The new business reality is one of increased competition, informed and demanding customers, commoditization of products and services, and relentless pressure to cut costs. In this environment, customer service is the single biggest differentiator for businesses. In order to create competitive advantage with customer service in a tough economic climate, they need to improve the quality of service but at the same time, control costs. How can they accomplish these conflicting goals? DOWNLOAD whitepaper to find out.

While the digital age has made it easier to identify an organization's key social media influencers, companies must now determine how to efficiently and effectively engage with them. Re-Envisioning Customer Value is an Economist Intelligence Unit report sponsored by SAS. It delves into the implications that new measures of customer value carry for businesses - and investigates the opportunities and risks that companies face.

The majority of your customers have adopted social media and are out there talking about you or your competition. Leading marketers that have embraced this movement are learning how customer value is different in a social media environment. They are finding ways to apply advanced analytics to identify their most valuable customers, and engage with them more effectively.

Now you can benefit from this rich knowledge by downloading Re-Envisioning Customer Value. This report analyzes the importance of creating a scalable and sustainable social media strategy in order to get join and, when necessary, steer the conversation.

TSIA members are reporting that after initial successes many KM projects are de-emphasized, and a year later, a once-popular knowledgebase stops delivering value. It's not hard to imagine that such disregard can quickly diminish ROI and impact long-term customer satisfaction.

This TSIA Executive Insight report explores common reasons for project 'launch and leave' with recommendations for avoiding pitfalls. The value of ongoing maintenance is investigated, including best practice recommendations on metrics to maintain the health of your knowledge implementation.

The rapid adoption of social media, peer-to-peer review sites, and mobile devices has enabled customers to retrieve and share more information and opinions over the Web. And, thanks to their Internet-connected mobile devices, customers are able to interact anytime, anywhere. The confluence of these developments creates digitally connected, highly informed, and more demanding customers. Compounding the problem for organizations is that a growing percentage of these customers prefer to use the non-traditional communication channels (i.e., web, email, chat, and text) on their mobile devices. Plus, they expect the organizations they purchase from to engage them over these channels.

But, for organizations to successfully incorporate these communication channels into their commerce strategies, they must create a superior, unified cross-channel customer experience. Organizations need a CRM/eCommerce system that is connected to front-and back-office functions, highly personalized, able to deliver valuable customer insights, and able to optimize operational efficiency. Doing so would enable organizations to attract and retain more customers and sell more because they would be delivering highly relevant, accurate, and personalized information to the right customers at the right time.

Find out how a unified, cross-channel CRM/eCommerce system will enable your organization to meet the needs of today's customers by reading the white paper, "Deliver a Superior Cross-Channel Commerce Experience."

For those just getting started in email marketing deciding whether to work with an email service provider (ESP) or build an in-house email marketing solution can be a daunting task. Even if your business has the resources available to build a powerful in-house platform, the expertise and proven integrity of an already established ESP is invaluable to those new to the email marketing world. To shed more light on this subject, Topica has created this white paper which looks at the areas of cost, time and reliability to make your decision of whether to outsource or keep your email marketing in-house much easier.

First call resolution (FCR), and the closely related call resolution rate (CRR), are the most important operational metrics for call center managers because they address productivity, quality and customer satisfaction in one number. To realize the benefits of these essential key performance indicators (KPIs), leaders need an objective, accurate and automated mechanism for capturing and calculating one or both  of these measurements. Organizations that employ FCR to firmly establish a corporate mindset dedicated to ongoing process and staff improvements are driving down their operating expenses while upgrading the customer experience and enhancing their brand. For years, companies have struggled to do FCR right; and many do not even know where to start. This white paper provides best practices for  building a successful operational FCR/CRR program, and shows how a leading telecom services provider used it to change their call center culture, cost structure and market perception.

Salesforce.com is one of the most successful, business critical on-demand applications, which makes securely managing access to it of paramount importance. Yet, unlike on-premise applications, Salesforce.com does not natively plug into traditional directories or identity and access management products, which introduces challenges for end-users, application administrators and IT.

This paper focuses on the challenges of integrating Salesforce.com logins for single sign-on (SSO) and automating provisioning/de-provisioning from on-premise directories like Active Directory. Salesforce.com provides industry leading APIs to not only secure data but also to integrate with other systems to achieve SSO and automate user management. The APIs capabilities are discussed as well as overcoming common challenges such as on-going maintenance and extending beyond Salesforce.com for organizations deploying multiple SaaS applications (WebEx, GoogleApps, Concur, etc.) to their Salesforce.com users.

Data. You've got a LOT of it. You use it every day for reporting and analysis to determine effective campaign management to your clients and prospects. But with 600 Tweets, 34,000 Google searches, and 700 Facebook posts per second, marketers are no longer in control of their brands, thanks to the real-time web.

But that doesn't mean you have to accept defeat and succumb to these new challenges. By bringing your data together across channels, it's possible (even easy!) to successfully embrace real-time marketing and evolve campaign management to conversation management - turning previous challenges into ROI opportunities.

Download this new white paper and find out the benefits of real-time marketing.

Find out how your company can ensure its contact center and back office are staffed with the right people and make sure they are available at the right time to meet predetermined service levels. Review Best Practices for Workload Distribution and Dynamic Employee Engagement-a four-part series of articles, authored by Bradley J. Baumunk, president of B. Baumunk and Associates. This compendium features:

• Rethinking Contact Center and Back Office Processes: The Challengers of Achieving Balance and Consistency-Learn how to strengthen overall customer satisfaction and minimize costs by balancing reliable service with employee occupancy.
• Staffing and Workload Management: Challenges and Opportunities-Find out how a proper marriage between the contact center and the back office can directly translate to a better customer experience and decreased employee attrition.
• The Importance of Proper Hiring, Training, Career Path Development, Skilling, and Routing-Discover key factors that result in: customer issues being resolved on first contact, an increase in closed sales, and more satisfied customers.
• Sustained Management: Changing the Game with Genesys iWD-Learn how Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD) can help shorten time to market, lower project risk, provide greater customer retention, and increase functionality.

New advancements in technology, particularly in the area of social media, have changed the way companies and customers interact. The recent power shift to consumers means that marketers must adapt their tactics or risk getting left behind.

This white paper will act as your guide to the new world of marketing, by showing you how analytics can help you sort through the explosion of new data being generated to find unique customer insights.

It also shows you how to get started using predictive tools to improve customer targeting, increase response rates, reduce campaign costs and strengthen your relationship with customers, so you do not get left behind.