Its undoubtedly challenging to select the right vendor for any software needed at work and its no different task in selecting a customer support software.
Its a daunting chore to get the checklist ready to evaluate different software in the market. Its good to have it readymade, any "Nos"?
Here you go, we SupportCenter Plus offer you an exhaustive list of important features to look at while selecting a customer support software...when the checklist is ready all you have to do is to just cross-verify if the parameters are present in your short-listed products.
SupportCenterPlus Evaluation Guide
Impress your manager with quick analysis and suggestion.
Happy Support!
Team SupportCenter Plus
Calling 26444444….(Local Yellowpages)
Tring… Tring..Tring..
Hi Mr.Sylvian, What can I do for you?
Boom…I was surprised to hear my name on the other side and literally forgot what I was looking for. And then I came back to my feet and asked for the local pizza delivery number. It was a wonderful experience and gave a positive impact on the Yellow Pages service.
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) plays a very important role in supporting your customers. It is defined as the technology of linking of computers and telecom equipment to answer calls, to pull out information from the database based on the phone numbers and even route calls to different people in some cases.
A study by AT&T says that 27% of the customers, who don’t get an answer from the toll free number buy elsewhere or drop the idea of buying the service. It’s better to have computer telephony in such cases. Computer Telephony gives a profound positive effect on the customers and also gives a ‘wow’ experience to the customers. In the modern day business, you are not required to satisfy your customers, but you are required ‘wow’ them every time.
The major applications that a CTI can provide you is
1. Call Answering
2. Call Routing
3. Pulling out customer data from the Data Base
4. Interactive Voice Response ( IVR)
Think about this scenario, you are in customer support and you have an annoyed customer, who has mailed you 5 or 6 times that day. He is now calling you on the phone; you pick up and answer him with utmost sincerity, giving out his latest problems and possible solutions. I assure you, you are going to win him forever.
Now for the interesting part, in the next major release SupportCenter Plus 7.5, we are introducing CTI Integration. It will tightly integrate with the Accounts and Contact management module in order to give you data about the customer. We are starting up with Asterix PBX and Telephone Platform (Open Source) initially and will support Avaya, the market leader in Q2. Now that’s something interesting cooking up for you in the SupportCenter Plus kitchen.
As our ManageEngine Brand is leaping ahead in the IT Management space, the ManageEngine team has taken a decision to change their support email addresses in synchronization with the brand name. So now on the Support email address for SupportCenter Plus would be supportcenterplus-support@manageengine.com
The previous support email address support@supportcenterplus.com is still active and our support team will continue to serve the mails received in that mail address. But we request you to add our new mail address to your mail client to prevent the loss of emails (as our reply address would be the new mail address). We have received some complaints from customers on this issue and we apologize if any inconvenience caused by the email address change. Please support us in this change and help us to support you better.
We are preparing for a wonderful 2009 with new features, strong enhancements to the existing features and a lottttttttt ( I am not exaggerating ) of changes. We like your participation in this development process so that we can bring out features , which will help you to help your customers, better.
Join us for Forum Discussion on Time Sheet Module here and on Customer Portal Enhancement here.
Questions are the life line of any support team. The more the questions asked, the better the customer support becomes. Our customer support has become better by your queries. We thank you for it.
In making it even better, we have tried to put a collection of frequently asked questions and answers about Supportcenter Plus. This will actually help people to install the product easily and troubleshoot some basic issues.
Here is the link
http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/support-center/faq.html
We would be happy to have your feedbacks on the same and mail your suggestions to supportcenterplus-support@manageengine.com
So here is the Main Course for SupportCenter Plus 7012. There were lot of queries from our customers on one particular integration. Yes, finally SupportCenter Plus will have Active Directory Integration from 7012.
Active Directory Integration:
Active Directiory Integration is important for a Customer Support Rep because it will allow him to log on through his Active Directory authentication and is also more secured than the usual login procedure. SupportCenter Plus will support the following features regarding AD Authentication,
1. Importing Active Directory Contact Details to SupportCenter Plus.
2. Automatic Synchronization with Active Directory in order to track changes.
3. Enabling and disabling logins for Active Directory users in SupportCenter Plus.
How to enable it in SupportCenter Plus?
1. Try to identify the two new icons in the Admin Page ( Refer Screen Shot). The Windows Domain Tab will allow you to add a new windows domain to SupportCenter Plus.
2. The Active Directory Tab will allow you to import users from Active Directory, enable active directory authentication and also specify the synchronization period.
3. The logins for the added Support Staff can be enabled in Support Rep Tab in the Admin Page. The logins can be combined with relevant roles.
Of Course there are some limitations with respect to AD Integration like the Single Sign On feature, but we are intended to provide this enhancement in one of the upcoming releases.Active Directory Integration will be one of the nicest additions to your Support because it will help in better utilization and also increase the security in login authentication.
Hope my blog post helped you in configuring the AD Integration.
Download the latest version of SupportCenter Plus Here for enabling these features. We had the starters, Main course and of course there should be a Dessert. Wait for the Hot on the Plate - III, untill its Sylvian Signing Off.
