In the past, field service operations were often disconnected from other customer-facing functions. While call centers, sales and marketing departments, and help desks have always been viewed as key contributors to customer satisfaction and loyalty, field support teams were considered a cost of doing business.

In recent years, this perception has changed. Many businesses now see field support as playing a major role in the customer experience, and as a result, have made efficient, cost-effective and profitable field service operations a top priority.

In fact, according to the Service and Support Professionals Association (SSPA), “field service is now finding itself in the customer experience spotlight, often for the first time. Driving costs out of field service operations continues to be the primary goal for most organizations, and more companies realize that field agents, with their face to face interactions with customers, have a major impact on customer satisfaction and incremental revenue.”

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Customer Interaction Solutions Announces their 8th Annual CRM Excellence Award Winners
Each year, Customer Interaction Solutions, one of the industry’s leading CRM publications, bestows the CRM Excellence Awards on those companies that demonstrate their ability to act as true partners to their clients, helping them significantly improve customer relations and related processes.

This year’s winners, announced in late spring, are as follows:

* Altitude Software
* AMC Technology, LLC
* Aplicor, Inc.
* Autonomy etalk
* AvantGo
* Centive, Inc.
* Citrix Online, LLC
* Cross Country Automotive Services
* DeGarmo Group
* Enkata Technologies
* Envox Worldwide
* Epicor Software Corp.

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The CRM Advisor

You ask the questions, and our resident CRM guru shares her wisdom.

This week’s question: “Do I need mobile CRM capabilities?”

A: The experts say that if more than 20% of your customer-facing staff frequently work from off-site locations, the answer is YES.

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Host.Net a BroadbandONE Company is headquartered in Boca Raton, FL, and serves the southeastern United States and beyond in the highly competitive world of Internet and network services providers.

In this market most vendors provide very similar products and services such as web hosting and IP phone service, to name two. Surviving and succeeding in this market requires vendors to focus on operational excellence to ensure that they deliver the best possible offers to prospective customers. Very often operational excellence relies on communication and the timely flow of information.

Host.Net recognized that front-end sales initiatives must be carefully coordinated with back-end operations to ensure the relationship is effectively managed throughout the lifecycle. And when customer incidents are reported sales people, for example, must be made fully aware of these issues.

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