I have written Moxie before see (Moxie Provides a Social Workspace Through Employees Spaces). Recently I spoke with their CEO, Tom Kelly, about their latest offering. Spaces converges customer communications with employee collaboration into a single offering that I think is a great idea. I have always preferred the term social business to enterprise 2.0 as it conveys both an internal focus and the need to align them. Moxie has taken this a step further with an integration of these domains.
We began with a discussion of enhancements to their customer support capabilities. They can provide call centers with multiple online channel options to regular and expensive phone calls. These include email, chat, communities, and a knowledge base. This will help as firms migrate away from live phone contact to online options for customer support and engagement. These capabilities are not designed to totally replace phone calls, as new communication channels seldom replace old ones. The TV did not replace the radio, simply put it where it was most effective. The same principal operates here.
There are many things now done on the phone can be better handled online, reserving the direct phone contact for when it is really needed and reducing overall operations costs. Recent Harris poll has indicated that more people actually prefer to interact with companies online (60%) than on the phone (53%). I imagine that these numbers will only grow.
The second major effort is the introduction of an internal product fro the enterprise. But this is a product that is integrated with the externally facing one. It offers a way to set up collaborative spaces in a simple manner for a variety of uses. Tom said that they have seen very diverse sets of markets adopt this tool and approach. It is very customer centric. In many cases a customer will call with a question the contact center person cannot answer. Now Moxie offers a variety of ways to get the right answer.
Expert Connect™ enables cross-departmental collaboration for Customer Service and Support, IT, HR and Sales and Marketing to ensure accurate and efficient customer communications across channels - e-mail, community, chat, Knowledgebase and social media. Here is a sample Expert Connect screen.
There is also an Activity Stream App to integrate activity streams into communication channels for faster knowledge sharing and collaboration. Real-time Insight is another feature that enables real-time visibility into issues in the field for faster resolution. The Virtual Response Team automates the creation of Web 2.0 tools (activity feeds, wikis, projects and groups) that bring resources together quickly to collaborate. Finally Click-to-Publish seamlessly publishes content to the Knowledgebase portal reducing the time spent finding the right answer. Here is a sample activity stream screen
It is critical for the success of any social business platform to connect with enterprise apps and Moxie does this with Spaces Connect™, a comprehensive integration framework with secure APIs and pre-built connectors, integrating Spaces by Moxie with applications such as CRM, ERP, Content Management, HR and other 3rd party applications.
This approach puts intelligence, workflow, and integration into the crowdsourcing the answers to customer questions and makes them accessible through the knowledge base for future use. I wish had tools like these when I did a lot of contact center works in the late 90s and early 2000s.