DiData eGains e-Services Ally
One of Dimension
Data‘s (DiData) key focus areas is the e-services market, the company revealed at a function today, and one of their key partners is eGain, a company that provides CRM and knowledge management tools.
DiData have, in fact, had a relationship for “five or six” years with subsidiaries since acquired by eGain. Recently, however, they have begun selling their products via DiData's iCommerce division, taking their cut and providing training and support.
The tools eGain offers, says Ryan Rosenberg, eGain's vice president of international marketing, are necessary for companies hoping to remain competitive. Customers, he says, have rapidly increasing expectations of service. When a channel — such as the Web — or a company delivers a level of service greater than a customer has previously experienced, they expect all other channels of companies to deliver on a similar vein. Or they jump ship.
This heightened sensitivity combines with the inability of large organizations to scale their service levels effectively (due mainly to cost) to create a situation where top management is aware of the importance of e-commerce and CRM initiatives — but have difficulty pulling these initiatives off.
EGain's answer is Web-based knowledge management systems that extend beyond the Web to include all channels.
The idea is to give customers a choice as to the channel they want to use — the telephone, Interactive Smartbots, e-mail, live text chat, etc. — and capturing their data, queries and actions into a central repository. This data can then be accessed by any one of the channels — a call-center telephone operator, for example — and passed along between people, e.g. from operator to supervisor, enabling the query to be fulfilled without customers having to repeat themselves.
The hopeful end result is happier customers, able to service themselves more effectively and comfortable with using channels that cost companies less. I.e. a better customer experience, greater customer insight and, naturally, cost reduction.
Indeed, the above is what all companies desire, whichever e-service or CRM or knowledge management tools they select. And select them they must, for customers expectations are rising and, made bold by the net-anonymity, they are expressing their demands louder and louder.
No wonder then that DiData is focusing on “customer management” — and doing relatively early. DiData, according to Johan Coetzee, head of software, tries to identify emerging trends and dominate them before they become common knowledge. Don't we all.
Reprinted from sa.internet.com
