Moxie Brings Workforce And Customer Collaboration Together

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Moxie Software, which offers social media-based workplace collaboration tools and customer relationship management tools, has come up with a way for the two platforms to work as one.

Spaces by Moxie, available by the end of this month, combines customer support tools such as chat, e-mail, phone, and social media with enterprise collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis, ideation opportunities, and other discussion groups to benefit both business and their customers.

While a number of companies offer social enterprise applications and others offer social media-type CRM solutions--and some offer both--they are separate siloed offerings. Moxie contends it's the first company to merge the apps into what it calls "customer-centric enterprise social software," said Tara Sporrer, the firm's VP of marketing.

[ For more on how Spaces by Moxie compares with its competitors, see Moxie Aligns Enterprise Social And Customer Service. ]

Combining CRM social media and enterprise social media expands the universe of people who can answer questions, contribute ideas, and solve problems. "As an employee, what happens [is that] you know someone within the company knows the answer, but you don't know who that person is. And as a customer you are even further removed," said Sporrer. "But it also works the other way--your customer might have the right answer, but you don't have a way of getting it from them to where it belongs in the enterprise."

Spaces by Moxie can improve customer service by reaching out to the employee community for the right answer, she added. Today, a customer may start with an FAQ page on a Web site and, finding no help there, call a help line. If the contact center agent can't find the answer, the call is forwarded to a supervisor--a system she calls "broken." In Spaces by Moxie, the answer the company comes up with is saved for when the next customer calls with the same problem. "With this platform, the answer is published and becomes part of the knowledge base right there, so that the collaborative intel that was generated isn't lost," Sporrer said.

There are three levels to the Spaces by Moxie platform, according to Nikhil Govindaraj, VP of products for Moxie. The Communications layer includes all the social CRM tools, such as e-mail, phone, chat, and "co-browse," where the customer and agent can view a Web page at the same time. The Collaboration layer includes the enterprise communications tools, such as wikis, blogs, project pages, and so on. A layer between them, called "Spaces Connect," is where the top and bottom layers are joined. It also includes interaction with various existing enterprise apps for managing the enterprise and CRM, such as those from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, or Salesforce.

"We tie these things in so that it all works together and in context," Govindaraj said. "While you are talking with a customer via chat, you can pull the customer's record from Salesforce. It really empowers the front line to have a personalized and tailored communication with the customer."

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