CRM (customer relationship management) isn’t a bad word...or series of words

Frankly, there are some companies out there that make good products that will make our lives easier. Here is the first IThell.com Halo Award winner....and tomorrow we’ll look at two other standout products.

October 25, 2000

by Eric Svetcov

I spent the day at the CRM expo in San Francisco yesterday and came away with a few clearly superior products of the show....here is the first of those products, a product that might keep some of our most clueless users from bothering us with more of their inane questions.

iCommunicate.net - the first IThell.com Halo Award winner!

Without a doubt, this is the winner as the coolest (and most helpful) new product of the expo and is the first product to be awarded the Halo Award for providing a solution that can truly help folks in IT by making it easier than ever before to cost-effectively manage customers, customer solutions and resolve customer problems. iCommunicate.net is a web based, out sourced solution (ASP) for CRM with a tremendous feature set and a great pricing model.

What does iCommunicate.net provide? According to their own press release, “The iCommunicate platform enables organizations to now offer live chat, two-way messaging, self-service/self-help, knowledgebase access, and comprehensive case management with no hardware, software or technical expertise required.”

In practice when a person has a problem, they will select “help” on your web site (intranet for internal customers or internet for external customers). This will give them an option for self help (knowledge base), an option to submit a request via e-mail, an option to chat (text) live with a customer service rep (or help desk) and lastly, an option to call the support center (help desk).

During this entire process, their case will be tracked by the iCommunicate system and the system will continuously learn about the customer. Should the customer resort to a call, the help desk/customer support person taking the call will have a fairly good idea of what is going on and hopefully a good plan of action to resolve the issue.

The best part of all this is the cost. This is a full-blown Customer Support package with a little price - 25 cents/case or $200/month for each customer service representative. This is cheap when compared to the cost of implementing a solution of this magnitude using a traditional, server based in house solution. Let’s analyze the costs:

The pricing almost doesn’t seem fair. For a small internal IT group at a 50-100 person company that gets 10 cases per day, they get all this functionality for $2.50/day or around $50/month. An organization would probably need to get more than 500 cases/day, before even the least expensive in-house solution would make sense....and at that volume, the cheapest solution probably wouldn’t be robust enough.

There is a point where this isn’t nearly as effective, though. If you are able to integrate your sales, customer support and finance applications all together, there would be a value that might make an in house solution truly effective.

Until you can do that, iCommunicate.net is out there to help you provide the level of support you and your customers desire. I highly recommend that if you are at all unhappy with your help desk or customer support system to check out iCommunicate.net.

Tomorrow we will discuss two other standout products from CRM Expo 2000.

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