R. Garland - November 2, 2001
The Lexicon is divided into three parts, this being the second of three. This third section covers the alphabet from R to Z. For A to I, see Part One. For J to Q, see Part Two.
R
RDBMS - Relational DataBase Management System. The typical, standard database, with both data models, data definitions, and data storage capabilities. Examples include Oracle's 9i database, Microsoft's SQLServer 2000, and IBM's DB2 and Informix.
RFI - Request For Information. A formal document sent by a customer to a vendor asking for specific information about their product or line of products. It's usually the first salvo in several rounds of information gathering by customers in the vendor selection process.
RFQ - Request For Quote. A formal document sent by a customer to a vendor asking them to put together a product and service package, with prices, for the customer to consider accepting and ultimately buying.
RMA - Returned Materials Authorization. Most companies require that customers contact them before returning previously-purchased product, to receive authorization to return the product. The customer is usually given an RMA number, for tracking purposes.
ROI - A calculation of how much money will be saved or earned as the result of an investment. When evaluating CRM packages, be sure to factor in investments of both time and capital in your ROI analysis.
Rollback Capability - The ability of an RDBMS, in the case of a catastrophic failure, to be able to return to, or roll back to, a set point in time when the database was known to be stable. This is less preferred than the ability for an RDBMS to "fail-over" to a hot spare server, losing no data and suffering no down time in the process.
S
Sales Pipeline - This is the list of potential customers that the sales department is currently trying to convert into paying customers. Typically, customer deals in the pipeline are assigned dollar values and "percentages likely to convert", and from that, sales forecasts can be approximated.
SFA - Sales Force Automation. One of the lynchpins of CRM. This enables the Sales team to capture and maintain lead and other contact information in one data store, conduct team selling, view pipeline reports, and other tasks. This is still the first objective of most companies implementing CRM solutions.
SLA - Service Level Agreement. This is the agreed-upon level of service that will be provided by the vendor to the customer upon purchase of product. Variables include: channels supported, hours of the day, days of the week, response times, and on-site support.
SMBs - Small to Medium Businesses. A segment of the market in general that tends to be the target of enterprise application and database vendors these days who have "already gone after the big fish," namely, large, Fortune 500 companies, and are trolling the waters for smaller catch. Sometimes called SMEs, or Small to Medium Enterprises, though that could be confused with Subject Matter Expert.
SOAP - Simple Object Access Protocol. SOAP is a lightweight protocol for exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed environment. It is an XML-based protocol that consists of three parts: an envelope that defines a framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it; a set of encoding rules for expressing data types, and; a convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses.
SR - Service Request. The latest term for support case, problem ticket, work order, or other terms previously used. A Service Request is established in CRM software to track a customer contact through to its conclusion. It contains contact information, details about the issue or problem at hand, and usually concludes with a summary of how the problem was solved.
Stinger - Microsoft's code name for its OS that will run on a family of smart phones, which are a class of wireless phones with oversized displays and color screens--designed for wireless Web access and conventional phone calls. The first hardware product is reported to have been in the works for two to three years and will be marketed by Samsung in the United States and Europe.
T & U
TCO - Total Cost of Ownership. When evaluating software for possible implementation in your company, you can't just consider the costs of the software licenses, on-going maintenance fees, and support costs. You also need to consider how much time, and in turn, how much money, it will cost to own the software over the long term. Is the software very buggy and in need of constant bug updates and enhancements? Is the software difficult to use and therefore requires higher training costs and ramp-up times? TCO considers ALL the costs that might be associated with a piece of software over its lifespan in the company.
TCP/IP - Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol. TCP/IP is the method by which data on the Internet is divided into packets of bytes. Information is divided into packets of information, with each packet delimited with header information that includes the destination address to where the packet is to be routed when it is transmitted over the Internet, and how it is to be re-assembled with the other packets containing the coherent data on the other end. Packets may take very different routes across the Internet, arrive at a destination, be re-assembled in the same order in which they were disassembled, and presented to the user on the other end.
