Many touchpoints, many opportunities, many challenges and increased competition. That’s the reality of multi-channel customer experience and relationships. Every time a customer hits your website, retail store, contact center, blog, or IVR menu it puts your company in a competitive situation. Your customer is always evaluating the experience. He or she either comes away with a stronger relationship as a result of the interaction or a desire to check out the competition. To succeed you need to bring your “A” game everyday, all the time.

Everyone knows that a great customer experience is critical for business success. When customers are treated well—and when they believe that a company’s employees are competent and genuinely concerned with their satisfaction—they will remain loyal, even as competitors vie for their business. They will also tend to make more purchases over time and generate more word-of-mouth advertising.

Our customers are demanding speed and quality at every touch point including sales, service and marketing. The ongoing crisis mode of delivering superior service within increasingly shrinking time frames is damaging organizations infrastructures and by extension, their competitiveness. This manifests itself through poor customer service, inferior products and organizations overall value propositions. The prevalence of time constraints in corporate America is so great that it has been termed a time famine as early as 2002 by Leslie Perlow, a professor in the Organizational Behavior unit at Harvard Business School. Unfortunately, this time famine affecting the quality of customer experiences across all touch points is here to stay.

With sophistication of marketing tools and number of media increasing tenfold during the past decade, the difficulty of keeping customers engaged has also increased. Reaching qualified prospects at the right time, and through the right channel, remains an obstacle, as the volume of marketing messages both online and off-line continues to increase year over year.

To meet customer needs and requirements effectively, the modern contact center must provide multichannel (e.g., voice, web, chat, fax and e-mail) access to customer sales, support and service assistance. Therefore, the majority of contact centers in North America are ready to upgrade their facilities—if they have not done so already. These upgrades are driven by the relatively recent availability and acceptance of IP telephony and high-speed internet access.

When the term knowledge management (KM) came to the forefront of business strategies in the 1990s, there was the generally accepted notion that it referred to a set of disciplines that enabled an organization to capture, categorize, and present corporate knowledge for improved business and competitive advantage. In many ways, KM started off as a method of institutionalizing corporate memory and knowledge, but it was largely restricted to the corporate intranet; many KM initiatives floundered because they didn’t have a clear goal, and supporters found it difficult to fund projects without clearly defined ROI metrics.

This paper will provide guidelines for choosing SFA systems, describe how a sales process can improve input, and suggest implementation approaches to accelerate the acceptance and benefits of SFA.

Companies spend staggering investments to make and keep their offerings competitive. Since the mid 90s, major expenditures have been made in CRM (Customer Relationship Management), often with mixed results. CRM gained quick acceptance and was viewed by some organizations as a way to introduce sanity and structure into sales and tactical marketing.

Think email has been left behind by snazzy blogs and RSS feeds? Was it cut short by ISP filters, or maybe set aside by multi-tasking consumers numb to new offers? Hardly. Ninety percent of Internet users, and over 56% of all Americans, use email on a regular basis. Sending email also is the preferred delivery vehicle for buzz-filled social networks such as word-of-mouth and user-generated content. The mass adoption of email hasn't escaped the attention of marketers, either. Second only to search marketing in terms of spend, email has staked its claim as a mainstay of the online marketing mix.

Customer experiences are true indicators of corporate health and brand strength; driving revenue growth, preventing customer attrition and increasing market share. They are the competitive differentiators and can help fuel an organization’s success. Yet, for all the evidence supporting customer centricity, companies remain largely product-centric with transaction rather than customer relationship-based business models. From customer interactions to empowering employees with the resources they need to deliver great experiences, the state of customer strategy execution remains poor.

Whether it’s over the Web, email, at a kiosk, or on the telephone, countless customers are engaging in self-service. In the process, they’re helping companies to save millions by deflecting service interactions to cheaper channels. At many organizations, the cost-savings alone have made the investment in self-service worthwhile. But going forward, the self-service business case won’t be built on cost-savings alone. There is a bigger, more customer-focused picture to consider, where the customer experience also plays a key role. To show the point, take a read of the self-service story below. Odds are you’ll also hear the voice of some of your own customers.