Electronic customer service live on stage

Neue Flora lends a stage for the novomind Annual Self Service Conference & Services Day 2007
Experts discuss the future of customer communications

E-business industry specialists invited to Dirty Dancing
This is how the latest generation of electronic customer communications will look: the jobs performed by virtual service agents will be more complex, e-shopping and e-mail management systems will be able to interpret the context of customer enquiries more accurately and the lines between the various communication channels will become increasingly indistinct. At the Annual Self Service Conference & Services Day 2007, users and developers of professional e-business solutions came together to exchange notes on the latest trends. The organiser, novomind, even provided the attendees with a real stage specially for the conference: that of the Hamburg musical theatre Neue Flora.
 
Transformation of the Internet into a virtual world is also set to transform e-commerce
Trend researcher Sven Tollmien kicked off the proceedings with a foretaste of Media 3.0., giving examples of how interactive bar counters, holographic avatars and totally virtual changing rooms that showed how the medium Internet is increasingly turning into a virtual world and how the customer is becoming more and more immersed in it. Buying at e-shops will therefore become more and more like a real shopping experience. novomind CTO Peter Wiedekamm outlined his vision of how the online shopping of tomorrow will work. E-shopping systems will be designed to extract from the context of a search request what the customer needs the product for. This will make fully formulated queries possible and so help to keep inappropriate or too many hits to a minimum.
 
Taking the load off service agents
New concepts for the further development of novomind customer communication solutions were key elements in the subsequent presentations. These included faster processing of customer queries by means of efficient indexing and the use of previous replies. This concept is designed to improve the automatic customer service on the one hand and on the other to take some of the load off the staff in the contact centres, even with more complex enquiries. Another example is the proposed linking of CRM systems with customer service tools with the aim of being able to respond more quickly to customer enquiries with relevant product suggestions. Both aspects are important new features in the customer communication software novomind Self Service Suite 6.0, which will be presented at Call Center World 2008.
 
Telephone is still ahead of e-mail
As customers still make far more enquiries by phone than by e-mail, providing the 430,000 telephone agents with electronic support was another central focus. In future, the aim is to make navigation more user-friendly so that customers can obtain the information they seek even faster. New methods were also presented for the mass processing of enquiries arriving by fax and letter.
 
Practical issues set the tone of the specialist conference
Convergence issues and a host of practice-related topics dominated the attendees’ discussions. The experts talked in depth about experiences and trends in the practical application of digital e-business solutions. These included useful tactics for marketplace integration, the standard processing of customer enquiries received by fax, letter, Web or e-mail, as well as case studies from companies operating in various industries and countries.
 
novomind AG: innovative software for professional customer communications
novomind is a software developer in Hamburg and the fastest-growing company in the field of electronic customer communications and mail management. As the leading provider of innovative solutions for digital customer communications, novomind AG provides software for service-oriented and personalised customer dealings. The software not only optimises efficiency in customer administration significantly, it also gives the user a faster return on investment. The portfolio of the Products division includes the novomind Self-Service Suite™. The software package contains all the communication modules necessary for a customer service centre on a central knowledge basis: e-mail management, virtual customer consulting and systems for interactive, real-time communication. The novomind AG Services division implements complex e-business applications. More than 40 major companies have already decided in favour of novomind technology, among them Citibank, Otto, Yello Strom and the German pension institution Deutsche Rentenversicherung Bund. Club Bertelsmann, EnBW and Mexx as well as public-sector users, such as the German Bundestag (parliament) and the German Department of Trade and Industry, have already successfully introduced novomind systems to optimise their customer communications, turnover and PR.

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