"I called my phone company to disconnect my line, and they said it was taken care of. But then a month later, I got another bill! I called again, and they said the cancellation request hadn't gone through. But why is that my fault? I shouldn't have to call twice to get this straightened out."

Good customer care doesn't end when the customer hangs up. This customer was billed because his cancellation request had never been sent to back-end billing and provisioning systems. But shouldn't there be an automatic process that will take requests from front-end channels such as contact center agents and make sure they get to the back-end systems? And if something goes wrong with the request, shouldn't the system let the agent and the customer know?

Microsoft Customer Care Framework 2008 (CCF 2008) was designed to help the many parts of a customer service initiative talk to each other-in short, to keep customers from falling through the cracks. Every company has different customer care needs, but Microsoft has developed an extensible solution that can be custom-fitted to the needs of your organization.

Depending on the needs of its customers, a company may have many customer touch points: a contact center, self-service websites, kiosks, automated service agents (ASAs), interactive voice response (IVR) systems, retail sites, or branch offices.

Microsoft CCF 2008 is an innovative, flexible platform that lets sales, marketing and service operations integrate existing systems and applications into a dynamic front-end solution that directly enhances the customer experience. But most importantly, it works along with your business as it grows and changes.

SELF-SERVICE PORTALS

"I called my credit card company, and was connected to an automated message that asked me to enter my account number. After a long wait on hold, I was connected to a real person, who again asked for my account number! She said she didn't know why I had to enter the number before. Then I had to repeat the number three times before she got it right."

Companies often implement voice response systems and automated agents to save themselves time and money, but they also add to customer frustration when not tied to the rest of the system. A recent approach is the self-service portal. Self-service channels allow the customer to directly interact with your company. For example, an airline check-in kiosk can be a much better experience than waiting in a long line to be processed by a single airline agent.

WHY A SELF-SERVICE PORTAL?

So why would a company provide a self-service portal to serve their customers? We found three common reasons.

Optimize Contact Center: Traditionally, when customers have a problem with a product, they pick up the phone and call the company that makes it. However, even though many U.S. companies outsource their call centers abroad, the cost per call is still very high, and language can be a problem for companies whose target customers' native language is not English. More importantly, companies today do not just use the contact center to resolve issues for their customers, they also want to use it as a channel to cross-sell and up-sell other products and services. By providing a self-service portal, a company is able to divert some routine or time-consuming tasks to that channel and use the contact center to handle more complex tasks. Additionally, today's customers demand the convenience of a self-service option from the companies they do business with.

Increase Sales and Minimize Entry Errors: A self-service portal can also be used to market products and services and enable customers to make online transactions. Because the customers enter information themselves, it minimizes the errors that a contact center agent could make when talking to the customer over the phone.

Prove Service Eligibility: Unlike a contact center agent, a self-service portal is always available. Customers never have to endure a queue or wait for the next available agent. The wait is usually the cause of a frustrated customer. By providing an "always-on" channel, self-service portals will increase overall customer satisfaction.

PORTALS AND PITFALLS

It's not enough to simply build the portal, however - to be an effective tool for both customers and companies, it must be constructed well. From a design perspective, there are three important criteria for building a successful portal:

Identify the users. Who will be using the portal?

Identify tlie goals of those users. Why do they want to use the portal? What tasks do they expect to accomplish there?

Identify ways to help them achieve those goals. How can we group the functions that are most relevant to the users? How can we present those functions in a visually appealing way, so the users are willing to invest their time to learn about them?

SELF-SERVICE PORTALS - BUSINESS BENEFIT SCENARIOS

E-COMMERCE. These types of companies should be able to sell products and services on the portal. Let's use the telecommunications industry as an example. Most telecommunication companies today do not own digital content such as digital video, music or ringtones; they rely on their partners to provide this content. A self-service portal will give these companies a way to manage their partners and give the partners a way to monitor and view how their products and services are sold to make proper adjustments if necessary.

