Guest Post : Story of a Wrong Swipe

Posted on May 18, 2012 by admin

Ever since we have got an iPhone at home, My son Akhil has been very comfortable with it. He uses it with such commendable ease, and seems to know how to get things done with that phone, though he does not exactly know what he is doing.

According to Akhil, it is not a “Smart Phone”, but a “Smart Playing Device”, He knows how to access App Store, and has loaded tons of games in our (his?) iPhone. Games of all sorts: Throwing paper into the dustbin (which he never does in real life), cutting fruits criss cross, running up, down and under, fighting, mimicking, cards etc.,

Last week, My husband Venkat was doing some work, when Akhil popped up asking him to enter the iTunes password. Venkat not bothering to check what was happening, just entered the password and continued with his work.

Little later, I got a SMS from my credit card company, that I have spent $64 with transaction detail as iTunes.

I have never spent this much for an App purchase, it must be something that Akhil downloaded. What happens now? I have to pay $64 for something I will never use? That’s not fair.

Next morning, I decided to do some research on this, hoping that there is a way to get that money back, it was after all a mistaken purchase.

After some googling, I found the way to report the purchase as a problem, and that page gave me a comment box to tell them why.

OK, a chance to exhibit that I can write well and convince people. I tell them how I have ended up in having a kid who is 5 years old (give or take 2 years), not comfortable with english but so addictive to iPhone and simply thinks Steve Jobs is a genius (Flattery works, I hope!) and that he has made a wrong purchase and I would like to revert it.

Wow, the mail seems to have done the magic because the very next day, I got the full $64 as refund, and a beautiful Email from Apple Support, which is one of the best support mails I have ever received:

Hello,

Thanks for contacting iTunes Store support to let me know you need some help. I understand that your son has made some purchases that he should not have. I can imagine you must be concerned, but there’s no need to worry. My name is Mark and I would be happy to assist you today.

After reviewing the circumstances of your case, we determined that issuing you a refund for your unintentional purchase is an appropriate exception to the iTunes store Terms and Conditions, which state that all sales are final. In five to seven business days, a credit of $64.97 should be posted to the credit card that appears on the receipt for that purchase.

Additionally, you can make modifications on certain devices that will prevent them from making purchases,

Thank you for being an important part of the Apple family. Please let me know how everything works out. I’ll be more than happy to have this looked into further for you.

Sincerely,
Mark
Senior Advisor
iTunes Store Support

There it is, a very personal mail, understanding my problem, stating that they are treating this as an exception, returning my full money without any fees / fine, and finally, giving me suggestions on how to avoid this in future.

Most important, It has a one-to-one tone, asks me not to worry, says that the money would be refunded in 7 days (But it was refunded even before the mail was sent, I assume) and ends with a note for further help.

Thanks Apple, not only for my $64, but for this wonderful support experience.

Jayamalini

Jayamalini is a UX Professional at Zoho Corp. Given two minutes of free time she would grab a book and start reading it from cover to cover. Writing is her next favorite pass time and she blogs her parenting experiences at http://akhilnjaya.wordpress.com (mostly in Tamil). At twitter she is @jayamalini

Posted in CEM, CRM, Customer Service, Guest Articles, User Experience, UX | Tagged | Leave a comment

Ready for Fusion Wave!

Posted on May 8, 2012 by admin

With our experience and unmatched expertise in the domain of SaaS CRM Deployments, CRMIT has built a dedicatedCenterofExcellencefor Fusion CRM deployments, with consultants certified by Oracle, on various domains of Fusion CRM Applications.

Being one of the early adopters of Fusion CRM, we have built a detailed approach and process for our client deployments of Fusion CRM. This framework supports Fusion CRM Sales / Marketing as of now, and will extend to support the Services Channel as and when it is introduced by Oracle.

With our team of dedicated consultants and developers working on various new technologies in Fusion CRM / Oracle Cloud umbrella, we are fully geared for the Fusion wave!

