Differentiate your Business by Delivering a Customer Experience that Matters

Differentiate your Business by Delivering a Customer Experience that MattersWe live in an increasingly commoditized world and the only way to truly differentiate a company from the competition is by delivering an outstanding customer experience. But how can you do this?

As a consumer, our expectations are pretty simple:
• Tell me what I need to know so that I can make the best decision
• Be there when I need help, wherever I am

As an employee, our expectations are pretty basic, too:
• How can I find the answers to my customer’s questions as quickly as possible?
• If I can’t find the right information, how can I find the right expert?

The Challenge

It seems very simple. Yet, companies struggle on delivering the right answers to customers. Data within the enterprise is distributed across a variety of sources – CRM and ERP systems, order tracking applications, multiple knowledge bases etc. At any given moment, customer representatives can have 10 to 15 windows open on their desktop with worn out ‘Alt’+’Tab’ keys.

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Get Your Moxie On! Moxie Delivers the First Customer-Centric Enterprise Social Software

To say that the enterprise social software market is an exciting one is an understatement. Despite all the industry buzz, most service providers are missing the point that enterprise social software is not only about connecting employees for the sake of making connections, but at its core, it is about creating better-functioning companies. I’ve shared my perspectives of today’s announcement in this video blog:

The direction we are taking the Spaces by Moxie suite reflects the valuable feedback we have received from key constituencies: our customers, industry experts/analysts and technology visionaries. To further support our vision, we recently commissioned a survey. The study looked into the behavior of consumers when dealing with purchases and/or business services, and their behavior when dealing with internal interactions at the workplace. The results are nicely showcased in this infographic:

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Enterprise Social Technology Will Meet Customers and Shareholders’ Expectations in 2012

Enterprise Social Technology Will Meet Customers and Shareholders' Expectations in 2012This morning, Moxie Software reported its financial results from FY 2011. While Moxie is a private company, we disclosed in today’s announcement some of the company financials, including the growth rate of our customer base. There is no question that we have had a very strong year, reflecting the current market conditions as enterprises are significantly increasing their spending on social collaboration software.

Beyond the current state of the market, there are two other trends that are directly influencing the evolution of enterprise social technology. First is the external/customer communications. I’ve been discussing with many industry experts and customers the concept that enterprises are becoming the contact center. Not the contact center as we know, but the center customers tap into for information held with knowledge workers. Customers want to interact with brands through their preferred channel of choice, including Facebook and Twitter, but also via other one-to-one social interaction channels such as chat, knowledgebase and e-mail. As I‘ve mentioned to my kids, social interactions are not limited to tools like Facebook or Twitter, but one-to-one conversations at the dinner table also count as social interactions. Hope this analogy adds color to my perspective here.

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Is Knowledge Management Making a Come Back?

Knowledge Management NirvanaAs enterprises become more collaborative and thrive to better connect their internal (employees) and external (partners and customers) worlds, a well-established technology is back in the spotlight — Knowledge Management. With so many hot technologies in the marketplace ranging from cloud to social to mobile, why should companies pay attention to Knowledge Management tools? It is so 1990’s, right?

Well, the answer is not really. A report published this year by ThinkJar cleverly noted that Knowledge Management in “early 2000s re-emerged in one critical area: customer service.”  However, any organization staffed by knowledge workers understands that knowledge is produced and used across all processes and functions.

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Customer Service in 2012 (And Beyond)

Esteban Kolsky

Guest Author, Esteban Kolsky is the Principal and Founder of ThinkJar.

I am constantly asked, especially this time of the year, what is going to happen next year.  The question comes from everyone I talk to: practitioners, management, consultants, service providers, and system integrators – even other analysts.  And, while it is an interesting exercise to compare notes (we all have our biases and visions of where we are going) to me is far more interesting to aggregate all of them and create a picture of where the industry, the investment, and the growth is going.

The first thing anyone trying to see the future needs to do is to define the market we are forecasting.  While Gartner, IDC, and Forrester (as well as Ovum, Frost & Sullivan, and many other analyst firms that track numbers) put Customer Service around $3.5 Billion, the reality is that there are three markets (or rather, sub-markets if you may) that work differently, grow at different rates, and are even investing in different things.

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