Customer Experience Management

 

 

Customers’ expectations of companies are changing. The “thanks for your email, we’ll reply in 7 working days” response simply isn’t good enough these days. Customers not only expect a faster response, they expect consistency across the many different channels through which they might make contact.

This has required organizations to improve the way they handle customer interactions, both before and after a sale. Such programs have become known as “Customer Experience Management”, often abbreviated to CXM or CEM.

Gartner define CXM as “the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations and, thus, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy”.

So while the focus of CXM is on the customer interaction, it can have widespread implications for a company’s internal processes and technologies, and the way sales and customer service teams work together.

In business to consumer relationships, the main focus for CXM has been on ensuring social media channels are integrated with traditional email and phone routes to CRM. This “social CRM” works well when the answer to one customer’s question is relevant to another customer, and when customers answer each other’s questions. Social media is a great place to do this, because of the critical mass of customers there.

But platforms like Facebook and Twitter are ill-suited for more complex customer interaction. The two main categories of this are:

Personalized long-term consumer relationships – for example when a consumer needs to talk to their bank, insurance company or energy supplier

Business to business relationships – where several people from the customer need to collaborate with several people from the supplier.

In both cases, privacy is required making social media an inappropriate platform. And continuity is required, with the customer expecting the company to remember all their activity leading up to, and after the initial sale. This may well represent many years of interactions.

Vmoso enables CXM by:

Providing a platform for customer engagement, and

Enabling better internal collaboration and knowledge sharing between sales, customer service and other departments within the company.

Customers have a dedicated channel for interacting with the company, through Vmoso mobile and web apps, custom branded company apps, or email. Any employee servicing the customer can see the full history of discussions with the customer, integrating with the data already held within the CRM system.

When an internal discussion is required to address the customer’s need, that also takes place on Vmoso, with the full context available to everyone involved, not just users of the CRM system.

Vmoso’s  combination of internal and external collaboration elevates the customer experience, leading to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.

 

 

Extending the reach of CRM with Vmoso

 

Galaxy Equipment is a world leader in professional network equipment, providing top class devices to companies all around the world. Their Sales teams use SugarCRM to track their sales cycle. Traditionally, this tracking has been limited to the Sales staff only.

In this video we’ll see how Galaxy Equipment manages to extend the reach of its CRM beyond the Sales team through an integration of SugarCRM with Vmoso.

Tom is part of the European Sales team in Galaxy Equipment; he’s been there for some time and can answer any prospect question regarding the world-renowned integrated network elements that Galaxy Equipment has been selling for the last 10 years.

A couple of days ago, he got news about a new line of network monitoring devices and software that Galaxy Equipment has been selling in Asia and is now introducing to Europe. He had a quick look but was too busy preparing for an important event in Berlin, where he is exhibiting.

During the event, he meets Helen from ACME Airways. Helen is managing her company’s network, and she’s seen a tremendous increase in usage over the last few years, which she’s spent endlessly upgrading her equipment to catch up.

Now she finally has some time to plan ahead, and wants to find a good monitoring solution. She’s read in the press that Galaxy Equipment is now selling their new solution locally, so she approaches Tom.

Tom’s caught off guard, as he’s only got a very basic knowledge of the solution which Helen is interested in, and was not expecting a question about it so soon. ACME Airways is one of those large accounts that Galaxy Equipment has never managed to get into, and he’s very eager to make a first sale here.

He notes down the details given by Helen, and as soon as he can he enters this as an opportunity in SugarCRM. He mentions that he needs help with this opportunity.

Typically, such an opportunity entered in SugarCRM would be shared only with the rest of the Sales team, and remain mostly unknown to the rest of the company. But that’s not the case for Galaxy Equipment. A few months ago, they integrated SugarCRM with Vmoso, the company’s platform for collaboration and communication inside and outside the company.

When Tom’s opportunity is added to SugarCRM, this triggers the creation of a Vmoso chat to discuss the opportunity with his manager, and a Vmoso post which is a collaboration conversation shared in the company to encourage serendipitous discovery by the relevant people. One of those people is Jeremy.

