Self-service: putting the customer in control
Customers increasingly demand online self-service options. Their online convenience provides your organization with many benefits as well, since it allows you to improve your own operational efficiency. In addition, it can offer you considerable cost savings over maintaining call centers or desk service.
Description
Customer in control
The Internet has opened the door for greater customer control over their transactions and interaction with your organization. This increasingly standard form of customer contact has created many business requirements for marketing, sales and support processes.
Previously you had to take the initiative to reach out to the customer or provide call center interaction. The Web has changed all of that. Customers want direct access and direct response. It is your business challenge to meet those new demands both from a process and an IT perspective.
Efficient or customer friendly?
What is your business goal? Executing the most efficient customer-related processes or maximizing customer satisfaction? You can answer both questions by introducing, maintaining or improving your online customer service.
Personalization
One-on-one marketing is and ideal way of making direct contact with your customers to understand their needs and requirements better. Self-service provides a great opportunity to create customer loyalty and create this direct interaction. Self-service provides you with specific and accurate customer information and enables you to meet your customer requirements using real data.
Back-end integration
For effective self-service Web sites, Web sites frequently require integrations with their back office systems in order to retrieve or submit customer data. These types of integrations need to carefully defined and implemented in order to ensure that data is secure and that you can retrieve the information you need when you need it.
A full integration with your Web Content Management system provides an ideal way of ensuring that this data is secure and accessible.
Benefits
Self-service is cost effective
Cost-effective, personalized customer interaction through online self service can fulfil many of the goals of service and support departments. SDL Tridion WCM allows you to publish consistent content about your products and services and facilitates online interaction through its Web form functionality. This cost-effective approach to online self-service can help reduce many of the operational costs of service and support.
Personalization increases opportunity
Online self-service applications often use logins and secure access to customer-specific data. This personal data give you the opportunity to offer your customers with personalized care. SDL Tridion personalization and profiling capabilities supports individual personalization for your online customers and opens up the opportunity to create up-sell and cross-sell options.
Easy access to CRM and ERP systems
For many organizations, it is vital to integrate the Internet and intranet with back-office systems. Online self-service requires access to data in back-end systems such as ERP and CRM.
SDL Tridion is ready for these requirements. All our customers run successful Web sites completely integrated with all relevant back office systems. Our product, our professional service capabilities and our strong global partner network make this work.