Technically, IP is responsible for moving packets of data from node to node. IP forwards each packet based on a four-byte destination address (the IP number). TCP is responsible for verifying the correct delivery of data from client to server. Data can be lost in the intermediate network. TCP adds support to detect errors or lost data and to trigger retransmission until the data is correctly and completely received.
Thin Client - Another term for web browser. When an application vendor says that they have support for thin client, they mean that the majority of processing happens on back-end servers, and the display mechanism is the web browser, which conducts minimal (though, with Java or ActiveX plug-ins, possibly more substantial) processing of data.
TSBs - Technical Service Bulletins. Information distributed to the customer base of a product to inform them of some technical news bit that would be relevant to their implementation, such as the discovery of a new bug, the availability of a patch, or the availability of a new version of software.
Unicode - A standard for representing characters, such as numbers, letters, and symbols, as integers. Unlike ASCII, which uses 7 bits for each character, Unicode uses 16 bits, which means it can represent more than 65,000 unique characters. This covers the requirements for not only languages such as English and the Western-European languages, but also for other languages, such as Greek, Latin, and Japanese. As the software industry becomes increasingly global, there is a push on for software vendors to enable their software to use the Unicode coding format.
Unified Message Queuing - This represents the ability to take inbound requests from multiple channels (see Multi-Channel Support in Part 2 of this series), funnel them into one logical processing point, and then to be able to send out the requests to user queues for work. It represents the blending of such items as email, phone calls, and faxes, into the same queues.
Up-sell, Cross-sell - The sales practice of analyzing a user purchase, and recommending additional items that the user might be interested in purchasing based on the initial purchase. Up-selling is the process of adding on pieces to the original purchase; Cross-selling is selling similar or similarly appealing items to the customer.
V - Z
VAR - Value-Added Reseller. This is a company, independent of an OEM, that takes an OEM product, adds some sort of customer-perceived value to it, repackages it, and sells it to customers on its own. The ways in which value might be added include the addition of new product functionality, or the wrapping of implementation services around the original product.
V-Commerce - Voice Commerce, or Voice-enabled Commerce. The ability to use simple voice commands over phone lines to transact business directly between customer and application. V-Commerce is still years away from true value-add for companies, though several companies are playing around with voice commands today.
Vertical Applications - Applications that are tailored to specific industries. For example, Siebel Systems might take their core application and tailor the screens, fields, and database structures to support the automotive industry (both sales and service). Their Siebel Automotive application would be an example of a vertical application.
VoIP - Voice over IP. The ability to carry on a conversation over the Internet, while still browsing the Internet. Typically requires broadband (e.g., DSL, cable, or LAN-based connections), which right now have fairly limited penetration into consumer households. Hence, VoIP is not yet broadly implemented by web sites creators.
WAP/WML - Wireless Application Protocol and Wireless Markup Language. These are syntax used to program content for wireless phones using languages that allow the text portions of Web pages to be presented.
White Paper - A lengthy, often technical, article on a topic that provides background information on corporate products, industries, or industry trends.
WIP bins - Work In Process bins. Can also be thought of as personal To-Do lists. They represent personal queues, to which only one user has access. When an item is in an individuals WIP bin, they "own" that Service Request and are responsible for solving the problem or answering the question, unless they pass the SR to another employee's WIP bin.
XML - eXtensible Markup Language. A superset of the ubiquitous HTML (HyperText Markup Language) that is the common language of the web. HTML is really good at defining how elements should be laid out on a page, but terrible at transmitting data. XML solves the problem, by defining both elements for data, and elements for data about data, or metadata, to explain what kind of data is being passed (see the example provided in Part 2, under the definition for Metadata). It is being heralded as the "EDI of the Internet," and the future of inter-database, inter-application, and inter-company communications.
ZLE - Zero Latency Enterprise. The latest, new-fangled term to come from the consulting world. It represents the Enterprise that is so technologically enabled that information is instantly accessible to anyone who needs it (or has need of it) at any time. Zero latency, or zero slowness, of information flow across an enterprise.
This concludes Part 3, the last part, of the series on the Lexicon of CRM.
SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/the-lexicon-of-crm-part-3-from-r-to-z-16506/
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Knowledge Management: The Core of Service Resolution Management
Knowledge Management: The Core of Service Resolution Management
Today's businesses are faced with the reality of customers expecting and demanding more multichannel information and better service from call centers than ever before. Integrating call center service resolution management (SRM) into customer relationship management (CRM) can help companies retain both their call center agents and their customers.
For more background, please see Integrating Customer Relationship Management and Service Resolution Management.
Knowledge management (KM) is at the core of integrating CRM and SRM. KM software aims at helping to unlock the power of a company's knowledge to improve efficiency, competency, and profitability. It does so by providing an environment in which companies can, more quickly and cost-effectively, create a company-wide knowledge base to store and index documents and to more accurately search for the answers to user questions.
Currently, the key trends in KM tools enable companies to perform the following: 1) target their online information to reflect what is most likely to interest customers, and 2) maintain online forums where customers can share amongst themselves what they know about the company's products.
Hence, KM products typically fulfill two functions. KM accommodates self-service, meaning a customer can access a pool of public information that a company accumulates about itself, without the need for live assistance, to have his or her questions answered. Second, KM software helps call center agents to retrieve information from a repository that is often, obviously, larger than what is available to the public (since the aim of live assistance is the same as self-service—to answer customers' inquiries quickly and accurately, but with the preferred human touch).
The above considerations have marked a fundamental shift away from the time when any company could claim to perform a valuable service to customers simply by displaying information on its web site, without having to take into account who the customers were. Today however, virtually all companies must demonstrate their value to customers by segmenting information that is directly relevant to them.
Customer segmentation is not a new idea, since segmentation was supposed to be the way that—with the help of CRM tools—companies would offer the best possible service to their best customers. The problem with applying overt segmentation to customer service was that it then revealed a hierarchy that placed most customers at the bottom. This was so because, by definition, elite customers represent a small minority (the proverbial Pareto's 80/20 Rule). The premise of segmenting customers reinforced the idea that customers existed to create value for companies, rather than the other way around. Using this logic, most (up to 80 percent) customers were of little value to the companies that they bought products and services from.
By contrast, the practice of KM helps companies establish a bidirectional relationship with customers that rewards them for sharing knowledge (their product and service use experience), and not only for spending money. The latest generation of KM software makes this possible by enabling the company to combine what it knows about customers and what customers know about the company, and to offer this information as part of the resources available on its web site.
As discussed in Making the First Call Count by Greg McFarlane, an astute KM software has to make it easier for agents to author new knowledge when new services, products, or upgrades are in place. This reduces the need for agents (especially novice agents) to escalate calls to the upper service tier. This decreases the costs and the lengths of calls, but more importantly, it gets calls answered more quickly. In addition, the diagnostic search functionality helps resolve customers' issues quickly and accurately with its ability to pull answers from any data source an agent can connect it to, thereby giving agents the right information at the right time. Lastly, the automation of key resolution processes enables new agents to get up to speed more quickly. By pre-populating case notes and pre-establishing workflows and other techniques, the companies can create an environment that allows agents to operate as effectively as possible, regardless of their experience.
With the addition of multiple channels and new technologies to support them, call center agents' job descriptions should become more interesting and diverse. When this occurs, several of the major barriers to call center agent job satisfaction, such as stress, repetition, and dullness, can be eliminated, thus resulting in greater retention. The customer service representative (CSR) might start to feel like a problem-solver rather than a mere document reader.
Agents might also feel more accountable for problem resolution, as they begin to follow problems from start to finish. For instance, a CSR can access and present solutions to problems from a knowledge base; create a service ticket; request repair services; note a complaint; process returned materials; issue a rebate, coupon, or refund; and escalate issues to other responsible parties, such as tier (level) two support, development, quality assurance (QA), or even third parties.
Customer satisfaction should, in turn, increase, as the number of disconnected handoffs between agents, customers, and channels are reduced. On the other hand, increased agent retention should improve the organization's domain knowledge, and as a result, the number of first-call closures should rise.
The Impact of Online Customer Service
Online customers are becoming increasingly demanding, since they want answers to queries quicker than ever before, and they want to be able to access services when it suits them—around the clock. No customer wants to be put (seemingly endlessly) on hold or escalated, or to attempt several different solutions over the next hour, only to be called back the next day. He or she wants the issue resolved as quickly as possible, either through self-service or by a knowledgeable agent at the other end of the telephone.
