Best Practice Customer Interaction Using Loki Portals

 

Customer Interaction: a critical success factor

 

The service business of the future is completely online with its customers. As a customer, would you rather call a support line or easily do what you need online? And providing great self-service interfaces improves your performance as a provider, reducing support cost. The world’s most successful providers all have excellent self-care. However, the decision to invest in a world class portal can be difficult- the implemetnation takes time and money, and there is always the risk that the end product doesn’t hit the mark. Loki Portals dramatically lowers the cost and risk of offering a world class customer portal.

 

Loki Portals

 

Loki Portals is a complete portals solution framework. Out of the box, it offers an easy-to-customize reference portal based on industry best practices. These best practices include web 2.0 controls to simplify and enhance user experience, automated password reset (via email), and reports on call activity. For easy introduction to the environment, many best practices are implemented around user help: in-line help, Flash multimedia tutorials, and a single help landing page.

 

Presenting Your Look and Feel

 

The customer portal should be one of the most prominent points of interaction between you and your customers. As such, it should reflect your distinctive brand elements and look and feel. It should also tie in with whatever subsystems hold data you want to expose to your customers: CRM, billing, messaging, etc. Loki Portals makes use of the Smarty™ template framework for simple front end customizations and the Loki Enterprise Service Bus for a flexible back end.

 

Visual Device Management

 

The goal of visual device management is to empower customers to configure their IP phone to their own particular liking. The business objective is to improve user experience and reduce calls to support. Loki Portals interfaces directly to the BroadWorks device management infrastructure for simple maintenance and support. Currently, Loki Portals supports Aastra and Polycom, with Cisco to follow.