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Dovetail Blog

Impact of Pricing on the Purchase Decision

October 21, 2010 We here at Dovetail have debated the impact of pricing on the decision making process for years. Recently, due to the current recession, some customers have deferred any decisions awaiting better times. Denis Pombriant addressed the impact of pricing on the purchase decision in a recent blog post titled The Subscription Economy. In it, he suggests that companies whose products aren’t being purchased might not be meeting the biggest feature need of the prospect – payment terms. He goes on to say that during these tough economic times, “finding creative ways to finance a buy may make all the difference.” Budgetary constraints have certainly contributed to the popularity of on-demand pricing models, or pay as you go. But many companies, while looking for ways to reduce their up-front investment, aren’t ready to move their data outside of their four walls.…

Social Media Policies – What’s a Company To Do?

October 20, 2010 By now, we all know that social media usage is exploding, no matter how you measure it. Traffic on social media sites is growing by triple digits and the amount of time people are spending on social media sites has grown by 82% according to Nielsen. For more stats, here's just one site that gives you an idea of the exploding growth. This exploding growth isn’t just happening outside of the workplace. A recent blog post from Forbes cited a new study from Trend Micro that shows a large increase in the usage of social networks while in the office and on the clock. The increased usage of social media in the workplace has put companies in a quandary – many don’t have a social media policy or if they do, they aren’t doing a good job of monitoring compliance.…

Great vs Bad Customer Service, and Technology Could Help

October 13, 2010 I have written a number of times about how good technology doesn’t ensure good customer service. If companies don’t put into place good policies or give their employees the ability to solve customer problems, technology can’t overcome that. Well, it can also be true that technology can “help” ensure good customer service. I say help because it doesn’t guarantee it, it just increases the likelihood of success. I think many of us have had experiences where we are talking to customer service or technical support, and it turns out that the agent doesn’t have all the information he/she needs to assist you. They either have to transfer you to a different department or put you on hold for a long time while they try to track down the information from a different department. I have experienced this not once, but…

Workflow Configuration with Dovetail CRM

September 27, 2010 Chad made a great post about integrating with Dovetail CRM the other day.  He touched on creating event rules and I wanted to show how you can use Dovetail CRM to configure common workflow tasks.  We see the following scenario a lot in the HR space:  when a new employee joins the company, there are usually a number of related tasks the company needs to perform.  For example, they might need to create an email account, assign a computer and configure domain permissions for the new employee.  I'm going to show how Dovetail CRM can automatically create child cases related to a parent case to automate the process of entering the tasks into the system.   When we're finished, we'll want the following statement to be true:   When a case           is created          …

Another Dovetail CRM integration story…

August 26, 2010 This is part two of a two-part series on integrating Dovetail CRM with Telligent Enterprise.  If you haven’t already, you might want to check out the first post in the series after you’re done reading this post.   In this post I will talk about the second integration scenario laid out in the previous post. I won’t get into all the nitty-gritty detail (line-by-line of code), but I’ll post a general step-by-step tour of integrating Telligent Enterprise with Dovetail CRM.   Let’s review the second scenario from my previous blog post: When someone mentions a case in Telligent Enterprise, log an internal note to the case in Dovetail CRM so that agents can see when the case is being discussed by coworkers.     Tracking Mentions of a Case in the Case History   In this scenario, I want to keep Dovetail CRM in sync…

A Dovetail CRM integration story…

August 25, 2010 Recently I was investigating various ways of integrating our Dovetail CRM product with the Telligent Enterprise collaboration software.  Telligent Enterprise is a tool that allows people within organizations to collaborate and share information and knowledge.  It has wikis, blogs, forums, and even social media-like features (imagine a Twitter + Facebook hybrid, but for employees inside your organization). I liked the thought of customer service agents and managers collaborating on cases together. I thought that I would try to bring these two tools together.  I imagined two simple scenarios: Alerting coworkers about new cases: When a case is created in Dovetail CRM, post a activity message to Telligent Enterprise.  Activity messages are somewhat like “tweets” on Twitter. Link discussions about cases to the case itself: When someone mentions a case in Telligent Enterprise, log an internal note to the case in…

We Provide Superior Customer Service! So What, Don’t All Vendors Say That?

August 20, 2010 We are in the process of re-designing our website. One of the great qualities of our company we wanted to highlight in our new website is our commitment to our customers, and how we truly do provide Superior Customer Service. It has been our highest priority since the inception of the company. We understand how the customer service process works and we incorporate this knowledge and experience into our own software, process, and structure when supporting our customers. In a recent independent survey of our customer base, 100% of the respondents described themselves as: Dovetail Software "champions" Likely to recommend us to others Likely to repurchase Very satisfied with the product and the company So we are proud of our Customer Service. But here’s our dilemma. Check out the other software vendors. Probably every one of them says they provide…

Great vs Bad Customer Service, and Technology had Nothing to do with It

August 4, 2010 This past week I experienced both a great customer service experience and a poor customer service experience. As I stopped to think about both of these, something hit me; the experiences had nothing to do with the technology used by either company. We read everywhere about how important Social CRM is going to be to providing good customer service, but in reality, Social CRM will be only as good as the company’s policy with dealing with customers is. Let me elaborate. Two recent blog posts start down the path to making my point, but don’t completely get there. First, in his blog post, Let's Call a Spade a Spade, Esteban Kolsky speaks towards the distinction between Social Media and Social CRM. In his post, he points out that: “Social Media is about tools and tactics, you can never set a…

Why is Dovetail better? Ask our Customers

July 4, 2010 We at Dovetail Software are in business to make money like other CRM vendors, but I think our approach to generating revenue is different than our competitors. Our philosophy is to take care of the customers and their success will ultimately enable us to maximize our revenue over the long haul. To this end we often provide free consulting to our customers or we might blog about customizations or solutions that might benefit our customers. We just completed a customer installation and another example of this was cited by our newest customer. Since we can’t announce this sale yet, I can’t name individuals, but you can still see what makes Dovetail different. The customer was talking to our installer at their site and said to him: “I can look at your blogging and tell you value your customers and customer…

Ever Wonder What Happens to Your Customer Surveys

June 23, 2010 I don’t know about you, but I would prefer a provider not pretend they care about what you have to say as opposed to claiming they care, and then don’t follow thru. We are conditioned to providers not doing anything after the purchase such that we don’t give it much thought when they don’t. More often than not, I don’t respond to providers’ requests for a survey response, but sometimes, because they have a great way of asking for it, or something really good or bad happened, I do respond. So now the provider has raised the bar, especially when they ask, “Can somebody follow-up with you if they have additional questions?” or “Would you like someone to follow-up with you?” And people remember ….I remember that I had an issue at the Ritz-Carlton, they provided a follow-up survey, I…