FuzeDigital characterizes its customer service solution as social business software that uniquely blends comprehensive multichannel support and online community technologies.
“The Fuze Suite is a blending of SCRM and E2.0 technologies,” Chuck Van Court, president of FuzeDigital, told CRM Buyer. The community knowledge base, search engine capabilities, the new Fuze Social module, and the ability to support all stakeholders with a single system set the Fuze Suite apart.
Leveraging Knowledge and Horsepower
The Fuze Suite enables people to help themselves with search capabilities that find quality content quickly using a patent-pending technology called the “Reputation Engine.” In addition, using a component called “Community Answers,” stakeholders can create public and private communities where subject matter experts can answer questions, allowing stakeholders to help other stakeholders.
“We believe that organizations need to leverage the individual and collective knowledge and horsepower of all their stakeholders to optimize their health and profitability,” Van Court explained. “Smartsourcing is smart and crowdsourcing is dumb.”
By segmenting Fuze Social into three separate components — Community Answers, Community Conversations and Community Conversations — Fuze Digital can optimize each community component as well as the Search Community feature to allow people to search across the knowledge base and Fuze social content, Van Court explained.
A Niche of Their Own
The Fuze Suite makes it easy for customer service representatives to manage feedback and for customers to provide feedback in online forms and custom surveys, Van Court said. In addition to helping to identify issues quickly, this gives customers an outlet for any negative feedback they might have, which helps keep them from broadcasting their issues on social media sites. All of this makes the Fuze Suite a very attractive choice.
Even though the company is not yet as well known as some, “we always do very well when evaluated against our competitors,” Van Court pointed out. “Our customers cross several different industries.”
Compared to other CRM providers, FuzeDigital is not yet a household name, acknowledged Brent Leary, cofounder of CRM Essentials. However, it is a well established company that has been around for a while.
“They have their own little niche,” Leary told CRM Buyer. “They’ve got a pretty good name for themselves.”
Personalized Experience
FuzeDigital’s emphasis on personalizing the experience for the customer is a smart strategy, according to Shep Hyken, creator of The Customer Focus training program.
The ability to provide customers with a personalized experience is an asset, he told CRM Buyer.
“CRM is a great tool to be able to personalize the experience for the customer,” Hyken said, adding that CRM is more than just issue-tracking. “We’re talking about CRM for customer service — and that’s all good.”
Staff should be taught to take advantage of information about customers, Hyken advised, stressing that it is very important to try to capture as much information about the customer as possible.
This will allow a company to segment the market based on past purchases and figure out what a customer will need. They can then create a personal experience for the customer, he explained.
A company should take advantage of customer service to do marketing and sales, he added. If they do not, they are actually doing the customer a disservice.
Companies should not just rely on information, said Hyken. They have to personalize the experience and make it as easy as possible for customers to contact the company via their website.
“The bottom line is that online companies have to be easy to do business with,” he said.
Scalability and Flexible Pricing
Fuze Suite offers month-by-month agreements with price protections and the ability to change user license counts monthly. The modular architecture allows businesses to pay for modules as they are needed, and FuzeDigital does not charge extra for support.
“We are also much more affordable than any of our competitors,” Van Court claimed.
If FuzeDigital recognizes that its product would not be a good fit for a particular business, it will recommend an alternative. Most customers who ultimately choose FuzeDigital find it to be a good fit, Van Court pointed out.
“There are limitations with any product, but nothing of a material nature has ever been brought forward by our customers or prospects,” he noted.
The system has been carefully engineered to scale with any-sized operations by just adding hardware. It can also be run in public and private clouds, noted Van Court.
Keep an Eye on the Future
Although modularity may allow businesses to purchase only what they need, this should not lead them to be too short-sighted. Smaller businesses tend to buy what they need at the moment, Hyken pointed out.
However, they should be more forward in their thinking and keep an eye on the future, he warned. They should not buy a component and replace it. They should instead buy a component and grow into it.
A business needs to cover current customer service needs but should definitely think of the future, Leary concurred. The goal should be to offer proactive service and to build relationships with customers.
When choosing a customer service solution, the best CRM choice will be dictated more by what a business does than by the size of the business, Hyken said. A company should find a vendor that understands its business well enough to make recommendations.
There are certain verticals that some customer service companies focus on — such as financial, healthcare and manufacturing, Leary pointed out.
A business should become familiar with what the vendor focuses on by researching case studies and vendor lists, he advised. Doing enough research beforehand will allow a business to make a smart choice, whether choosing a large, established vendor or a smaller, promising provider like FuzeDigital.
Loading ...