Posted in Cloud, CRM, CRMOD, Customer Service, Marketing, News, Oracle, Oracle CRM On Demand, Oracle Fusion CRM, Sales, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

CEM : Customer Experience Management

Posted on May 3, 2012 by admin

Yesterday I had a casual lunch conversation with one of my colleagues and the topic of “Online Purchases” came up. He quoted a particular website and said “Their website is good, but the way they run their buses, it is horrible to say the least!”

I was surprised, because to my knowledge that website doesn’t run any buses. They just allow you to book tickets from various bus service providers and that’s it.

Personally, I have used this website many times, I know they don’t run any buses and hence I only book tickets from bus services which are highly rated by fellow users. As a result, I never had a bad experience. I would gladly recommend their website to anyone.

But my colleague, had a totally different view on this. He said he will never book tickets from them anymore.

So, I decided to probe further and asked him about the ‘bad experience’ he had with this website. His response was ‘Their buses start late, arrive late, they are dirty, Air conditioning is poor…’

‘But wait, these are the problems of Bus Service Provider, The website where you booked the ticket can’t be held responsible for these operational issues. They just act as agents and allow you to book a ticket at the comfort of your home, that’s it.’

‘I don’t care. For me they sold the ticket, and they are responsible for my travel experience. Isn’t it?’

Now, you can’t argue with this logic!

Few days back, I had a similar experience when we tried to buy a washing machine for home. We went to a super market, looked at various models, and were debating on which one is best for our needs. My wife had some additional questions about few of those models, and asked the sales person.

Unfortunately, that person was not able to answer any question my wife asked. It was clear that he didn’t understand anything about washing, forget machines. He is simply paid to stand there and tell people what models are available and how much they cost.

My wife got really upset about this. ‘Let us go to some other store’, she decided abruptly.

‘But why?’

‘These guys don’t know anything about the products they sell!’

I tried to explain her how retail industry works. ‘This super market deals with hundreds of brands, thousands of products, it is practically impossible for them to know technicalities of all those goods they sell.’

Her response was almost same as my colleague’s, ‘I don’t care. I buy from this shop, and they should give convincing answers to all my questions, Else, I am not buying from them!’

So, Consumers are not ready (or don’t want) to understand the gap between Sales and Delivery / Usage Experience. It is for companies to manage. They don’t care if you sell somebody Else’s product, they want the entire process to be smooth and you are responsible for it, end to end!

When you look at the way most companies are organized, there is a Research division which looks at various customer needs and imagines products. Then we have a production division which makes these products, we have Sales / Marketing divisions which take care of the selling process and Support division to take care of customer issues. Each one of these divisions have their own problems / solutions and boundaries.

Not anymore. A sales guy can’t say “My CRM ends when an opportunity is converted to an order”, a Service guy can’t say “No Purchase, No Support”, Whether we like it or not, we need to do everything possible to make sure that EVERY touch point a customer has with us, are giving them the best possible experience.

For example, someone coming to your website, visiting your twitter page / facebook wall, buying your product in a small store, calling the telesupport number to report an issue, talking to their friends about how your product functions … all these touch points (and more) are important, and as a company you need to make sure all these experiences are great. This is not optional anymore, one bad experience in any of these touch points can drive tons of business away from you.

Customer Experience Management, that’s where the future lies. CRM is not enough, it’s going to be CEM Era now!

Naga Chokkanathan,

Senior Director, CRMIT

Originally Published In : http://nagachokkanathan.wordpress.com/2012/05/03/why-not-manage-experiences/

Posted in Brand, Case Studies, CEM, Change Management, Collaboration, CRM, Customer Service, How To, Marketing, Sales, Service Management, Service Request Management, Social Media, Soft Skills, UI, Uncategorized, User Adoption, User Experience, UX, Why CRM? | Leave a comment

Oracle Fusion CRM : Features & Benefits

Posted on May 3, 2012 by admin

Oracle Fusion CRM, a component of Oracle Fusion Applications suite, is a comprehensive sales and marketing solution that not only drives smarter selling, but is also a flexible and extensible approach for rapid adoption. CRMIT being the most trusted Oracle cloud CRM partner helps implement this one–stop solution, so that its highly intuitive user experience can endow sales managers, executives and representatives with information whenever they need it.

