February 28th, 2012 | | Comments Off on Transforming from Help Desk to Service Desk – Volume I: Tired of Firefighting? It’s Time for a Service Desk
As your business grows, managing IT services becomes more complex and requires a new approach and new tools. A help desk was the right solution in the early days. Users would call with an issue, and technicians would attempt to fix it as quickly as possible. IT was predominately in a firefighting mode and help desk software had a fairly singular focus: tracking incidents and open tickets as responsibility passed from one person to another. In order for your business to scale, you must move from a world of firefighting to one of forward planning and preventative maintenance. If you’re ready to shift from reactive technology support to proactive business service support, then it’s time for a service desk.
February 28th, 2012 | | Comments Off on Transforming from Help Desk to Service Desk – Volume II: Beware the Seven Deadly Sins
To provide a more proactive mode of service delivery and support, you must avoid committing these sins with your service desk. Volume II of this five-part series explores these seven deadly sins and reveals how they can be avoided or neutralized with an integrated centralized knowledgebase.
February 28th, 2012 | | Comments Off on Transforming from Help Desk to Service Desk – Volume III: Essential Process Automation Capabilities
Business process automation is a primary driver of many service desk implementations. Large or small, your business can benefit dramatically through process automation, increasing efficiency and reducing costs. While most service desk solutions offer automation of basic repetitive tasks, others take process automation to the next level through business rule designers. The right level for you will depend on the complexity of your business. Volume III of this five-part series explores the essential process automation capabilities that every service desk solution should provide, and how they can be leveraged to streamline your business
February 28th, 2012 | | Comments Off on Transforming from Help Desk to Service Desk – Volume IV: Getting Self-Service Right with Six Simple Steps
Customer self-service is far from new. In fact, industry analyst firm Gartner projects that by 2010 self-service will account for 58 percent of all service interactions, up from 35 percent in 2005. Yet many companies are still grappling with how to get self-service right. Volume IV of this five-part series reveals six simple steps you can take to help ensure customer adoption of self-service processes, reducing their need to interface with live agents and enabling you to focus service desk resources on more strategic, complex issues.
February 28th, 2012 | | Comments Off on True 360 Degree Visibility: The Silver Bullet for SFA
For years, the mantra for SFA and CRM Systems has been to achieve a 360° view of the customer. The sad truth, however, is that traditional standalone Sales Force Automation solutions are not able to deliver this complete view for the sales force and leave major “blind spots” on key customer activity with the company.
February 28th, 2012 | | Comments Off on Understanding Service-Oriented Architecture and Its Impact on Small Manufacturers
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) continues to emerge as the dominant technical platform for building next generation business applications. The potential of SOA to transform enterprise software applications has been well documented within leading industry trade publications. This white paper will attempt to cut through the hype surrounding the technology by (1) examining the manufacturing pains that are driving the conversion to service-oriented business applications, (2) breaking down the essence of SOA, (3) focusing on the relevance of SOA as a tool for continuous business process improvement, and (4) comparing and contrasting the Made2Manage SOA product development strategy with that of other ERP vendors.
February 28th, 2012 | | Comments Off on Using the Voice of the Customer to Gain Business Benefit: How Customer Feedback Can Improve Business Performance
Despite the explosion in the number of ways customers interact with a company, benchmark research carried out by Ventana Research shows that contact centers handle the majority of customer interactions. As the primary interface point for customers, the center thus is the de facto face of the company, and how an agent handles an interaction can have a significant impact on perception of the company and its brand, and as a result on its business performance.
Customer profiling is one of the main driving actions that help in obtaining benefit from CRM. Simply put, this activity tells you who your customer is so that you can market and sell your services to him.
Many confuse the purpose of a job advertisement with a job description. These are both valuable tools, but are not replacements for one another.
Paid search marketing solutions offer a broad range of functionality to make your online advertising campaigns easier to manage and much more effective. This article highlights the key features you’ll want in your paid search marketing solution.