Jeremy is the head of European technical presales. He has just started to study the new monitoring solution, and the opportunity described in the post grabs his attention. To him, this opportunity looks like a perfect chance to let someone in his team acquire the right skills for the new product, but he needs to act fast and help Tom give the right answers to the prospect.

From his limited knowledge, Jeremy gives a few answers to the questions that Tom has written in the opportunity. He also shares the document that he has been using to train himself on the topic.

But Jeremy knows that this is not enough, he needs to find more detailed information in order to answer the question that ACME has submitted to Tom. He needs to investigate further. The self-training document was originally shared with him through a chat with Bruce, the presales VP, but it surely came from somewhere else.

So Jeremy switches to the Vmoso Knowledge Map which lets him see where the document has been referenced from. He can see his chat with Bruce, but also several other activities which have referenced the same document.

By clicking on each of those activities, Tom can see who’s involved in each of them, other related documents, and which other activities are referenced from there.

Most of the activities visited are discussions between the Asian sales team in languages that Jeremy doesn’t understand. By clicking on the users referenced in the various discussions, Jeremy manages to identify a couple of people in the US presales team. He discovers that Jeff, a consultant in the US, has been able to get himself up to speed with the solution and has now good working knowledge of it

Jeremy suggests to Tom that Jeff should be included in the tender response, because he’s probably the only person able to help them in the short term.

Tom includes Jeff, who is more than happy to have a real prospect case where he can use his new skills, and together they are able to build a well-articulated response to the request from ACME.

This has only been possible because the integration between SugarCRM and Vmoso has enabled the collaboration around the prospect’s requirements, involving the right people from the company.

As a result, Galaxy Equipment is able to increase significantly the quality of their responses to prospects, making it more likely that their Sales teams close new deals.

All of the information exchanged during this collaboration is retained and transformed into corporate knowledge meaning that the global sales team all benefit from the work Tom, Jeremy and Jeff have done on this account.

Integrating Vmoso with SugarCRM increases the reach of information held in the CRM improving the efficiency and accuracy of the sales team, leading to shorter and more successful sales cycles.

Collaborative Processes

 

Whereas the structured, predictable element of a business process is increasingly automated, exception handling continues to be where human knowledge and intelligence needs to be applied to resolve a problem.

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In an ideal world, all the processes that power our businesses would be neatly defined and predictable with provision made for everything that could go wrong.

Of course, in the real world, there’s always something that can go wrong that you didn’t expect. Whereas the structured, predictable element of a business process is increasingly automated, exception handling continues to be where human knowledge and intelligence needs to be applied to resolve a problem.

But all too often, this exception handling is a chaotic mess of email conversations. Attempts to bring structure to this person-to-person interaction often results in both front- and back-office processes becoming too rigid, frustrating employees and customers alike when the inevitable “the system won’t let me do that” situation arises.

Let’s take the simple example of a consulting company agreeing a change request with their customer.

While steps 2, 4 and 5 of the process are individual approval actions, steps 1 and 3 are likely to involve a several people working together.

Without the collaboration in the process, the change request won’t get a sufficiently thorough review, and time may be wasted further down the line when overlooked details become apparent.

Without the structure in the process, the collaboration could lose direction and fail to come to a final conclusion.

Of course, countless variations on this example are happening every day. From simple document reviews, to field service engineers resolving issues at customer sites. From customer service departments handling complaints, to operations teams working to restore service after automatically-triggered downtime alerts – almost every organisation in the world has a set of processes that are too unstructured to be modelled rigidly in traditional Business Process Management tools, but too important to be left to email. We call these collaborative processes; they can also be characterized as people-intensive, decision-centric, knowledge-based processes.

And even as our business processes become more automated, the need for structured collaboration is not going to diminish, merely change. Over the next few years, collaborative processes triggered by Internet-of-Things-connected sensors will become just as common as the examples we see today.

Vmoso Process management introduces structure, discipline and accountability to collaboration.

Process flows can be started from a list of pre-prepared templates for your organisation, or created from scratch to suit the specific task in hand.