Oracle Fusion CRM has set a new standard for CRM in sales performance management and enterprise integration. While it is an extensible, modular and absolutely flexible approach for rapid adoption, its 100% standard based infrastructure facilitates in reducing the cost of implementation, staffing and maintenance.

How Can You Benefit From Oracle Fusion CRM?

Whether you want to target, nurture and validate leads, need to enrich your knowledge about a prospect, resolve duplicity or route the quality leads to the sales team, Oracle Fusion CRM knows it better, has an ‘easy to use’ tool for it and always helps you to sell smarter. This modular solution can be setup such that it qualifies the leads and assigns them to sale representatives according to sales territories and also equips all the reps with personalized, sales initiated campaigns that can be used to expand the pipeline, besides a whole lot of other capabilities on sales & marketing fronts.

With its predictive analytics, it identifies exploitable white spaces and makes it easy to decide which products to sell to whom & which leads deserve your energy focus. Oracle Fusion CRM not only analyzes the traditional buying patterns, but it also identifies similar products and prospects. Territories can be modeled right in the system as per any combination of criteria and while making use of powerful analytics for distinguishing gaps and overlaps. Additionally, Oracle Fusion CRM keeps your high quality forecasts accurate with real time analytics and helps achieve / exceed the agreed numbers.

Oracle Fusion CRM cloud application allows enterprises to:

  • Have consolidated companies, accounts and contact information for complete 360˚ view of customer data.
  • Combine customer information and product master data with other CRM processes including partner management, incentive compensation etc.
  • Assimilate quota management with sales territory management
  • Assist enterprises in optimizing resource allocation.
  • Improves lead generation process and facilitates the sales force to focus more on solutions
Posted in CRM, Oracle, Oracle Fusion CRM, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Client Feedback On CRMIT’s CRMOD Implementation Services

Posted on April 30, 2012 by admin

Great news to begin the week. We are very happy to share the client Feedback from one of our recent Oracle CRM On Demand #CRMOD implementations. This client is a famous Insurance and Banking firm from Australia.

Thanks CRMIT for the excellent work to support the demanding requirements on this implementation of CRMoD.

You were excellent communicators and your CRMoD knowledge is excellent.

Excellent Job, Team CRMIT. Keep going!

Posted in CRM, CRMOD, Feedback, Oracle, Oracle CRM On Demand, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Customizing Oracle Fusion CRM

Posted on April 25, 2012 by admin

We have prepared a short video, which talks in detail about “Extending Oracle Fusion CRM”. It covers information about the MDS Repository, Engine, Various layers where customizations can be done, how these are stored in the repository and how they are retrieved at the runtime to provide different experience to different users.

Customizing Oracle Fusion CRM

We will be coming up with more advanced videos on Oracle Fusion CRM in the coming days. For more details and to answer any of your queries, feel free to reach us at st@crmit.com

Posted in CRM, How To, Media, Oracle, Oracle Fusion CRM, Technical, Tips & Tricks, Tutorials, Uncategorized, Videos | Leave a comment

Book Review : The Asocial Networking By Dhiraj Kumar

Posted on April 23, 2012 by admin

In the last couple of years, we have read enough about Social Networks. Some of us understood what it is all about and got in there with clear goals, many others went with the flow and became addicts. Few think it spoils their productivity and decide to keep it strictly controlled (or stop it altogether), Many others think it improves their productivity and give reasons / measures to prove it.

The reality is, none of us understood the impact Social Networking has made / is making as we speak. It is so huge, practically making it impossible to even visualize. We all look at small parts of it and make our judgement, without realizing it is incomplete.

This book (The Asocial Networking : Musings On The Real & Online Words By Dhiraj Kumar : Wordizen Books : 322 Pages : Price : Rs 195/-) approaches this from a different angle. The author asks us to think again about the ‘virtual network’ (or the ‘second world’) we all take for granted. Is there really another world? Are those really your friends? The constant updates you are making on the social media, does it really matter in the bigger scheme of things? Do those likes and follows and Retweets mean anything?

