Gartner research, referenced in this white paper as part of Astute Solutions' essay, clearly shows customers are continually shifting their channel of choice from the phone to one of the other service delivery channels. There doesn't seem to be a single alternative channel that is replacing the traditional call center, which still accounts for roughly half of all interactions. Instead, all channels are picking up new users.

This shift has prompted this year's group of industry experts to suggest that organizations provide a consistent customer experience across those channels. The challenge lies in unifying all of these channels into a central repository available to all, including your contact center agents. Autonomy calls the central point of customer service operations a "relationship management center" and eGain dubs it a "customer interaction hub."

With more and more information coming in from nontraditional sources (read Lithium's piece, "Delivering ROI in the Contact Center with Social Knowledge"), managing and making sense of the data flow has never been more important or challenging. Fortunately, the big concepts that are offered this year (i.e., meaning-based computing, creating actionable intelligence, gaining deeper customer insights) are all within reach of most companies.

When we came up with the idea for this Best Practices topic, we expected many participating software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies to write about rapid deployments of tactical, non-IT intensive solutions. This is still the case, but their interests are much larger in scope. These vendors want people to know that their SaaS solutions have moved into a different phase of maturity and, as a result, are making their way into more large enterprises.

Still, as adoption of SaaS solutions become more widespread, integration and customization challenges, especially at larger companies, exist. This new Best Practices White Paper discusses integration issues as well as several other Cloud Computing / SaaS themes such as:

-Contact Centers in the "Cloud" For Better Customer Service
-Compelling Benefits of Cloud-Based Business Intelligence
-Enterprise SaaS Solutions
-How to Avoid Cloud Data Disaster
-And more...

DOWNLOAD NOW FOR FREE!!!!! 

In this white paper you'll be treated to three distinct strategies that you can use to form relationships with prospects and past customers with lead nurturing campaigns, interact with them using their preferred touch points, and engage them with social networks in a measureable way.

If there is one thing that marketing and sales agree on, it is that customers are forming their prejudices and favorable attitudes much earlier in their decision-making process. As a result, our companies have to do a much better job of timing messaging to fit the new sales cycle.

Some of the themes in this issue are:

-Demand Generation and Social Media
-Lead Nurturing
-Going Beyond Email to Reach Buyers 2.0

Is your pipeline clogged with opportunities that never come to fruition? Does your lead-scoring or nurturing process leave your sales team out of the process? Does your slimmed-down technology staff need help with integration issues to move a key project forward? These and other solutions, from critical reporting to marketing automation to predictive analytics and more, can be found in the following pages and on the AppExchange site. With over 800 applications available for download, and more than 175 services, a business user need only identify a particular pain point to start investigating Salesforce.com AppExchange solutions.

Some themes you will learn about in this white paper:

--Enterprise-Class Cloud Integration
--Meeting Sales Quotas in Tough Markets
--Marketing Automation
--Analytics On Demand
--On-Demand Business Intelligence

Knowledge management initiatives have been proven to deliver ROI and a range of significant benefits for customer service and support organizations, including increasing staff efficiencies, delivering cost savings, flexible content access, collaboration, analytics, improving customer satisfaction, and much more.

Knowledge-driven CRM has emerged as one of the few sustaining differentiators companies utilize for cocmpetitive advantage. By focusing on a few of these key "Best Practices" offered up in this white paper from InQuira, eGain and Consona CRM, all market leaders in Knowledge Management, your organization can optimize the benefits of a well-thought-out knowledge management initiative and start enjoying the benefits of this technology sooner rather than later.

We all know that the key to driving user adoption-of any technology-is having benefits that users themselves actually recognize. For many, the concept of mobile CRM is all about personal convenience, mutual efficiency, and business productivity. But other users require other benefits: Field-service providers, sales personnel, and mobile workers of every ilk continue to demand universal access and increasingly powerful solutions that allow them to focus on their core concerns, not the mechanics of connecting to information.

This month's Best Practices report offers three different perspectives on how to best implement mobile CRM solutions throughout your organization. Although there may be differences of opinion when it comes to specific tactics or approaches, no one can dispute the importance of having an overarching strategy toward your mobile CRM initiative. That strategy--and the technology it leads you to--will help you make your organization more responsive to the mobile needs not only of your customers, but those of your partners, prospects, and employees.

How can you harness the total power of social media with return-on-investment (ROI) metrics that satisfy your CEO? Download this free white paper and find out how to "Drive Sales Effectiveness with Enterprise-Ready Web 2.0Solutions," "Harvest Social Knowledge for Customer Service," and learn how "Social CRM Turns Customers into Competitive Advantage."