Throughout the process, there’s always a  clear indication of who’s responsible for completing the current step, but the assignee can always call on Vmoso’s collaboration features to access the expertise of their co-workers. And of course, all participants can see all the discussion so far, ensuring they have the information they need to complete the task, and a clear audit trail.

For more information, visit broadvision.com/process-management

Vmoso: Enterprise Digital Transformation Hub

 

The way we work is changing. As we embark on digital transformation projects that change the nature of our products, our workforce and our offices, we need a digital workplace to support these new methods of doing business, and a platform for digital engagement with today’s connected customer.

Galaxytown Police Department

 

Captain Lombard of the Galaxytown Police Department has a wide range of responsibilities. His daily duties include everything from overseeing budgets, officers under his command, investigations, internal department matters, attending community events for awareness and reporting to city council members.

He’s been struggling lately with cases taking longer to close. It’s difficult to organize, retrieve and retain information and activities on cases due to the multiplicity of difference sources – files, email, chat tools, CRM, and content sharing applications.

This is even more challenging given the need to access the information in the street, not only from behind a desk.

Captain Lombard has noticed recently that because of the proliferation of communication channels and the lack of centralized way to track and organize them, several cases and activities have been falling through the cracks. This has impacted the image of the department and hindered the resolution of the cases.

In an attempt to address the situation, Captain Lombard has recently approved the procurement of Vmoso for his entire department.

This morning, Captain Lombard receives details of a major robbery at a large electronics store. With everything on his plate and emails piling up in his inbox, Lombard decides to use Vmoso to manage his duties and keep everything in one place.

Instead of parsing hundreds of daily emails, now with Vmoso Lombard only has to review a few folders where all his communication is automatically organized and classified. It makes it easy for him to rapidly review cases as they come to his attention. In addition, any assignment made can be easily tracked and documented.

As Lombard reviews the case he uses the Vmoso knowledge map to explore all the connections between cases, and discovers a lot of information he wouldn’t have been aware of without Vmoso.

He identifies a possible tie between this case and another one handled by Detective Peters. Lombard uses Vmoso to assign the case to Peters, and with a single click he includes all the pertinent information.

Peters is working the case and finds evidence at the crime scene that could be vital. Using Vmoso he updates the task to inform the Chief on progress he’s made.

Peters also creates a task for the Forensics department to work on the evidence gathered at the crime scene.

Documents and reports provided from Forensics can be continuously updated with any new findings, so Peters always has access to the most up to date information, even if he’s out of the office.

Once they are finished, Forensics then update the task notifying Peters of their findings.

Peters receives the notification on his cell phone while working in the field, and he can keep his Captain up to date from wherever he is.

The Chief decides to use the knowledge map in Vmoso to see if there are any current or past cases that are similar to Peters’ case. He can easily see previous cases that were worked on and that had success with certain strategies, making it easier for him to find and obtain intelligence or strategic insight.

The Chief finds that one of the suspects lives in the Newtown, 20 miles away. He instructs Peters to reach out and coordinate the arrest with the Newtown Police Department. This entire communication happens on the go, using their mobile devices.

Peters receives vital information from the Newtown detective about the suspect, as well as information on his movements and history.

Newtown PD is not on Vmoso and uses email to communicate with Galaxytown PD. But thanks to Vmoso’s email integration, all the communication with Newtown PD is received and automatically classified and, saving valuable time.

While working on the case, Peters uncovers that the suspects have ties to an international terrorist group that have bombed local cities. He responds to his task to let the Chief know about his findings.

The Chief decides to create a post for the Galaxy Intelligence Agency, notifying them about a possible terrorist threat.

With minimal effort, a huge amount of information stored in files, images, videos, email and chats are shared. This information is stored in a highly secure space with very strict content access.

With the information gathered by the police department and intelligence agency the Captain and Detective Peters are able to close the case.

Using Vmoso enables the Galaxytown Police Department to close cases faster. Vmoso captures, organizes and retrieves information from any device as a single source of truth. Updates on cases and tasks can be viewed from anywhere, at any time with instant notification, thus increasing efficiency and saving time.

With Vmoso, orders never fall through the cracks and information is never lost. Vmoso enhances collaboration with external agencies and communication with the public community to better protect and serve its citizens.