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Tag: CRM

A great example of usability improving the customer support experience

August 22, 2007 The 37signals guys point us towards Twitter's use of HelpSpot's Help Desk software:   How do you help your helpdesk/support team give you the best support? Give them the information they need right from the start. I really like the simple, clear, and concise labels: This is what I DIDThis is what I EXPECTED to happenThis is what ACTUALLY happened I'm sure this greatly helps the support team resolve more requests on the first go-round, as opposed to the all-too-common first response having to ask the customer for more information. It's good for the support team, and good for the customer. Nicely done.  

Having RuleManager invoke command line scripts

June 26, 2007 I've received a few questions on this recently, so I decided a post is in order.   One of the features in Rulemanager (both the Clarify/Amdocs Rulemanager and the Dovetail Rulemanager) is the ability to have it invoke command line scripts/executables via a business rule action.   For example:   if a case has been in a status of "waiting on customer" for more than 30 days, run a script that will close the case when a new contact is created, run a script that will send the contact data to another system (such as an ERP system) when a case is closed, run a script that will send the customer a satisfaction survey etc.   What kind of scripts can Rulemanager run? Basically, any kind of script or executable, as long as no UI activity or user input is needed.  …

Making the app work the way the user expects it to work

May 9, 2007 Every morning I get an email report containing all of the Full Text Searches that our customers performed within our SelfService application, along with how many results each search resulted in, and if there were any errors. Our volume is low, so it's not too much information for me to process on a daily basis. This report allows me to gain some knowledge of who's using the app, what types of things they're searching for, and if they are finding answers to their inquiries. This morning's report showed that a customer searched for just an integer (for our example, we'll say they searched for 12345), and came up with no matches. Knowing the  customer, I knew they were searching for a case number. However, our search is currently setup to perform full text searches on the textual information with a…

Two Key CRM Problems – Adoption and Expectations

Static image April 23, 2007 After a decade of development, CRM deployments are still problematic for many companies, as recent surveys show. Two main areas of concern are employee adoption of new deployments, and also large disparities between what executives expect and what the system actually delivers.   Additionally, sales consultancy CSO Insights finds installation problems, with forty-one percent of implementations going over budget. The main reasons for budget overruns center around management failure to plan for user training and post-install support. This melds with the adoption rates being lower than expected. CSO explains:   ”’I’m sure we could pick out companies whose numbers are well above average, and I think we would find those companies have had CRM [programs] for some time,’ Trailer said. ‘But I would suspect the difference is not their CRM[technology] but their management. CRM isn’t what makes the difference; people embracing the tools makes the difference.’” See CRM software fails sales   This is…

Turning blog entries into customer experiences

April 12, 2007 John Ragsdale points out a new product that allows companies to monitor what's being said about their products and services in the blogosphere. We've been talking a lot about this here at Dovetail, specifically how a post on a blog or forum can be turned into a customer experience. I've mostly thought about identifying problems that customers may have posted about, but John points out another interesting aspect, identifying expert users who are very knowledgeable about your products, with whom you may want to align. Very cool. A negative blog post about your company, product, or service can automatically create a support case, and the company can reach out, hopefully turning a negative customer experience into a great one. Proactively. Nice. John also talks about identifying new content sources, which I completely agree with. I pointed out in an earlier post that there's…

Extending SuperEmailClerk.NET to call your own APIs

March 20, 2007  SuperEmailClerk.NET (SEC.NET), when running in API Invoke mode, will invoke requested APIs and return the results in a reply email. SEC.NET can be configured to execute API toolkits purchased from Dovetail Software, such as the ClearSupport toolkit, or custom-built APIs. This post will walk through creating a custom API in .NET that can be invoked by SEC.NET. The example will be a CreateAddress method. Even though there is an existing CreateAddress method in our Interfaces toolkit, we chose this as an example because it illustrates how to use the AdditionalFields property of the Toolkit Setup objects, which allows you to re-use our toolkits, but with an unlimited number of additional fields being set. Overview of the steps involved: Create a SecApiInvokeExample class with a CreateAddress method Create a SecApiInvokeExampleTests class for our tests Create the tags and subtags and add these to the…

Using Microsoft Full-Text Search within Dovetail applications

March 13, 2007 For years, Clarify has used the full-text search engine from Fulcrum (now Hummingbird OpenText) to allow full text searches in its applications. This was important back in the day, since the database vendors didn't offer good solutions to this problem. Now they do. A couple years ago, as we started expanding our knowledgebase, we had the need to perform full-text searches. However, we preferred to stay away from the Fulcrum/Hummingbird product, mostly because of how Clarify integrated with it. Corrupted indexes, huge amounts of time to create/re-create indexes, and having to setup cron jobs to schedule index runs, were just a few of the problems I ran into on previous implementations. As we used Microsoft SQL Server as our database platform, we decided to use the FTS engine that is bundled with SQL Server, and we've been happy with the result.…

Uniqueness of Relation Names

Here's an interesting scenario that we recently ran into when developing our SchemaEditor application for Clarify. In Clarify, the rule is that relation names must be unique within a table, which makes sense. For example, I cannot have two relations named case2site on the case table. The schema editing tools (ddcomp, DD Editor, Dovetail SchemaEditor) will disallow this. But there is no problem having case2site on the case table and case2site on the subcase table (although it's a bad naming convention, it's not illegal). However, in Microsoft SQL Server databases, Clarify creates relate stored procedures for relations. For example, the following relation: case2subcase OTM subcaseINV_REL=subcase2case COMMENT="Subcases originated from the case" will produce the following stored proc: create procedure rl_case2subcase( @case1 int, @subcase2 int) as update table_subcase set subcase2case = @case1 where objid=@subcase2 How and where do these stored procs get used?…

Daylight Savings Time (DST) Impacts Clarify Database (and Rest of World)

Static image February 27, 2007 Those who have called Daylight Savings Time a folly from the beginning may snicker at the Congressional decision to alter the dates, but those who have anything to do with software aren’t laughing. Changing the dates of the Daylight Savings Time active period, for the first time in decades, will throw a lot of clocks out of sync.   Dovetail engineer Steven Weintraub has compiled a list of dates affected by the new law, and instructions to update Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the Clarify database   “This requires a good knowledge of CLARIFY database setup and SQL. This is a problem. I am sure Clarify is providing a solution for those using Clarify support – but this does not help the many customers who have stopped paying support.   “For those customers (and this blog post is for you) – they have to…

CRM Thrives on Open Standards

Static image February 1, 2007 Through all of its evolution, Dovetail Software’s family of CRM products has embraced open standards in the process of bringing extensibility to Clarify’s proprietary code. Open-standard scripting languages such as JavaScript simplify and energize extension and integration throughout the enterprise computing environment. These languages are readily recognized by many applications, and freely employed by in-house IT departments.   Standards sometimes arise first, often from a single developer or project, and afterwards get the seal of approval of a trusted authority that enables all developers to embrace the technology. This happened with JavaScript, created initially by Netscape. The same thing is happening now with Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) specification, which it is currently offering for ISO standardization.   Other times, standards have to be created. This is occurring now in the CRM environment as SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) continues its evolution: suggested standards begin to be discussed, and standards already accepted are…