From The President's Desk

Welcome to this month's letter. I hope you had the Memorial Day off and enjoyed the long weekend.

Since the previous letter, some of you emailed me praising our customer service. I appreciate the feedback. When your ticket is closed by the CSR, an automatic email goes out to you with a link to the feedback page. Please fill in that page. Your feedback is very important to me and to the CSR. Our CSRs are rated based on the score they receive from you!

I am happy to share with you that we are celebrating our 10th anniversary this year. Almost 10 years ago, on October of 1992, I started Soffront with a small amount of personal money. Since then we have grown considerably. Today, we have global/domestic offices and more than 500 CRM installations world-wide. We have been profitable and funding our growth very successfully. Many of you have been our customers for years. I would appreciate if you would share your experiences to make this anniversary memorable. Send me an e-mail at manu@soffront.com  

We are planning to launch Soffront User Group (SUG). If you wish to contribute or participate, please email to SUG@soffront.com 

Our latest version 7.0 has been well received by our customers. Almost 70% of our customers have already upgraded to 7.0. Everyone who upgraded have only positive things to say. Upgrading to 7.0 has been a good experience for most of our customers. If you have not upgraded yet, please consider it at your earliest convenience. Our support staff will help you.

Thank you for your time and looking forward to the next month.

Manu Das , President 
manu@soffront.com  

Top

Multi-Channel Contact Center solution

Soffront Contact Center is an IP based contact center that enables you to provide service through multiple channels: 

• Telephone

• Voice chat (voice over IP)

• Web chat

• Email 

With Soffront Contact Center, agents make/receive phone calls using a multi-media computer (connected to the internet) and a headset. Your customers call a regular phone number, as usual, and will not even know that the call is received on a computer! Handle up to 23 incoming calls simultaneously using a single T1 line. Support hundreds of agents with multiple T1 lines. 

If you have already invested in a switch, use Soffront Contact Center in conjunction with the switch based call center. With a little training, your support reps will become significantly more productive using both. Alternatively, consider Soffront Contact Center for an independent call center to augment your traditional one. Either way you get all the benefits at a fraction of the cost of a switch based call center.
 

Top

Soffront CRM Q&A 

Question:  

I need to work on Account and Contact information using my laptop. Can I do that without internet connectivity?

Answer:

Yes. You can do it with the Soffront Laptop solution. Soffront Laptop provides all the functionality that is available through the web-based client. You can

• Create new accounts and contacts

• Assign new leads

• Plan activities

• Create and update opportunities

• Assign tickets

• Escalate issues

• Query the database and run reports

You work on a LAN client that is installed on the laptop. The user interface just resembles the web based interface, to get you up to speed with it rapidly. 

A snapshot of the database and the LAN server will be installed on the laptop. If you choose to, you can go with a lighter version that will reduce the size of the server/database footprint in the laptop.

Top

Using the Business Rules engine effectively 

The Soffront Business Rules engine is an ideal foil along with our sales, marketing, customer support or employee support solution. It offers immense business value by monitoring your business process and generating automatic actions /notifications. Following are some examples of how Business Rules can be used in the Sales, Marketing and Customer Support functions.

Business Rules in Sales

• Re-assign a ‘hot’ new lead, if it has not been acted on for two days. 
  
  

• Send an alert e-mail to the sales manager, if a lead is in the same stage of the sales process, for more than a pre-defined time.

Business Rules in Marketing 

• Stop a campaign at a pre-set date/time or when the targeted results have been achieved. 
  
  

• If the response rate in a tele-marketing campaign is below par, augment it with an automatic email campaign. 
  
  

• Send an automatic email alert to the press /analysts, when a press release is made.

Business Rules in Customer Support

• Escalate a ‘low’ priority ticket to ‘high’ priority, if it has not been resolved for over 72 hours. 
  
  

• Send an alert e-mail to the account manager, if a ‘critical defect’ has not been resolved for over 24 hours. 
  

As you may infer, the possibilities are endless. Derive the most value from your CRM, by deploying Soffront Business Rules.

Top

Upcoming feature - Job Manager

Schedule and run the business rules at specific intervals using the Job Manager. Schedule and run the jobs from a remote location, using your browser. The Job Manager uses Windows NT scheduler technology. 

Soffront Business Rules and Job Manager offer a compelling solution to make the most of your CRM processes and data. 

Top

Question:
How do I synchronize with the main server after local use?

Answer:

You can synchronize using the LAN client installed on the laptop. You need a valid connection to the server to synchronize. You can synchronize when you log into the local network where the server is installed or do it remotely using RAS. Only the changes between the local database and the main database are transmitted over the network.

If there is any change in the database structure, you need to update the database snapshot on the laptop. 

Mobile Tips
1. Want access to the CRM solution through a Palm powered PDA or Pocket PC?
Use Soffront PDA.
2.  Want access to the CRM solution through a cell phone or a WAP browser?
Use Soffront Wireless for WAP.

Top