At the same time, web site design is maturing, and the average customer is becoming more computer literate, which means that customers are ready to be introduced to online self-service solutions. Many customers indeed want to be able to solve their own problems through self-support on the Web, since we are all “too darn busy, and who has time for lengthy phone calls.” Companies, too, are ready to embrace the benefits of self-help solutions, which offer the dual advantage of cutting the cost of support while improving the quality of the service delivered to users.
In the early 2000s, Forrester Research reported that it costs, in US dollars, about $33.00 to handle a customer inquiry by telephone, $10.00 to handle it by e-mail, and about $1.00 to deal with the question through an online self-service system. Furthermore, by 2010, Gartner projects that self-service interactions will account for 58 percent of all service interactions, up from 35 percent in 2005. Thus, the goal of self-service has been to drive as many inquiries as possible away from the telephone to the Web, which is less difficult than it might seem, because organizations usually find that about 12 questions will account for half the calls made.
An effective self-help system should allow users or customers to resolve most common queries on their own, but it should also make it easy to escalate inquiries to an operator through telephone, Web chat, or e-mail if users get stuck or their questions are more complex. Also, call center representatives can sometimes handle problems more productively over live chat than on the phone, since an agent can deal with only one customer at a time over the phone, but it is quite possible to simultaneously juggle a few live chat sessions with customers.
One should note, however, that different users have different levels of tolerance for the length of time they are willing to commit to self-service, which means the availability of live support is still a necessary option companies must offer. On the other hand, in a corporate setting, the company may want to discourage highly paid staff from using self-help for more than a few minutes, because it does not want these employees to be unproductive.
In summary, enterprises can provide customer self-service that reduces service costs, improves customer satisfaction, and facilitates the sales and marketing of products and services. Moreover, IT organizations can increase the effectiveness of employee help desk operations while decreasing internal technical support costs.
SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/knowledge-management-the-core-of-service-resolution-management-19189/
Today's businesses are faced with the reality of customers expecting and demanding more multichannel information and better service from call centers than ever before. Integrating call center service resolution management (SRM) into customer relationship management (CRM) can help companies retain both their call center agents and their customers.
For more background, please see Integrating Customer Relationship Management and Service Resolution Management.
Knowledge management (KM) is at the core of integrating CRM and SRM. KM software aims at helping to unlock the power of a company's knowledge to improve efficiency, competency, and profitability. It does so by providing an environment in which companies can, more quickly and cost-effectively, create a company-wide knowledge base to store and index documents and to more accurately search for the answers to user questions.
Currently, the key trends in KM tools enable companies to perform the following: 1) target their online information to reflect what is most likely to interest customers, and 2) maintain online forums where customers can share amongst themselves what they know about the company's products.
Hence, KM products typically fulfill two functions. KM accommodates self-service, meaning a customer can access a pool of public information that a company accumulates about itself, without the need for live assistance, to have his or her questions answered. Second, KM software helps call center agents to retrieve information from a repository that is often, obviously, larger than what is available to the public (since the aim of live assistance is the same as self-service—to answer customers' inquiries quickly and accurately, but with the preferred human touch).
The above considerations have marked a fundamental shift away from the time when any company could claim to perform a valuable service to customers simply by displaying information on its web site, without having to take into account who the customers were. Today however, virtually all companies must demonstrate their value to customers by segmenting information that is directly relevant to them.
Customer segmentation is not a new idea, since segmentation was supposed to be the way that—with the help of CRM tools—companies would offer the best possible service to their best customers. The problem with applying overt segmentation to customer service was that it then revealed a hierarchy that placed most customers at the bottom. This was so because, by definition, elite customers represent a small minority (the proverbial Pareto's 80/20 Rule). The premise of segmenting customers reinforced the idea that customers existed to create value for companies, rather than the other way around. Using this logic, most (up to 80 percent) customers were of little value to the companies that they bought products and services from.
