CRM magazine Best Practices Series: Delegate Power... To Your Customers

One of the biggest advances in recent years, in the way organizations interact with their customers and prospects is through web self-service. This aroundthe-clock method of answering questions, solving problems, and serving customers has been a boon to both organizations and the individuals they serve. Corporations get to cut costs, increase customer satisfaction, and attend to customer needs while consumers can get the majority of their questions answered at any time it is convenient to them.

In

this special section of CRM magazine we have invited several leading vendors of web self-service solutions to offer their best practices for the successful implementation of web-based self-service solutions. You'll notice that none of these best practices have much to do with the technology itself, but instead are focused on the actual goal of eliminating the barriers to information which frustrate end users-their customers.

By concentrating on a clearly defined vision of information availability from the end users point-ofview, a well done web self-service strategy can satisfy the needs of the consumer while achieving the organization's goals of increased customer satisfaction and reduced costs for a truly "win/win" outcome.

In the following pages, you will find best practices in web self-service as defined by Comergent, eGain, Kana, Oracle, and RightNow Technologies. These companies offer their experiences gained by implementing web self-service in a variety of different industries in concise, easy to digest essays on what they view as the key guideposts that organizations should use to accomplish their goals. Each company has a different twist on the theme, but all come from the point-of-view of the end user with the understanding that if their needs are satisfied, the organization will meets its goals as well.

In 2007, CRM magazine's Best Practices series will challenge solution vendors on a variety of different topics to distill their visions of how organizations should view their customer relationship management implementations. For your convenience, CRM magazine presents this section in PDF form to easily download from our website, destinationCRM.com. We encourage you to contact our sponsors directly about services and offerings. You will find their contact information on the back cover of this section.