Congratulations go out to Bold Software Customer Jim Allen, founder and CEO of The Appliance Zone. The online retailer of major household appliance parts was named to the prestigious Inc. 500 list as the 39th fastest growing company overall in the U.S with a whopping 5,535% growth rate over the past three years. For more than 30 years, Inc.’s list has served as evidence of the significant accomplishments of business enterprises.

We profiled Appliance Zone in this case study about how they managed their rapid growth using BoldCCM. We congratulate Jim and his hard-working team on this accomplishment and wish them much success as they move forward!

Customer service should be a strategy that positively impacts and feeds into your overall strategic plan. Learn to take it to the next level at the International Customer Service Association Conference, September 19-22, 2010 at the Omni Hotel at the CNN Center in Atlanta, Georgia. You have until July 31 to take advantage of early bird pricing and find out about “The Power of Service.”

While you’re at ICSA, be sure to catch Rick Trefzger, COO of IS3/STOPzilla and Steve Castro-Miller, CEO of Bold Software as they present “CHATzilla: Live Chat’s Power over the Support Beast – A Success Story from iS3″ on September 20, at 10:30 a.m.

During this presentation you’ll understand how iS3, makers of STOPzilla, differentiated themselves in the fast-paced battle to stay ahead of malicious spyware programmers while their front line support personnel faced intense, day-to-day demands. Within this hyper-competitive market, iS3 had to differentiate themselves by providing a superior customer experience. Live chat has powered-up the company’s care organization while simultaneously reducing costs. In just 45 days the company was delighting thousands of customers a week by responding in real time to support issues via the live chat channel. After this case study, bolstered by leading industry research, you’ll be ready to determine if live chat is a good solution for your company and what steps are required to provide it and start delivering great service.

Managing email inquiries is a problem many companies simply don’t realize they have. An inability to manage inbound emails causes organizations to miss sales opportunities and deliver poor service to existing customers. How many inbound email messages does your company get daily and what is your response time?

One article stated that “…poor email handling often affects more than just the customer directly involved; in this era of rapid-fire electronic communication and the blog, perturbed customers have made a sport of sharing with the world their negative service experiences.” Unfortunately, the 51% of companies not responding to customer service inquiries that we noted here, is on a steady decline. A follow-up study, again by Hornstein Associates, reported that in 2009, just 45% of companies responded to customer service inquiries within 24 hours.

Bold Software customers effectively utilizing Email Management are able to simply and effectively route emails into the correct workflow. This post illustrates two typical customers who use Email Management in their daily operations.

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Our live chat white paper library has grown considerably in the last 18 months and this post will pick the three “best” ones. “Best”, for this purpose, is defined as follows:

- Ability for the content to impact a live chat implementation in a measurable way.

- Absence of fluff. [We’ve all downloaded white papers that don’t contain anything specific - just grandiose statements of superiority.]

- Real data. [The antithesis of the previous criterion.]

- Cross vertical applicability. [Live chat is in use across industries so our aim here is to provide widely relevant information.]

With these criteria in mind, our Three Best Live Chat White Papers are…

Live Chat Performance Benchmark Report
This report is based on the summative data across our entire customer base. It provides a definitive guide allowing customers to measure their performance against customer medians.

Live Chat Effectiveness Primary Research Report
Fielded a year ago, this report looks at chat from the shopper’s perspective. What it shows is that live chat’s role in the sales cycle cannot be denied. A new version of this report – an even more robust version – is currently underway. Familiarizing oneself with the inaugural report is a pre-requisite to the next version.

Abt Case Study
There are dozens of other choices we considered for this last slot but we ultimately decided that Abt’s real and impressive results were worthy of it. This electronics retailer uses live chat to increase sales, boosts up-sells, and improve customer service. Access to this case study is provided automatically when you download white paper #2 above.

As the methods by which website owners communicate with their visitors have grown, we became increasingly aware that our flagship product name, “BoldChat” was only partially descriptive of the technologies we sell and our customers use.  But that’s only one reason we chose to launch BoldCCM as a better way to communicate our suite offerings which integrate live chat, click-to-call, email management, and remote control capabilities.

The second reason came from macro-market forces which continue to redefine how businesses interact with their customers.  The dialogue generally revolves around convergence, integration, and single contact resolution (for both sales and support).  We thought, therefore, that a new name – one that embraced this holistic view of customer interaction – was needed.  BoldCCM was born.