P.S: Feel free to buzz our support team at support@supportcenterplus if you have any problems in updating to the latest release.
I am not here to give you release updates and issue fixes, but talk to you about some nice features that have come up in the recent release of SupportCenter Plus - 7012. Of course, it's a follow up from What's Cooking Post.
First things first, Canned Responses are officially released in 7012. To know more about it, check my What's Cooking post here. I am going to talk two other simple features in this post.
Email Signatures:
We had some of our customers worried about typing the Email Signatures every time they type a reply. Our Internal customers - I mean the Support Staff of ManageEngine were the most demanding. We have come up with the option of adding Email Signatures to your replies.
To enable it, click on the Personalize tab in the top right, and add the signature on to the system. Check the Screen shot for better understanding.
Notifications to Account Managers & Primary Contacts:
This was one of the those features, which was asked by some of the customers. There was no particular way for the Account Manager and the Primary Contact of the customer to track the request threads, because there were no specific notifications given to them whenever there is a change in the request.
By Account Manager, we mean the person who manages a set of particular customers (clients) in your company and by Primary Contact we mean the person from your customer's company, who can view all the requests of his account.
Now SupportCenter Plus has come up with the notification option, by which notifications can be configured for Account Manager and Primary Contacts. Check the screen shot for better understanding.
Download the latest version of SupportCenter Plus here to enable these features....
Well, thats good for the starters, wait for the main course in Hot on the Plate - II for something special...
Gmail calls it 'Emails for the truly lazy'.
Nope, don't worry we are not starting an email service. We are just introducing Canned Responses feature in SupportCenter Plus. There are innumerous support questions which bog your support team daily. Although, its their primary job to reply to those queries but it's one of the most boring,tough and costly job to provide answers for repeated queries.
Reducing the response time in repeated queries and commonly asked questions will actually reduce the support costs considerably. Canned Responses are the best solution for this problem.
The Canned Responses feature in SupportCenter Plus will help you to add,manage and share predefined replies. It allows you add different variables like the name, request id , categories and all the other possible variables related to the request.
The responses you create can be made private or public according to your convenience. The public option will allow you to share the canned responses with the other support staff. Canned Responses can be accessed from the request view page and even new canned replies can be made from the same.
Canned Responses provide a personal touch and it helps you to customize your replies in a better way. The main advantages are the reduction of response times and savings in support costs.
That's one of the tasty additions that's being cooked for you by the Chefs in SupportCenter Development Team. Keep looking at this space to know more on What's cooking in SupportCenter Development Team.
From today, with the latest edition of SupportCenter Plus, we join the wonderful people of Italy ( like the above), to speak Italian. We will help the Italian companies to support their people in their own language. Italy, it's a privilege for us.
For more information, please visit
http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/support-center/sp-readme-7.html
and to download the latest version
http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/support-center/download.html
P.S: I hope you can identify the people on the pictures but anyways I will introduce them, from left to right - Marco Polo, Roberto Baggio,Leonardo Da Vinci, Michael Angelo and Monica Bellucci.
Si Parla Italiano - We Speak Italian.
For the past few days, ManageEngine blogs are full with product release and hotf ix posts. So we thought, Why not release something from SupportCenter Plus too... Common Guys, our developers are also working (!$@#&!). Just Kidding folks.This is actually one of the long waiting upgrades for SupportCenter Plus.
SupportCenter Plus is ready with the latest and the most awaited update of 7008. We had a whole lot of requests, issues from the customers with regards to this service pack. Some of the important enhancements in the current release are
1. Multiple Contracts can be created for the same account,based on products.
2. You can make the request conversations private or public. This gives you the flexibility for the support staff to forward a request to another staff and get his opinions on it.
3. With the 7008 upgrade, you can make the solutions viewable for the non-login users and contacts without accounts.
We have also fixed some important issues raised by the users. For a detailed description of the enhancements and fixed issues, check out the read me file @
http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/support-center/sp-readme-7.html
To download the service pack,
http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/support-center/service-packs.html
Awaiting your valuable bouquets and brickbats....
And Hastalavista Folks, wait for the upcoming upgrades in Q4 2008. We have some interesting things coming up.
September 8th was the day on which Michael Angelo’s David, the eternal masterpiece of the sculptor unveiled. September 8th will be the day on which ManageEngine starts its journey in to the realms of Europe.
ManageEngine is organizing its biggest road show yet in Europe starting from Denmark. It will travel through the IT valleys of Sweden, France, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Poland and complete its journey in UK on October 3rd. The road show will be a platform for the Customers, Resellers and Users to know more about ME. This is one of the path breaking initiatives taken by the ME Team to stay in tune to the customers’ expectations.
We officially invite all those admirable users of ManageEngine and SupportCenter Plus in Europe to participate in our road show and support us with your suggestions, feed backs etc.,
For more Info on the Dates - http://manageengine.adventnet.com/euroroadshow/agenda.html
For more Info on the Speakers - http://manageengine.adventnet.com/euroroadshow/speakers.html
For registrations - http://manageengine.adventnet.com/euroroadshow/registration.html
Get ready to be part of ManageEngine’s Masterpiece.