CUSTOMER SELF-CARE. Customers can solve problems on their own, without waiting on hold or in line. This frees up contact centers for more serious or complex issues, and saves the company money. With a Single-Sign-On approach, users can complete several transactions without having to explain their needs to more than one agent. In addition, portals can be personalized to an individual user or market segment. With a personalized portal, features or functions that are relevant to a particular user can be grouped together. The user is also able to customize the look and feel. That encourages the user to use the portal more and call the agents less.

NEEDS-BASED SELLING. This means both cross-selling and up-selling. Portal users need not see those ad banners on the screen as annoying and distracting, because they can be tailored to a customer's probable needs. For a cable TV company, for example, it wouldn't benefit them to show an ad banner for introductory pricing for a lower-tier programming package than what the customer already has. They should show this customer a higher-end and more expensive programming package. Most modern advertising puts customers into groups, and then advertises products to different groups. This may be better than a non-selective, blanket approach, but it is still over-generalizing. With customized portals, companies can create a precision marketing mechanism which determines a user's need based on different data sets-demographics, self-descriptive, and transactional.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

"I heard about a great promotion on the radio. So I tried to go to their website to sign up for it, but it was nowhere to be found! I ended up having to call the company, and the person who answered the phone hadn't even heard of the promo, and had to ask someone else. It's the same company-don't these people talk to each other?"

As useful and efficient as self-service portals are, they are only part of the answer. To be effective, they must operate as part of a larger, interconnected system. This system must be easy to update and flexible enough to work with legacy systems and the unique demands of your business. Microsoft CCF 2008 makes it easy to create just such a system.

A LOOK AT CUSTOMER CARE FRAMEWORK 2008

CCF 2008 can help your employees improve the timeliness and quality of their customer interactions and maintain focus on customer needs, while lowering the cost of providing world-class customer care. With CCF 2008, agents handle calls efficiently, in a single session, avoiding unnecessary call transfers and frustrating handoffs.

If a handoff becomes necessary, a unique transfer capability in the software retains the information from each customer session. Now you can achieve consistent, high-quality customer care that is designed to comply with corporate standards and regulatory mandates.

Customer Care Framework 2008 supports the rapid, flexible, and cost-effective development and deployment of customer care integration and improvement. Using Web services and workflow, it works with a contact center's existing collection of business applications, linking agent desktops to systems such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Customer Relationship Management), billing, payment, ordering, trouble ticketing, and knowledge management.

With CCF 2008, your customer care team will have near-immediate access to the relevant information they need to successfully and efficiently help your customers. Based on industry standards, it can be easily integrated with existing applications and systems, and is flexible enough to easily support future integration and the IT needs of customer care.

The heart of Microsoft CCF 2008 is a core server component called the Aggregation Layer that ties together various line-of-business applications such as CRM, billing, trouble ticketing, knowledgebase and order-taking systems. Its flexibility allows it to integrate information from almost any existing software into a customizable desktop application. This Integrated Agent Desktop provides customized, automated "workflows" which suggest appropriate tasks and courses of action for the agent, based on context of the task steps, customer-specific data, and session attributes.

INTEGRATED AGENT DESKTOP

The Integrated Agent Desktop is where all the business functions of the Customer Care Framework 2008 come together. Existing line-of-business applications are integrated with data management functions, workflow design and process management tools. Information is delivered to the Agent Desktop, ready to be used by contact center staff. The desktop prompts an agent through tasks, and launches applications as they are required-helping agents be more efficient, and yielding a consistent customer experience.

WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT

The Workflow Management window provides step-by-step guidance for the administrator to simplify call-resolution processes and standardize agent activities. An administrator can easily create separate configurations for various agent groups, with different workflows triggered for each incident type, based on agent input, existing customer data, or other activities within the Desktop. The framework can extend process workflow management across the enterprise and to external customer communication channels, on-line applications such as e-commerce sites, or self-serve Web portals.