CCM stands for:

Customer
Communication
Management

Two product offerings bear this name which means they both offer users the ability to interact with website visitors in multiple ways.  You can learn more about these products and the benefits of integrated website communication management by following the link.

For months now, the economy has challenged businesses of all sizes to pull out every cliché they can muster. It seems every marketing department is chasing “low-hanging fruit” while business development professionals are busy with “synergistic win-win relationships.”

Meanwhile, IT departments are looking for “best practices” that will “increase efficiency” while executive teams are encouraging “paradigm shifting organizational changes.”

Though it may be counterintuitive, we think that enterprise-sized e-tailers can save money by thinking inside the box. Here’s what we mean:

Consolidate Communications: We know from our own proprietary research that a website visitor’s communication technology preference is dependent upon where they are in the buying process. In a given moment then, there are people on your site who want to chat with you, initiate a click to call with you, email you, be actively assisted, or have no communication with you at all. Putting each of these communication methods into its own box and under its own management is wasteful. Enterprises should consolidate all of these methods under one umbrella with the same interface and staff. We recently launched an integrated suite to accomplish just that. Learn more about BoldCCM.

Get in the Driver’s Seat: Taking control over your own live chat, click-to-call and email management solution is valuable to an enterprise for two reasons. First, it saves money in the short-run because it avoids costly fees associated with ongoing professional services engagements. Secondly, it enables companies to build intellectual capital around an increasingly important competency. We recommend, at least, that firms develop a working knowledge of live chat reporting metrics and proactive invitation logic.

One Chat Resolution: Many enterprises who utilize live chat for support should consider an active co-browsing or full remote control capability. If your product line is complicated or if you sell computer-related items, the ability to actively view and interact with a target customer’s PC could allow you to resolve their buying or support issue in one session. This not only provides a positive experience for the customer, but avoids costly escalations.

Live chat helps convert browsers into repeat online buyers, according to an article published today in eMarketer, a leading technology research website.

Using proprietary research from Bold Software, eMarketer found live chat “very helpful” for e-commerce sites. In fact, live chat was the preferred customer service option for questions about order status, promotions, shipping or cheaper services, the article said.

Live chat is valuable for “inducing shoppers to make a purchase and getting those purchasers to return to the site,” eMarketer noted.

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How quickly do you respond to sales inquiries that arrive via email? How about support issues? Stop for a minute and really think about your answer to these questions. Can you quantify them? If phrases like, “pretty fast” and “we’re not so bad” are the best you can do, then you’re like most companies.

In fact, you might be better than most. A study of small and medium-sized North American companies revealed that 51% of businesses never responded to emails with high-value purchase intent. A more recent study by Hornstein Associates shows a steady decline in customer service response rates since 2002. In 2007, only 33% of companies responded to emails sent to customer service within 24 hours, down almost half from a high of 63% in 2002.

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Are you on Twitter?

Oprah is. President Barack Obama is. Martha Stewart is. Same with Shaquille O’Neal and John Mayer. Zappos.com CEO, Tony Hseih, entrepreneur Mark Cuban and AOL co-founder, Steve Case are all tweeting away too… and that’s barely scratching the surface of the popular microblogging service’s users.

But Twitter isn’t just for the rich, famous and successful. There are 6 million users currently signed up with the service and, according to predictions by eMarketer, that number could double by the end of 2009.

Twitter is also not just for individuals. More and more businesses are tweeting, to varying degrees of success. Should your business jump on the Twitter bandwagon? Signing up for an account may seem simple enough (it’s easy and free), but the question I often hear is “then what?”

Here are a few tips for navigating the Twitter landscape as a business:

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Under tight economic conditions, why would any company give up business to their competitors? There are several perfectly rational (and economically sound) reasons. Here are a few:

1. If your product can be used a particular way, but really shouldn’t be. Our BoldMail solution is extremely powerful and our customers use it with tangible benefits to their business. However, it is a tool intended for the management of inbound emails. We turn away prospects who want to use it as an outbound email marketing solution. It can be used this way, but because it wasn’t designed to be, it would ultimately fail to satisfy them. To see how BoldMail works, check out this short video.
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