Judging from questions posed on CNBC
this morning, few understand what Silk really does.
Some background follows for those who are interested.
Today, companies must provide a customer-centric experience that extends across both the physical and online worlds. Silknet puts customers at the center of the corporate workflow, overcoming artificial distinctions among sales, service, accounting, and other departments. With Silknet eBusiness System, customers can interact as effectively on the Web or through email as they do over the phone or in person and can choose different channels for different activities. This is very important since the telephone is not going away just because the Web is here!
Here is an excerpt from SILK's Crossroads 2000 A-List Award, which recognizes the best newly proven products and services for enterprise computing:
"Silknet eBusiness System users, be they large brick-and-mortar organizations or burgeoning Internet start-ups, share a common vision of a new kind of customer experience. In this vision, customers are in the driver's seat, empowered to help themselves effectively online, interacting with a company when and how they choose, moving seamlessly between departments and touch points. Silknet eBusiness System users are building toward this future with a new management attitude, one willing to rearchitect the work process around an online customer armed with knowledge.
Early users of Silknet eBusiness System are already reaping dividends from this new philosophy and their use of the Silknet product. One user, a pioneer of online service, has successfully diverted 25% of the volume on the call center to the Web. With a customer base of half a million, a quarter of whom are on the site at any given time, this company has improved the quality of the customer experience while substantially reducing costs. Another Silknet user has seen even more impressive results in reducing the volume in the call center. Today, eight solutions are delivered via the Web for every one phone call.
Trying to synchronize inputs from all the touch points is a particularly ambitious goal for brick-and-mortar companies because it touches every component of an established workflow. Even so, Silknet eBusiness System is delivering early results. One Silknet user needed a way to grow without adding staff. As it was, this organization had 600 help desk agents, all of whom had to be proficient in English and French. The company was hiring 50?100 new call center agents per month and desperately needed to offload some of this volume to the Web. The nature of support challenge in this case is to reduce the number of contacts per customer per month. The first month alone saw a reduction of 10% in contacts per customer, an excellent first step in achieving the ultimate goal of handling 75-80% of help desk inquiries on the Web.
Customers note that Silknet eBusiness System is unusually stable for a young product. The product comes with a capable out-of-the box process model for case management, and object-oriented programmers will find the business rules to be easily modifiable. Integration with Web sites and legacy customer service systems has been relatively straightforward."
(for more info on the Crossroads A-List Award program: www.crossroads-osa.com) |
