“If you’re a French-speaking customer with a Cognos 8 issue, we’re
going to find the best analyst by looking at the data we’ve got.”
resonates with you?’ When a company goes to design a new
product, it can tap a rich trove of knowledge.”
Cognos can attest to this fact. Once the company realized
that its legacy CRM program wasn’t doing what it needed
to do, it underwent an 11-month implementation process
to bring Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management
(CRM) 7. 8 up and running. The system went live in
November 2007. One of the first things the company put in
place was advanced call center routing, so it could route customers based on their problem and which customer service
agent was best suited to help them, says Dave Sheppard,
Cognos’ director of worldwide business solutions. “If you’re
a French-speaking customer with a Cognos 8 issue, we’re
going to find the best analyst by looking at the data we’ve
got within Siebel and routing that call automatically,” he says.
“So response time to the most qualified agent has definitely
improved. We’ve all been in queues where you get moved
from agent to agent, and have to re-describe your problem to
multiple people. That just takes energy and time from a customer point of view. And it’s quite a frustrating experience.”
Information from every customer can be logged and documented, so agents can stay attentive to customer needs and
situations. According to Sheppard, that information is used
down the road to help create better products and provide
better service. “This information gets passed on to R&D,
—Dave Sheppard, Director, Worldwide Business Solutions, Cognos
but it also gets put into the self-service realm, making end-user support more efficient and satisfying for users,” says
Sheppard. “We put in advanced search and some upgraded
capabilities in our knowledgebase as well, to help customers
get to their answer more quickly without having to interact
with an agent.”
And now everyone within the company—from assistants
to customer service agents to salespeople—can have an
impact on the way the business is run based on their own
interactions with the Siebel CRM program, says Silvestri.
“We call them ‘change champions,’” Silvestri says. “They
were involved in helping to define some of the customer
service processes. There were always a lot of great ideas in
the field about how customer service agents could help their
support organization, but there was an inability to put them
into effect. Now they have that ability, and there is a lot of
positive energy and letting those ideas flow into the design
of the product and service.”
AN EASY SELL
If you can’t sell effectively, then all of the above abilities are
moot, which is why leading-edge CRM users have taken
their programs and further empowered their salespeople and
sales engineers, says Beagle Research Group’s Pombriant.
“One of the biggest changes is embedding analytics at
management. “There has been a gap
in the solutions that aid the decision
process that surrounds negotiation,
and that’s where our deal management
product comes in—to ensure the right
price is offered on every deal.”
All these sales processes are
accomplished using intuitive interfaces that have already gotten rave
reviews from users. “From a user
standpoint, we have focused on
designing our applications so they
are simple, easy to consume, and
appealing,” says Tara Roberts, vice
president of product management for
Oracle Social CRM applications. “Our
goal is to help sales reps be more
productive by providing social applications rich with data. When they first
see the interface, people say, ‘Wow,
this is gorgeous.’”
Oracle is building on previous
investments in
business intelligence and data
mining. “What’s
available in the
market often
looks like technology in search of
a problem,” says
Jean-Marie Flexer,
Oracle’s product
manager of mobile CRM products.
“Here, we’ve listened to our customers and then geared our design to
meet their needs.”
Oracle Social CRM applications
integrate with CRM and ERP systems
Social capabilities are embedded into Oracle Sales Library.
and are available standalone as well.
Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant was
released in March 2008; the other
applications will be available later
this year.