Microsoft CCF 2008 is a great fit for sales, marketing, and customer support centers in virtually any type of business. Organizations can focus on the customer and be more competitive in their field, building customer loyalty and increasing retention. Improvements in customer service lead to increased profitability. Whether the customer care environment is an external-facing center, or an internal support group such as sales support, helpdesk, or administrative services, business decision makers increasingly look to quality of customer care as a competitive differentiator, and a key contributor to improve customer satisfaction. And while CCF 2008 is a great fit for any service and support center, it is particularly valuable for those business managers who need to integrate inherited business systems, or who want to add new technologies that provide customers with more choices in communication channels.

AGGREGATION, AUTOMATION, AND ACCELERATION IN CCF 2008

Good customer care requires three things. First, aggregation means that all the information needed to solve a customer's problem is collected in one place. second, automation ensures that tasks and processes happen automatically, saving agent's time and hassle. And third, acceleration refers to speedy training and fast resolution time, as well as rapid realization of business results. The many components of CCF 2008 come together to create a solution that will fit your current business needs and grow with it over time.

Customer Care Framework is a Windows-based application used by customer care agents. When a customer contacts the company, whether by phone, web chat, e-mail, or another method, the interaction gets routed to an agent. The agent is able to access the customer's information through the Integrated Agent Desktop, see customer info alongside workflow and session management, and easily find the correct information from numerous and disparate enterprise systems to answer customer queries.

As discussed above, the Customer Self-Service Portal will help companies create direct-to-customer, self-service channels of communication. Content managers and developers can easily customize portal channels with customer-specific content.

An Interaction Server allows CCF 2008 to smoothly integrate voice, e-mail, chat, and other types of communications. Regardless of the channel, the CCF integration architecture remains the same.

Enterprise Single Sign-On provides convenient ways to map a Windows User ID to non-Windows user credentials, making customer information accessible across all channels, and significantly reduces the time to access relevant systems. This ensures that agents don't have to trouble the customer by asking for their account number repeatedly.

Another feature in CCF 2008 is a set of Developer Tools that automate tasks and processes for integrating applications and separating business logic and application controls.

WHAT'S NEXT

Here is a glimpse at the next generation of customer care technologies that are part of the Microsoft commitment to innovation. These technologies are available in conjunction with Customer Care Framework to enhance Microsoft's Customer Care offerings.

TellMe, a new Microsoft subsidiary, is an industry leader in voice portals. Companies can use their TeIlMe Studio VoiceXML tool to build Internet-powered, voice-enabled applications. TellMe's robust technology is used by Verizon to provide 411 service, and by ETRADE, Merrill Lynch and American Airlines for customer support.

Automated Service Agent (ASA) is a new customer service technology from Microsoft that can easily be integrated with Microsoft CCF Using a conversational, self-service interface that puts customers at ease, it allows customers to type questions in their own words (referred to as "natural language inquiries") using a text-chat interface. It can work simultaneously over multiple communication channels, including the Web or any interface that supports two-way messaging, such as instant messaging or SMS. ASA can seamlessly escalate a customer to a live customer service representative, passing along the details of the customer's inquiry. It also includes sophisticated reporting and analytics tools to help customers evaluate and refine the system.

ELIMINATING THE CRACKS

With this combination of time-tested tools and an eye to the future, CCF 2008 is the best way to improve the timeliness and quality of customer interactions and maintain focus on customer needs, while lowering the cost of providing world-class customer care.

The powerful technology of CCF 2008 can handle the needs of organizations of any size, and diverse channels such as voice, chat, and self-service portals can be integrated into one solid solution. Because it works with almost all existing applications, it's an easy transition. Training is quick and can be tailor-fit to your company's needs, making employees more productive.

Excellent customer care is a hallmark of successful companies, and more and more successful companies are choosing Microsoft Customer Care Framework 2008. Its power and flexibility make it easy to eliminate the usual cracks in customer service, with a smooth, seamless system that improves your bottom line.