The sheer volume of Unilever's consumer base (4 million across Canada, the U.S., and Mexico) made reporting and knowledge base maintenance on their numerous brands a challenge. With Astute Solutions, they have transitioned to a unified customer service solution that has paid immediate dividends in shortened handle time and agent satisfaction.

With the proliferation of the Internet and Web platforms, customers now have the ability to interact with service organizations through a wide variety of channels. And a recent survey conducted by the Aberdeen Group revealed that they are taking advantage of their choices. The use of other channels such as email, chat, and website self-service is on the rise.

When implementing a self-service strategy, you'll find the moment of truth to be when customers hit the "support" link on your corporate website. What happens from there can be critical to your company's reputation. Many companies simply choose to appease customers with FAQs, IVRs or keyword-based search boxes. However, the damage these solutions can cause is exceptional when customers can't find the information they are looking for. But it doesn't have to be this way. With a means to effectively analyze customer inputs and identify their needs, you can eliminate the dead ends and wasted time that plague many self-service interactions.

"Voice of the Customer" initiatives are becoming more common among customer-centric companies. However, one of the key challenges facing them is managing the massive amounts of unstructured data that multi-channel customer service strategies bring. In fact, for most companies, more than 80% of customer-driven data is unstructured. This data can come in the form of email or chat sessions, call recordings, and voice and Web self-service interactions. Learn how companies are addressing these issues by leveraging technology to analyze unstructured, unfiltered questions and dialogs--and gaining unprecedented insight into the true "Voice of the Customer."

With growing customer expectations surrounding the quality and consistency of service across all communications channels - and the constant pressure to reduce costs - companies cannot afford to deemphasize the importance of quality and effectiveness of their Web self-service channel. How does your current Web self-service solution measure up in these areas? What are the questions you should be asking yourself in determining the effectiveness of your current solution? Is it helping you provide excellent service while reducing costs? How can the latest generation of Web self-service solutions help you? In this CRM Magazine, Astute Solutions sponsored article, you can assess your current self-service strategy to go from "good enough" to "great."

The evolution of web self-service has gone well beyond basic keyword search and FAQ lookups. With heightened customer expectations, it must be in sync with the quality and information of your other service channels, or you face losing customers. Learn how customer-centric companies are engaging their customers in personalized, virtual service conversations, and how this enhances performance in their contact centers.

In today's media-rich environment, consumer-focused companies spend billions on building and promoting their brands. Yet many cannot fully protect them. They have significant knowledge gaps where consumer interactions occur because they have not equipped key stakeholders, employees, partners, and their websites with consistent, accurate, and timely information. Knowledge management enables B2C (business-to-consumer) companies to fill these gaps. It is one of the most economical ways to support branding efforts as it furthers promotional initiatives while mitigating risks at the most critical junctures: consumer interaction touch points. Learn how.

As marketers, we seldom consider Knowledge Management (KM) a top priority. But it should be. It is how we organize, manage, access, and distribute knowledge to help our customers, constituents, and prospects fulfill their wants and needs, while furthering our business goals. In this Astute Solutions article, you will learn more about how effective KM enables marketers to deliver the right information at the right time, while gaining "voice of the customer" feedback from customers, prospects and employees to drive continuous improvement.

Customer, competitor and cost-related pressures are driving companies of all kinds to implement multi-channel service. And the benefits of implementing multichannel service are significant, including: reducing costs by deflecting calls to lower-cost channels; enabling customers to communicate where and when they choose improve satisfaction; and gaining "voice of the customer" insight that improves the business. But what are the steps to ensuring that your interaction quality and content are consistent across channels?

How you engage a customer when they are asking for guidance over a self-service channel and how you present information can have profound effects on their experience. Learn how utilizing natural language, dialog-based technology engages user in "human-like" conversations to point them to an exact answer -- versus delivering irrelevant answers or overwhelming lists of links that are typical among "traditional" knowledge management solutions.