Now, this is not a book against online world or Social Media. In fact the author gives a wonderful background about various social networks people use and how they do it. Only catch is, he tries to break the myth around these by introducing logic and rational thinking to the table, Making us think, how social these networks are, really?

The book is actually a collection of 150 short articles written by Dhiraj Kumar. It talks about the Offline world, how it got impacted by the online networks, how we started sharing information, photos, videos and almost everything with our virtual “friends”, What is the psychology behind someone carefully designing their facebook homepage, how seriously privacy is viewed, what is our level or tolerance when it comes to social network related complications, how games affect our mindset, What “Likes” and “Comments” really mean, how we react differently in online / offline worlds and so on. If I list all the topics the book covers, this review will run into many pages.

Nowadays we assume social networks as a granted thing. If someone is not “Online”, for all practical purposes they don’t exist. We are more connected to these virtual worlds, we want to do business online, we want to complain in social media, instead of sending a private email to the brand or the store where we bought the product, we ask for opinions / reviews from these online friends and make decisions based on this. To cut a long story short, our dependency on these social networks becomes more and more every passing minute. So it makes sense for us to stop and think about these, understand the perspective and then take a call. It doesn’t mean you will delete your facebook profile etc., after reading this book, but you will take it differently if someone likes your post, or someone doesn’t like it. Huge improvement, isn’t it?

Lovely book for those addicted to Social Networks, Others will find is amusing to know that there is a world like this. Very good debut book by Dhiraj Kumar.

For details about the book : http://www.amazon.com/The-Asocial-Networking-Dhiraj-Kumar/dp/9381115877

Posted in Books, Social CRM, Social Media, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Guest Post : The spiral continues

Posted on April 19, 2012 by admin

With political, cultural and social revolutions happening on Twitter and Facebook by the day, the arguments for the Internet being the common man’s means of political participation is no more surprising. With everyone (with Internet connectivity and literacy) being able to start a blog (or a microblog) and speak his/ her mind (in most countries), the Internet is the epitome of democracy. If you can see that democracy itself is a system of marginalising the minority, you will see that the Internet is no different.

As far back in 1977, Noelle-Neumann argued that “the process of opinion forming and sharing was based on perceptions of popular opinion, and that perceptions of decreasing support for one’s position led to a reduced likelihood in speaking out about the topic”. She called this the spiral of silence.

In any public sphere, when one knows that his/ her opinion is not popular, one is more likely to abstain from expressing it. We all, at some point in time or another, left a conversation thinking ‘nobody gets it’ or ‘it’s not worth it’. That is us drowning in the spiral of silence. Though there are published articles to prove that the spiral of silence is far less on the Internet than in real life (like in this research here and this about LGBT communities of colour), I am still not convinced that the Internet is a place where all opinions are accommodated and all issues are supported.

I believe that what’s popular is what goes around on social networks. While corruption is a cause that most of the Indian (social networking) population stood up for, something that requires deeper understanding like Maoist movement in the Northeast or AFSPA in Manipur is generally not outraged about. My point here is not the number of people on the Internet writing about marginalised issues, it is about their virality. If more people don’t read and share, the idea of the Internet levelling the opinion high ground is defeated, isn’t it?

What’s more worrying is that with the Internet maturing as a platform and more tools of engagement coming along, it is the early adopters or the celebrities (from elsewhere) that get the most number of eyeballs. This, I believe, would lead to further bullying and a wider spiral of silence. Let’s imagine you are the only one who hates Chetan Bhagat and everyone else in the world thinks he is God (let’s just imagine for once), will your voice be heard in the public sphere? With all social networks aiming to milk the most out of people (they are businesses too and this isn’t entirely wrong), it is just not the world’s priority to ensure a level playing ground for (counter) opinions.

