Let's be honest. Widespread opinion is that high tech companies do not take customer service seriously. Negative word of mouth/mouse is rampant. Skeptical, tech savvy customers are fed-up. They want responsiveness and effective self-service options...resolution. It's a crowded market. Loyalty is up for grabs.
Despite the obvious business case for keeping your customers happy, you know there are numerous factors at play. Each new generation of feature-rich products, gadgets and software brings added functionality and complexity. Customer inquiries run the gamut from basic product registration questions to issues surrounding features to configuration problems that require expensive, high-level resources to resolve.
You're charged with controlling an unwieldy budget, while trying to deliver the level of service your customers demand. But fielding questions specific to model numbers, versions, and distinct customer issues takes a powerful knowledge base and a solution with serious functionality. Your support agents can't possibly stay on top of it all.
Eliminating High Tech's Pain Points
Imagine a service environment supported by Astute Solutions' technologies:
Our solutions excel in the high-tech industry. They move you past information-related challenges and the other root causes of sub-standard service—eliminating complexity and providing a single point of access for everybody and everything.
Over 450 of the world's top consumer brands rely on Astute Solutions' technologies to increase efficiency and reduce costs, while developing profitable, long-term customer relationships.
You can do the same. Our customer care solutions enable you to:
As a high tech company, you're contending with vast amounts of customer, product and service data—spread across the enterprise. With our solutions, the multiple knowledge base “labyrinth” is replaced by a single interface and powerful, unified platform.
Providing streamlined access to multiple sources of customer information. Our ePowerCenter customer relationship management solution simplifies consumer interactions. Through a single, easy-to-use interface, it provides your agents immediate access to relevant data like the customer's contact details and case history—before the interaction even begins.
Across all communication channels, your agents can instantly view or listen to valuable files attached to a consumer's interaction record such as letters, faxes, emails, voice mails, screen shots, and call recordings. ePowerCenter can even pull data from multiple back-end systems onto a common screen.
Your agents are no longer taxed with launching and navigating multiple applications (loyalty, warranty, repair, ordering, billing, etc.) in search of the information they need.
Delivering consistent, accurate and timely responses. Our RealDialog knowledge management solution removes the biggest obstacle to service excellence by providing your contact center representatives, employees, and consumers with access to consistent, accurate, and timely information about your products, services, policies, and brands.
As a centralized knowledge source for multiple communication channels, it enables you to rapidly disseminate updates on product issues or recalls to all service representatives and self-service channels.
Simplifying your inherent complexities. The needs of the high tech industry are expansive. The sheer volume of information—alone—that must be accessible to your contact center agents, retailers, field service personnel, customers, employees, help desk representatives and stakeholders is confounding. But this is where RealDialog excels. It eliminates related complexities and provides a single point of access for everybody and everything.
Cumbersome binders that require manual updates become a thing of the past. Your contact center representatives, field service technicians, help desk personnel, and all others can access install and troubleshooting guides, product manuals, configuration specifications, warranty information, operations procedures, and much more through RealDialog.
They bypass lengthy searches through documentation, irrelevant chapters, previous versions and models, and unrelated issues to get the exact details they need.
When anyone who touches, buys, develops, sells, services, or markets your products/peripherals/software can simply log on to access anything they need to know, you're equipped to differentiate through service excellence.
Built-In Savings. How do you measure the impact of resolving information-related challenges for improved speed, quality and efficiency?
The short answer: In dollars saved by shaving seconds, minutes, hours—even days—off of your processes and interactions.
The short version of the long answer: By controlling operational and IT-related expenditures, leveraging existing assets, mitigating risk, minimizing fraud, reducing agent turnover, and keeping your customers happy and loyal by giving them what they want, when they need it.
We believe there's a logical solution to easing customers' frustration levels: Equip agents to do the job they were hired to do.
Assisting agents in resolving issues. Within the ePowerCenter interface, your agents can easily access helpful, contextual information such as scripted answers, graphic images, and full multimedia files. They can tap into other internal and external applications and databases—such as order, shipping, warranty, returns, and loyalty systems—in real time.
This helps them resolve issues and offer valuable information in a fast and personalized manner—without escalating the call or involving other departments.
When integrated with our RealDialog knowledge management solution and agent assist tool, the solution helps agents deliver expert-level service, regardless of their experience. They can simply enter or select a customer's question, verbatim, and immediately receive an accurate response they can deliver. When needed, they are guided with a series of questions to diagnose and resolve the problem.
Facilitating successful recovery efforts. Through intelligent suggestion rules, flexible letter and email templates, and powerful fulfillment capabilities; our solutions deliver the optimal response and follow-up communication for each consumer and issue.
ePowerCenter enables you to define and pre-approve compensation types along with follow-up letter/email content for each type of situation. Representatives can extend goodwill and issue cash and non-cash compensation on the spot, as appropriate.
