TMCnews Featured Article

It’s the weekend, and it’s time for a quick review of the week’s events in customer service software.

Mobile apps for financial services customers that can connect users to a live agent…great idea, right? Sure it is, in practice. It turns out that many financial services organizations that offer mobile apps could use a lot more practice. According to a new study, 31 percent of users of smartphone financial apps say they have had to hang up due to long hold times before speaking to customer service to solve their problem. Other consumers experienced dropped calls, disconnections or were unable to reach a customer service representative at a convenient time.

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While everybody knows that customer service works two ways – inbound and outbound – a lot of time and effort is expended on the inbound, while outbound technologies and processes have changed very little in decades (unless you count the rise of the hated robo-calling). It shouldn’t be this way, according to many customer service experts, who say that many companies are too passive when it comes to their customer relationships, hoping their customers will initiate contacts.

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Businesses may have different goals and adopt different ways to attain them, but all of them live by just one mantra – enhance sales performance, improve efficiencies, increase profits, get new customers and keep those you have satisfied. That may sound a lot to achieve, and difficult too, but it’s not as bad as it sounds.

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There are few customer services experiences that are more maddening than that when a customer service rep puts a call on hold and goes searching for a solution to a problem, only to return to the phone with an inadequate answer we probably could have found online ourselves. Customer service experience management firm KANA wants to help companies avoid such daily customer disasters.

Find the complete article here.

In other KANA news, the company recently released Lagan Express to help medium-sized government entities better serve their customer bases. Not long ago, the company was cited in Gartner’s (News - Alert) Magic Quadrant for Social CRM, earning it the title Niche Player. The customer service software seamlessly integrates communications from constituents originating from various channels such as virtual agents, self-service apps, Web chat, social networks, e-mail, and phone calls. These various communication pathways are then assimilated into one platform, eliminating the need to toggle back and forth between systems.

Read the full article here.

That’s all for this week in customer service software. Have a great weekend.