Who Provides E-Service Solutions?
Now that you understand why e-service is becoming more important, it is necessary to understand more about who provides e-service solutions. e-service products primarily come from two main areas:
CRM Vendors
CRM (sometimes referred to as eCRM, e-business, or IM [interaction management]) vendors offer specific CRM functionality centered around the e-service capabilities described above. Many vendors that provided just interactive text chat, e-mail management, or FAQ, have rounded out their respective offerings to include multiple interaction channels. Some vendors focus on e-service as a point solution; point solutions are typically easier to install than large frameworks, which have higher rates of failure in the implementation process. Companies such as KANA, eGain, Synchrony Communications, Chordiant, LivePerson, NativeMinds, and Primus offer e-service solutions.
Call Center Vendors
This group is trying to reposition themselves as e-service vendors. This means that these vendors must have full call center functionality including IVR and CTI. In addition, they must have connectivity to PBX/switches, VoIP (voice over IP), e-mail management, self-service, media blending, skills-based routing, interactive text chat, assisted browsing, and preferably workforce management. Call center vendors that have moved into the e-service space include Apropos, Genesys, and the more traditional call center hardware providers such as Lucent (Avaya) and Cisco. Nortel Networks (Clarify) has been associated with the CRM space for some time.
It is increasingly common to see companies using e-service solutions as or along with a CRM application to capture customer information and use that information to forge better relationships. For example, a travel services company in Florida implemented CosmoCom technology for customer interaction via the Web which was then integrated with a leading CRM application, utilizing a standard SQL database. Since the e-service capability was implemented, there has been a drastic reduction in calls placed to a toll-free number for customer service.
When evaluating e-service applications, you should consider if the solution can:
Provide the option for a personalized self-service experience.
Provide the end-user with the ability to escalate to assisted service and seamlessly transfer information across all communication channels (i.e. VoIP, Web chat, e-mail, Web forms, CTI (voice integration).
Accommodate more than one account or tenant on a system server.
Queue all forms of customer/agent interaction—voice, Call Me Now, e-mail, Web chat, and provide media blending with integrated skills based and load balancing capabilities.
Consolidate the knowledgebase and intellectual capital throughout the organization and make it available throughout the extended enterprise. This could be accomplished by providing both COM and CORBA objects that can be called from CRM and e-business frameworks like IONA, BEA, WebSphere, etc.
Learn through cumulative customer feedback and rapidly develop solutions to allow the enterprise to provide proactive service to end-users. The ability to transfer customer history from your platform to other systems provides a good competitive advantage.
Enable enterprises to rapidly deploy e-service technology without large integration/implementation efforts. Companies are spending their time on implementing CRM, ERP, MRP, e-business and they do not have large amounts of time to integrate point solutions.
Scale cost effectively as an organization's service needs grow.
Provide seamless integration between all technologies using architectures like COM/COM+ wrappers, C++, EJB wrappers, XML, ODBC and native tools.
Handle multiple sessions concurrently, regardless of contact method used to reach the contact center (e.g., phone, interactive text, e-mail).
Provide strong workflow functionality.
Provide dynamic self-service and custom Web page presentation through inference technology.
Be purchased on a pay-per-usage basis or a licensed, per-seat basis.