Business requirements for customer service start with consistent service across established channels and social media, Gartner’s Michael Maoz says in the recently release Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Centers.
The customer service agent needs to provide support across all channels, whether the customer is on a Web site, a mobile device or at a kiosk. So the agent needs to be able to see what the customer does, know the customer’s interactions with the company prior to the call to the contact center and have the tools necessary to solve the customer’s issue(s), Maroz says.
Among those tools is the ability to send out proactive, automated alerts, including low balance notices for credit cards and flight updates for fliers. Such an application requires business rules and workflow processes that automatically route communication, leveraging cloud-based models, according to Maroz.
He adds that a case may be routed from one department to another, depending on type. The application should be able to link all interactions across all channels, and should support multiple languages. Back-end synchronization is critical. Real-time decision support is another essential feature for some uses.
To be included in the report, a company had to have at least 15 customer references for functionality in the contact center, with at least five new customers in the last four quarters. Customers must come from at least two separate regions (Asia/Pacific, Latin America, South America, North America or Europe).
Additionally, the company’s solution must have generated at least $7 million in revenue from new clients in the last four quarters, and should equal or exceed revenue from the prior four quarters. Further, the firm must have grown by at least a double-digit pace for the last four years. The solution needs to support extension across all channels.
In its “magic quadrant,” featuring a combination of vision and ability to excel, Gartner lists Salesforce.com, Oracle, Microsoft and Pegasystems. Challengers included SAP, Amdocs, Nice Systems, Sword Ciboodle (note: report was written prior to the acquisition of Ciboodle by Kana) and Astute Solutions.
Gartner says Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud accounts for more than 30 percent of the company’s new subscription revenue.
Gartner sites salesforce.com as “the largest and fastest growing software solution provider solely focused on customer engagement that could be verified. Service Cloud is recognized as a de facto shortlist product by most North American and Western European Organizations.”
Gartner adds that Salesforce.com’s new customers have invested more than $10 million per year in the company’s solution, retiring homegrown systems and systems from competitors that were at end-of-life stage.
However, Gartner cautions that Salesforce.com’s solution “is largely unproven in large, complex, retail, business-to-consumer contact centers – that is, large-scale, high volume contact centers where processes must be continually synchronized and monitored, such as retail banking, loan origination, insurance policy administration, bill processing and fraud management.”
“For years Salesforce.com has dominated sales force automation (SFA) with Sales Cloud. The announcement by Gartner, a trusted advisor to some of the world's largest and fastest-growing companies, further acknowledges our continued commitment to building the world's leading Customer Service and Support solution,” Salesforce.com said in a prepared statement.