opportunities, and outpace competitors. (Marketers can push refined messaging, content, and links to all touch points in minutes.) You also have a means to gauge consumer reactions to new products and promotions early on. Quickly identifying problems and their root cause. epowercenter acts as an early warning system for problems that could lead to product recalls or undesirable publicity. When incoming complaints match the specific issue alert threshold established by your organization, the system sends notifications to alert key stakeholders. They can then drill down into the details of reports to identify the root cause of issues, make informed decisions, and resolve problems - before they escalate to an uncontrollable level. Increase retention and drive revenues through happy, satisfied customers A happy customer is your greatest asset. They buy from you. They will recommend that friends, families, co-workers and neighbors do the same. Within their social networks, their influence has a reach beyond advertising. By moving you past the obstacles to great service, our solutions enable you to reward customers with outstanding experiences and show them that you re listening. Your representatives have the tools and knowledge to anticipate, identify, and maximize revenue generation opportunities across multiple interaction channels. Along the way, you re reducing expenses throughout the service organization, and making profitable decisions in almost every area of the business. page 7

8 About Astute Solutions Astute Solutions delivers CRM, knowledge management, and multi-channel contact center software and services that enable companies to create significant value through customer interactions in the contact center, on the Web, and in the field. Our award-winning solutions enable you to: Build exceptional relationships with your customers through highvalue, personalized interaction experiences Improve interaction efficiency and effectiveness by empowering representatives with the right information at the right time Reduce service costs and complexity Quickly identify and respond to critical issues Gain actionable insights that drive continuous improvement, profitability, and growth By partnering with us, leading companies across a variety of industries achieve exceptional ROI by reducing overall costs, improving productivity, retaining more customers, delivering market-leading products and services, and increasing revenue. The Astute Solutions Difference Best-of-Breed Solutions. Our award-winning solutions blend advanced features that enable high-touch, high quality experiences online and offline with communication and automation capabilities that improve efficiency and reduce costs. Exceptional One-to-One Interaction Experiences. We have spent more than a decade perfecting solutions for building, managing and enhancing relationships through one-to-one interactions between your service representatives and customers. Specific, Actionable and Strategic Insights. Our solutions enable the effective capture, distribution and use of information and feedback transforming our customers contact centers into strategic enterprise assets. Built for Flexibility. Flexibility and adaptability have long been trademarks of Astute Solutions people, processes and products. We have always embraced tools, technologies and architectures that enable us to seamlessly integrate our solutions into our customers existing technical environments. Extensive Industry Knowledge. We offer extensive expertise across multiple vertical industry segments, which helps us ensure a successful implementation for your company. You gain organization-wide process improvements based on best practices. Exceptional Value. As your needs change, you do not have to worry about investing in significant upgrades or complex customizations. We grow with you. Our comprehensive solutions are highly scalable, and offer a low total cost of ownership. Corporate Headquarters 2400 Corporate Exchange Drive Columbus, OH office toll free info@astutesolutions.com 2010 Astute Solutions. All rights reserved. page 8