By contrast, the practice of KM helps companies establish a bidirectional relationship with customers that rewards them for sharing knowledge (their product and service use experience), and not only for spending money. The latest generation of KM software makes this possible by enabling the company to combine what it knows about customers and what customers know about the company, and to offer this information as part of the resources available on its web site.
As discussed in Making the First Call Count by Greg McFarlane, an astute KM software has to make it easier for agents to author new knowledge when new services, products, or upgrades are in place. This reduces the need for agents (especially novice agents) to escalate calls to the upper service tier. This decreases the costs and the lengths of calls, but more importantly, it gets calls answered more quickly. In addition, the diagnostic search functionality helps resolve customers' issues quickly and accurately with its ability to pull answers from any data source an agent can connect it to, thereby giving agents the right information at the right time. Lastly, the automation of key resolution processes enables new agents to get up to speed more quickly. By pre-populating case notes and pre-establishing workflows and other techniques, the companies can create an environment that allows agents to operate as effectively as possible, regardless of their experience.
With the addition of multiple channels and new technologies to support them, call center agents' job descriptions should become more interesting and diverse. When this occurs, several of the major barriers to call center agent job satisfaction, such as stress, repetition, and dullness, can be eliminated, thus resulting in greater retention. The customer service representative (CSR) might start to feel like a problem-solver rather than a mere document reader.
Agents might also feel more accountable for problem resolution, as they begin to follow problems from start to finish. For instance, a CSR can access and present solutions to problems from a knowledge base; create a service ticket; request repair services; note a complaint; process returned materials; issue a rebate, coupon, or refund; and escalate issues to other responsible parties, such as tier (level) two support, development, quality assurance (QA), or even third parties.
Customer satisfaction should, in turn, increase, as the number of disconnected handoffs between agents, customers, and channels are reduced. On the other hand, increased agent retention should improve the organization's domain knowledge, and as a result, the number of first-call closures should rise.
The Impact of Online Customer Service
Online customers are becoming increasingly demanding, since they want answers to queries quicker than ever before, and they want to be able to access services when it suits them—around the clock. No customer wants to be put (seemingly endlessly) on hold or escalated, or to attempt several different solutions over the next hour, only to be called back the next day. He or she wants the issue resolved as quickly as possible, either through self-service or by a knowledgeable agent at the other end of the telephone.
At the same time, web site design is maturing, and the average customer is becoming more computer literate, which means that customers are ready to be introduced to online self-service solutions. Many customers indeed want to be able to solve their own problems through self-support on the Web, since we are all “too darn busy, and who has time for lengthy phone calls.” Companies, too, are ready to embrace the benefits of self-help solutions, which offer the dual advantage of cutting the cost of support while improving the quality of the service delivered to users.
In the early 2000s, Forrester Research reported that it costs, in US dollars, about $33.00 to handle a customer inquiry by telephone, $10.00 to handle it by e-mail, and about $1.00 to deal with the question through an online self-service system. Furthermore, by 2010, Gartner projects that self-service interactions will account for 58 percent of all service interactions, up from 35 percent in 2005. Thus, the goal of self-service has been to drive as many inquiries as possible away from the telephone to the Web, which is less difficult than it might seem, because organizations usually find that about 12 questions will account for half the calls made.
An effective self-help system should allow users or customers to resolve most common queries on their own, but it should also make it easy to escalate inquiries to an operator through telephone, Web chat, or e-mail if users get stuck or their questions are more complex. Also, call center representatives can sometimes handle problems more productively over live chat than on the phone, since an agent can deal with only one customer at a time over the phone, but it is quite possible to simultaneously juggle a few live chat sessions with customers.
One should note, however, that different users have different levels of tolerance for the length of time they are willing to commit to self-service, which means the availability of live support is still a necessary option companies must offer. On the other hand, in a corporate setting, the company may want to discourage highly paid staff from using self-help for more than a few minutes, because it does not want these employees to be unproductive.
In summary, enterprises can provide customer self-service that reduces service costs, improves customer satisfaction, and facilitates the sales and marketing of products and services. Moreover, IT organizations can increase the effectiveness of employee help desk operations while decreasing internal technical support costs.
SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/knowledge-management-the-core-of-service-resolution-management-19189/
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