Support Systems

Customer Service and Support Applications

Today, organizations have implement customer interaction centers (CIC), where organizational representatives use multiple channels such as the web, telephone, fax, and face-to-face interactions to communicate with customers. The CIC manages several different types of customer interaction.

One of the most well-known customer interaction centers is the call center, a centralized office set up to receive and transmit a large volume of requests by telephone. Call centers enable companies to respond to a large variety of questions, including product support and complaints.

Organizations use the CIC to create a call list for the sales team, whose members contact sales prospects. This type of interaction is called outbound telesales. In these interactions, the customer and the sales team collaborate in discussing products and services that can satisfy customers’ needs and generate sales.

Customers can communicate directly with the CIC to initiate a sales order, inquire about products and services before placing an order, and obtain information about a transaction that they have already made. These interactions are referred to as inbound teleservice.

Teleservice representatives respond to requests either by using service instructions found in an organizational knowledge base or by noting incidents that can be addressed only by field service technicians.

The CIC also provides the information help desk. The help desk assists customers with their questions concerning products or services, and it also processes customer complaints.

Complaints generate follow-up activities such as quality-control checks, delivery of replacement parts or products, service calls, generation of credit memos, and product returns.

New technologies are extending the traditional CIC’s functionality to include e-mail and web interaction. For example, EpicorOpens in new window provides software solutions that combine web channels, such as automated e-mail reply, and web knowledge bases.

The information the software provides is available to CIC representatives and field service personnel. Another recent technology, live chat, allows customers to connect to a company representative and conduct an instant messaging session.

The advantage of live chat over a telephone conversation is the ability to show documents and photos. Some companies conduct the chat with a computer using natural language processing rather than with a real person.