This improves recovery efforts, removes agent guesswork and dramatically reduces your service representatives' workloads.
This also ensures that all of your follow-up communications are effective, timely, compliant, and consistent to help mitigate risk.
Safeguarding against abuses. Providing your agents authority to issue goodwill doesn't mean you are open to misuse. Through repeater checking and threshold alerts, our solutions can protect your company from goodwill abuse and fraudulent claims, dramatically improving your profitability. They help manage and monitor customer goodwill programs to determine their success and to protect against excessive loss.
Our RealDialog self-service solution enables your customers to receive a personalized service experience on the Web, 24X7, with an unmatched level of quality. It provides instant access to accurate information and answers for tier 1, 2 and 3 inquiries, improving issue resolution while deflecting calls (and costs) from your contact center. In fact, it can reduce your overall interaction costs by up to 33 percent.
Personalizing service, engaging users. Through a simple text/chat-type interface on your website, RealDialog enables your customers to ask questions the way they prefer—in their “natural language.”
The customer care solution interacts like your most knowledgeable live agents, engaging the customer in a “conversation” to ask clarification questions and gather specific details. This could include the brand and model number of their computer, a software setting, or account information.
It applies these details, along with what it learns about the customer throughout the conversation, to deliver exceptionally specific and personalized responses. This capability enables RealDialog to resolve technical and complex tier 2 and 3 issues better than any other.
Ensuring accuracy builds trust in Web-based service. RealDialog offers an exceptional accuracy rate of up to 99 percent because it truly understands language and intent. It can even comprehend synonyms, pronouns, slang, and company/product/industry specific terms. Its built-in dictionary is easily customized, so you can always add information. And it learns automatically.
This greatly improves adoption rates to your lower-cost channel, while building satisfaction. And because it is so successful in resolving issues online, customers using RealDialog have reduced inbound email volume by up to 80 percent.
Delivering a quality IVR experience. For phone-based self-service, we provide integrated voice response (IVR). Our intelligent IVR solution leverages information in ePowerCenter, your customer loyalty databases, and more to personalize interactions and ensure proper call handling and routing.
With our customer care solutions, you delight your customers by providing a consistent experience across all communication channels. Our technology integrates the management of all customer interactions, including self-service, email, telephone, and chat. Your customers won't receive different answers to the same question as they move from channel to channel.
Escalating between channels... seamlessly. In some instances, escalation is unavoidable. A question just can't be answered effectively without agent or expert assistance.
Our customer care solutions enable seamless escalation in the contact center and online. All relevant details are passed along to the receiving representative, including those collected during self-service interactions. The interaction picks up precisely where it left off. Your customers are spared the annoyance of repeating their information and issue details.
ePowerCenter's sophisticated reporting capabilities allow real-time, actionable customer feedback to be captured, analyzed and quickly distributed across the organization.
Making continuous improvements. Our solutions provide valuable insights from all of your service interactions that can help you identify changes in customer preferences, issues impacting loyalty, and retailers and manufacturing partners that are not meeting company standards—all in real time.
This unbiased feedback offers ongoing input for improving the customer experience.
A finger on the pulse of your customers. When you're equipped to listen to and leverage the voice of the customer, you quickly uncover opportunities where their wants and needs are not being met. This enables you to fine tune marketing, sales and product development efforts.
From the highly-detailed information captured in our reports, you can develop better messages, execute more successful campaigns, rapidly respond to opportunities, and outpace competitors. (Marketers can push refined messaging, content, and links to all touch points in minutes.)
You also have a means to gauge consumer reactions to new products and promotions early on.
Quickly identifying problems and their root cause. ePowerCenter acts as an early warning system for problems that could lead to product recalls or undesirable publicity.
When incoming complaints match the specific issue alert threshold established by your organization, the system sends notifications to alert key stakeholders.
They can then drill down into the details of reports to identify the root cause of issues, make informed decisions, and resolve problems—before they escalate to an uncontrollable level.
A happy customer is your greatest asset. They buy from you. They will recommend that friends, families, co-workers and neighbors do the same. Within their social networks, their influence has a reach beyond advertising.
By moving you past the obstacles to great service, our customer care solutions enable you to reward customers with outstanding experiences and show them that you're listening. Your representatives have the tools and knowledge to anticipate, identify, and maximize revenue generation opportunities across multiple interaction channels.
Along the way, you're reducing expenses throughout the service organization, and making profitable decisions in almost every area of the business.
Next steps:
Download a brief overview of our RealDialog Agent Assist solution
View the article: The 2009 CRM Service Awards: Service Elite—Bath & Body Works: Spiffing Up the Center
Download our success story: Unilever—Consumer Packaged Goods Giant Leverages Knowledge Management Solution in Support of Over 90 Brands
Download our Solutions Guide: Empower Employees
Download our RealDialog Agent Assist brochure for a deeper dive into RealDialog's capabilities and impact