The rate at which people are adopting social networks across the globe ensures that it is not limited to the elite few. However, the openness of these networks also means that trolls cannot be kept away. Blind following, abusive language, inappropriate responses, and personal attack on content creators are things we cannot avoid.

The SOPAs and the PIPAs of the world aren’t much of a support to the open democracy that the Internet is. Most Governments have begun looking at an uncensored Internet as a problem and the fear of being troubled for what you said (and published with a record of it online somewhere) isn’t very encouraging to express opinion.

Besides all of this, I believe the responsibility rests with the users of the social networks to be open to opinions and respectful of fellow networkers. Much to ask, that?

Ranjani Krishnakumar

Ranjani Krishnakumar is a Digital Marketeer, who drinks a lot of coffee and fiddles with her pen all the time (apart from all the stressful marketing work that is). She also writes a blog about (Tamil) films at www.tharkuri.in.
She can be found as @_tharkuri on Twitter.
Posted in Guest Articles, Social CRM, Social Media, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Oracle Fusion CRM Reporting

Posted on April 11, 2012 by admin

Oracle Fusion CRM comes with a comprehensive Reporting Module, which is very easy to use, flexible, yet powerful enough to capture all your reporting needs.

If you are already comfortable with Oracle’s BI (OBIEE Or CRM On Demand Answers) way of creating reports, this should be very easy for you, there is basically not much to unlearn / relearn as you can see from the steps below:

Step 1 : Go to “Navigator” > “Tools” > “Reports and Analytics”

Step 2 : From the left navigation, click on “Create” Icon, It opens a popup screen

Step 3 : Select your Subject Area, Reporting Wizard Starts

Step 4a : Select Columns / Organize them as per your requirements

Step 4b : Name your report, Select Views (Table / Chart / Both), Decide on the layout

Step 4c : Edit Table

Step 4d : Edit Chart

Step 4e : Filter your records (to display limited information in your report), Sort them based on one or more fields (Ascending / Descending)

Step 4f : Define Conditional Highlighting (If any)

Step 4g : Define Location : My Folders / Shared Folders / Subfolders & Save

Step 5 : From the left navigation, Click on the folder specified in Step 4g, Click on the report name, Click on “View” to view the report, Or “Edit” to edit the same

Posted in Analytics, BI, How To, Oracle, Oracle Fusion CRM, Reporting, Tips & Tricks, Tutorials, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Social CRM For Service Teams

Posted on April 11, 2012 by admin

One common source where people are sharing content online more than ever is certainly the social networking environment. This is the largest source of direct, honest and outspoken opinions and community assistance. While this real time social media thing is global, uncontrollable and dynamic that lets your prospects and customers talk about you online, it is definitely serving like a helping aid to Service Teams, as well.

While customers talk about issues that you may not be even aware of, using right tools you can actually uncover the posts that talk about various issues, problems or may be grievances about company products and services. This can facilitate you in enhancing your customer support and service.

Social CRM provides you an opportunity to automatically convert these customer posts into service requests into the existing support application for a better follow up and track.

Now, what kind of social media posts for customer support routine can assist you? It may be a complaint, suggestion, any positive feedback or may be an additional service or product offering.

Once you identify the kind of post that can help you further in the matter, social CRM can convert it into a service request and route it through the existing workflows. Most of the organizations answer these posts as first come, first served manner, but you can choose to answer these according to your high value customers or may be high rated products. But whatever you choose, that should be based on business needs and not social media dynamics.

With the scoring mechanisms of social CRM, efficient and timely segmentation of actionable posts becomes easy. So, while managing service requests and taking proficient actions accordingly, you can also enjoy various other benefits of social CRM like platform flexibility, greater influence over conversation, better accommodating complexity of customer relationships and achieving deeper customer engagement.

Charu Mehta

CRM Consultant, CRMIT

Posted in B2C, Collaboration, Communication, CRM, Customer Service, Feedback, How To, Online Image, People Management, Personalization, Service Management, Service Request Management, Social CRM, Social Media, Targeted Messages, Tips & Tricks, Uncategorized, Why CRM? | Leave a comment