Astute Solutions
Power-up Customer Engagement

In today’s fast-paced commoditized marketing atmosphere, the market is becoming more customer-centric, and businesses are enriching their branding efforts. Google and CEB Marketing Leadership Council through their research on connecting B2B customers to brands decoded that for a marketer, the core part of brand building is to create an emotional connect with consumers. The study by the joint-venture found that the customers who are emotionally connected to a brand are twice as likely to purchase a product or service and more likely to defend their purchase decisions. It concludes that customer relationship is a two-way relationship. If an organization doesn’t care about its customers, they won’t reciprocate. With growing market competition, organizations are working towards implementing practices, strategies, and technologies to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, with the goal of improving business relationships with customers, assisting in customer retention and driving sales growth, in short they are fast adopting CRM. The CRM technology is growing quickly and Gartner Research predicts that by the year 2017, CRM will have grown to encompass a world-wide market of approximately 36 Bn dollars. It can be concluded that CRM has become a key to stabilize the dynamic and evolving marketplace, building long-term relationships with customers.

In a classic example of McDonald’s who are serving more than 25 Mn people in the U.S. alone each day, implementing the right CRM solution is of utmost importance. But, their customer satisfaction contact center was quickly outgrowing their CRM system and started lagging in the functionality to meet their evolving business needs prompting them to look for a better alternative. The qualities McDonald’s wanted in their CRM included improved functionality for customer satisfaction, real-time access of customer data via flexible and comprehensive reporting. “Our CRM solution has to work very hard for us,” says Christopher Garrity, Senior Director, Customer Satisfaction, McDonald’s. “Therefore, our vendor selection process was thorough, lengthy, and extensive. We evaluated more than 30 potential vendors and found Astute Solutions to be able to address our problems accurately.”

Astute Solutions software and services were developed to help organizations improve the quality of their customer service interactions while gaining insight into their consumers needs. The firm has over 20 years of experience helping leading consumer brands deliver loyalty-building consumer service. Their CRM, knowledge management, and customer interaction solutions assist companies to enhance their customer understanding and engagement while empowering customers, agents, employees, and partners with access to the right information at the right time. Garrity goes on to say, “We’ve been working with Astute for more than seven years and I truly don’t think of them as a vendor—they are business partner. They didn’t just sell us and walk away. Astute is extremely responsive. They listen to our needs, understand them, and when appropriate, make value-added recommendations for better ways to improve our customer satisfaction strategies.”

Today, we are investing heavily in ways to interact with consumers in an enhanced way be it via social media and mobile devices

Astute’s dedication to adapt and respond to changing regulations, business needs and customer preferences–while capturing the “voice of the customer” insights that drive product and process improvements is what differentiates them. “As the consumer became king, the CRM market was stuck in a business-to-business box. We stepped in to provide consumer care contact centers with a truly innovative CRM software focused on their needs, rather than forcing sales automation tools into customer service roles,” says Joseph M. Sanda, CEO, Astute Solutions.

Astute’s flagship CRM solution, ePowercenter, enables efficient workflows for contact center representatives, and provides a full view of customer interactions across channels. Additional solutions offer intelligent social media management, natural-language based knowledge management, call reason code quality assurance, and rich reporting and analytics tools–all of which can be integrated with ePowerCenter or with a client’s existing CRM and contact center platforms. “Because our business is to help our customers serve their consumers, we have to adapt to technology trends from both the consumer and corporate IT industries’ perspective,” adds Sanda. “Today, we are investing heavily in ways to interact with consumers in an enhanced way be it via social media and mobile devices, while also offering cloud-based services according to the needs of corporate IT groups that can be integrated with their on-premises infrastructure.”

Powering up Businesses

Success in today's market depends on this crucial information, and call centers depend on flexible tools to get the job done. PowerCenter is a consumer response database and tracking system that tracks, logs, and responds to inbound inquiries, comments and complaints while providing online access to product, company, and customer information.

Benefits of PowerCenter include instant access and detailed information about specific products, services, and policies. It also works with a street-level and zip/postal code database to clean, verify, and assist in entering customer addresses and free-form email, formatted email, and web-based transactions for online customer inquiries. PowerCenter integrates with a firm’s existing telephony system to provide useful features as user prompts and screen pop-ups to enable call center agents to view customer history or other important information even before the call is accepted.

PowerCenter also integrates customer communications and routes them to the appropriate person for handling. Meanwhile, the powerful tool also allows firms to manage their inbound emails with intelligent message analysis by leveraging PowerCenter Knowledge Server, a specially designed knowledge base for products, services and company information.

PowerCenter also offers a one-to-one web chat link on a client’s web site to provide customers with immediate answers and maintain customer loyalty.

Listening to the Social Voice

Astute is also foraying towards providing customers with customer preference, updates and feedback on social media from Facebook to Twitter by using natural language processing to bring the most relevant and urgent social interactions to the fore. Astute’s Social Relationship Management product monitors 150 Mn social media sites, blogs, and review pages. Additional capabilities include content, sentiment, influencer, brand, and competitive analysis, customizable workflow automation and escalation, integration with multiple other CRM tools, and extensive reporting options.

"Astute delivers proactive customer care and engagement, social, ecommerce and telephone solutions that increase consumer satisfaction and reduce costs and drive revenue"

“Astute Social makes it much easier to find and engage with customers just as they’re getting ready to order a pizza, so our contact center is becoming a real-time marketing operation,” says Terri Haffey, manager of customer care at Domino’s. “When customers tweet, ‘Who should I order pizza from today?’ we’re able to quickly see and react to that and win the sale.” Astute Social automatically searches for hundreds of Twitter key words and constantly monitors Domino’s Facebook to find posts that need attention that results in Domino’s being able to interact in a faster and efficient manner.

Astute Social works well with the Domino’s CRM tool, ePowerCenter. The compatibility of the two saves time and makes Domino’s more efficient in the contact center. In addition to the 128 percent increase in social traffic handled, Domino’s has also reduced handling time by 53 percent. Social cases are often handled in less than five minutes, instead of the 15 minutes needed when Domino’s managed social cases manually. “Astute Social allows us to hear the social media concerns and intervene quickly making a big impact on long-term customer loyalty,” adds Haffey.

Towards Increasing Customer Satisfaction

With engineered precision, Astute has gone forth and built a unique and fascinating customer engagement software. They make it a point to continuously invest in R&D to keep it afresh with continuous coding and refining and improving ensuring it will remain the smartest software tomorrow also. The company’s engineers, strategists, designers and account managers identify the opportunities, plan the execution, write intelligent code and craft the best user experiences possible—delivering their promise: to help organizations drive revenue, enhance efficiency and build lasting brand loyalty. “All of the consumer-facing industries need to provide consistent and quality service across all channels, participate in social conversations to mitigate risks, which often reveal themselves in the social realm, and they need to empower call-center agents—including work-at-home agents—with the tools they need to deliver fast, accurate answers. Astute delivers proactive customer care and engagement, social, ecommerce and telephone solutions that increase consumer satisfaction and reduce costs and drive revenue for the business,” concludes Sanda.