What does your company recommend as a strategy?

One of the most compelling business concepts to emerge in the past few years is the strategy of customer experience management (CEM). Its proponents see CEM as the guiding principle for creating customer-centric organizations that manage all aspects of customer interaction with a company or its brands, products, or services. CEM seeks to exceed the scope of customer service and to engage customers at a higher level of interaction.

Customer feedback, Web self-service, business intelligence, knowledge management, measuring and improving metrics-all are meaningless buzzwords: Customers and prospects will judge your company by the experiences they have with it. Increasingly, customer experience is determined in the absence of your best salesperson or customer service representative, and the innovative implementation of technology solutions is what will determine how your company is perceived in the market.

The six perspectives included in this special section will undoubtedly trigger your own thoughts on how to improve your company's efforts to manage your customer experiences.

Themes included:
-Practical approach to driving sales through CEM and Social Networking
-5 Best Practices to transform online Customer Experiences
-Web Self-Service Experience
-Top 10 Customer Support mistakes and how to avoid them
-Turbo-Charging your Service Organization
-Enterprise Feedback Management

Now more than ever, business leaders are challenged to guide their organizations through an ever-shifting landscape of opportunities and pitfalls. The current business climate demands clear decision making by executives, and tools that offer better business intelligence and customer insights are essential for achieving optimal outcomes. Making better-informed decisions is essential to the success of executives and the businesses they manage.

In this special supplement to CRM magazine, six leading vendors with very different tools for augmenting the decision-making process share their insights for illuminating everything from the intricacies of "uplift marketing" to pipeline management to combat the classic "disappearing forecast" at the end of a quarter. Business analytic solutions that deliver real-time snapshots of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can not only enhance executive insight into the health of the
organization, but can also help individuals stay on track producing the results that roll up into the larger KPIs.

Some themes from this issue:
-Using metrics to manage customer relationhsips
-Optimizing customer experience with multichannel interaction analysis
-Pipeline management with analytics
-Customer retention
-Maintaining accurate customer contact data
-Unlocking the value of CRM data
-ROI through better customer data and intelligence

In this supplement, three vendors offer excellent advice on how to actually create some lasting "good" from your customers' interactions with your company. You'll notice that delivering great customer service, "even in a down economy," seems to be a recurring theme. I would take it one step further and submit that it is essential that organizations deliver great customer service in a down economy. The average consumers will not only appreciate great service, they'll go off like a powder keg if they're subjected to bad service.

Themes in this section:

-Self-Service for competitive advantage
-Customer Experience Management
-Creating multiple pathways to ROI with successful self-service
-On-demand vs. On-premise
-Self-service especially important in down economy

Many of the early CRM vendors who started out in specific market segments soon found themselves boxed in, with no place to grow. On the flip side, broader CRM solution providers soon began developing expertise in a whole range of markets, and found they were able to transfer that knowledge quickly to new customers. Much of the value proposition that prospects were looking for amounted to having the vendor answer one question: "What kind of experience have you had working with companies like mine?"

In this special section of CRM magazine, we’ve asked vendors to highlight what their companies do particularly well, so that you can benefit from their specific expertise and experience. The result? Six very different solutions ranging from leveraging social data in the enterprise to productivity solutions that every salesperson can benefit from.

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT AND E-COMMERCE—could there be a more natural combination? In many ways, e-commerce applications, such as the online storefront, are great examples of CRM theory put into practice. Your storefront is like a laboratory, with the aspects of sales, marketing, customer service, and analytics all there to be adjusted, without the unknown variable of employee quality to contaminate the results.

Creating strong relationships with customers online—and, ideally, expanding those relationships to include offline customer interactions—presents special challenges, but new technologies are making it possible. In this White Paper, five leading vendors offer their insights on how to maximize your online channel.

Consumer’s expectations and the advent of broadband accesshave altered the way we interact with our customers and howthey expect to interact with us. People want product information24/7, want to place orders, track shipments, resolve problems, and getsupport at a time and through any channel of theirchoosing. In a very short period of time the expectations ofcustomers for good service and access to information hasmade instant access a true competitive advantage for SMBs.This white paper examines SMB solutions that offer clear businessvalue and complement—not compete with—the resources needed by thecompany’s core business.

The following two sponsored-content pieces presentcomplementary considerations for today's speech applicationintegration strategies. They discusssecure interface necessities and clarify how toachieve extended business value from speechtechnologyinvestments. Both concepts are criticalto your operations and to the success of yourspeech-enabled initiatives.