At A Glance
Company: RLE Technologies
Location: Fort Collins, CO
Industry: Manufacturing
Challenges: RLE needed an integrated, Web-based solution for sales order processing, CRM and help desk functionality with an intuitive user interface

Before turning to NetSuite in February, RLE Technologies - which manufactures water leak detection and web-enabled monitoring products - found itself in an IT quandary. The company had been using Great Plains software with its pervasive database; however, with Microsoft’s recent efforts to migrate users to SQL Server and .Net, RLE was facing massive upgrade costs.

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

This week’s question:
“We recently implemented a call center management system as part of our CRM strategy. What key metrics should we be measuring?”

A: For many businesses today, the call center is the “front line” to the customer. Therefore, you want to make sure your agents are performing at optimum levels and delivering the highest quality experience. Read more »

Harris Interactive has recently published its 2nd Annual Customer Experience Impact Report.

The study, which was sponsored by RightNow Technologies, polled over 2,000 adult consumers from various regions across the United States. The report is designed to gauge how clients interact with companies, and how their experiences impact future behaviors. Some of the key findings include:

• 80% of consumers will never return to a company after a negative experience, up from 68% last year.

• 51% cite outstanding service as the primary reason they continue to do business with certain organizations.

• 74% will register a formal complaint, or spread the word to others, after a bad experience.

• Most consumers (60%) indicated that speaking to a live agent was their preferred method of communication.

• 68% cited an inability to reach a live human being as a major source of frustration.

View the entire report. (Available at RightNow.com and registration required)

By Katherine Jones, Director of Marketing at NetSuite

We all know that our sales teams should be leveraging the businesses advantages of mobile devices when they are out of the office. But like most things, it can be easier said than done — that is, done well.

Wireless connectivity has become mainstream in today’s workplace. Here are some stats from IDC and Gartner: IDC says 40% of workers now travel for business and they say this will rise to two-thirds by 2007. Gartner reports that there will be 41.1 million mobile professionals worldwide by year end 2007.

Planning for your mobile device integration is not intuitive — it does take some thought. Here are five points I think are important to remember in creating a mobile workforce.

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John Todor, Author of Addicted Customers: How to Get Them Hooked on Your Company

How do you get customers to scrimp elsewhere so they can splurge on your offering? Offer a relationship that gives them a better experience, reduces stress, and increases the value they get.

This type of relationship leads to customer equity. Customer equity leads to higher profits, greater lifetime value, and the power of word-of-mouth. Yet, most businesses are compelled to compete on price and convenience. Why? They have no systematic process for building customer equity.

The basis of these relationships is trust.

However, according to the 2006 Edelman Trust Barometer, customers rank most companies, executives, products, and marketing in the bottom one third of the trust scale. Many business people feel they stand behind their products and therefore are trustworthy. Guess what? Customers expect quality products and services. This only leads to trust in the product, it does not add trust or value to the relationship.

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