Customer interaction

Customers demands are increasing with the rapid onset of technological innovation.
They have already had great customer experiences with market leaders, and have
seen first-hand what great customer experience looks like. One thing they know for
certain – a company that makes them feel special is a company they should be
investing their hard-earned money in. And, the best way to gain a loyal customer is
by having awesome customer interactions and build longlasting relationships with
them.
For example, if your customer service representatives are rude to the customer, they
will surely be unhappy with your customer service. And, if you suddenly realized your
employees are not delighting customers, you should focus your efforts on finding out
the reason behind the problem. No one wants to be rude or perform poorly – they
are just unable to do so with whatever they have at their disposal.

Definition of Customer Interaction

This is the most basic form of communication between the company and the
customer. Every single interaction is another opportunity for your business to delight
customers and retain them.

Types of Customers
There are four types of customers you are likely to encounter:

 Existing Customers: the ones who you already know and are actively
serving.
 New Customers: the ones who have not yet invested, but are extremely
likely to do so .
 Past Customers: the ones who have discontinued doing business with you.
 Prospective Customers: these are your future customers.

Types of Customer Interactions

Great! So there are 4 types of customers. With them, you can essentially have 4
types of customer interactions:
 General Interactions: These are usual interactions with your business. For
example, checking your cell phone balance or enquiring about your latest
products.
 Predictable Interactions: These interactions are predictable and can
happen from time to time, thus making them easy to plan for in advance.
For example, when an insurance policy holder calls the company for the
very first time to enquire about their claims process.
 Unpredictable Interactions: These interactions, as the name implies, are
unpredictable in nature and can’t be planned in advance. For example, if
the company’s website goes down during a transaction or the server
presents an error.
  Unwanted Interactions: These interactons have the potential to damage a
company’s reputable, and thus, are unwanted. An interesting thing to note
is that these customers here are highly engaged, so ignoring them is not
an option. For example, when a telecom operator charges a customer for a
value added service he didn’t opt for.

Customer Interaction Life Cycle

The Customer Interaction Life Cycle is a pattern of behavior that is used to interact
with customers in an interaction. There are 5 stages in the customer interaction
lifecycle:
1. Greeting
2. Understanding
3. Agreeing
4. Solving
5. Closing
Importance of Customer Interactions

Customer service has always been considered a reactive process. Customers

contact a company when something goes wrong, and the company solves the
customer’s problem. However, it has changed more to a proactive role with the
introduction of social media and other platforms. It is a part of the entire customer
experience, not the entire experience itself.
Moreover, a customer who receives a bad customer service experience will spread
negative word of mouth reviews about the company to his friends and family.
According to American Express 2012 Global Customer Service Barometer, Consumers
are 2x more likely to share their bad customer service experiences than they are to
talk about positive experiences.
However, if such an event does occur, interacting with the customer is the best way
to identify what is causing the problem and solve it immediately.

Skills for Customer Interaction Management

When’s the last time you talked to a customer service representative and were
amazed with his relationship building skills? Not too many, I presume. People often
ask for the right set of skills for customer interaction management, or whether any
such set of skills even exist.

Although customer service is pretty challenging to take up as a full-time profession,

there are a few pointers that can help you in managing customers effectively:

 Be empathetic with your customers and sympathize with them.

 Don’t focus on the negative, focus on the positive.
 Be Attentive, friendly and listen to what your customers are saying.
 Know what you’re dealing with, in terms of the product & technology.
 Be patient and calm.
 Learn from every single customer you deal with.

Definition of Customer Interaction Management (CIM)

Customer interaction management is the process followed by companies to interact
with its customers. A customer interaction management solution is a software or
system that facilitates the interaction between the company and its customers. It is
also designed to help managers handle teams much better for maximum efficiency
and performance.
Difference between Customer Interaction Management (CIM) and Customer
Relationship Management (CRM)
A great analogy to illustrate the difference between CIM and CRM is to think of your
company’s customer interaction management as a waiter interacting with customers
at a restaurant. Although he is the most front-facing employee who interacts with the
customer, the real brains behind the restaurant is the customer order tracking
system – or in this case, the CRM. CIM is the contact center industry’s answer to a
CRM, and manages customer data during the entire customer journey.

Database management

database management
system (DBMS)

Posted by: Margaret Rouse

WhatIs.com

Contributor(s): Craig S. Mullins, Simon Christiansen

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A database management system (DBMS) is system software for
creating and managing databases. A DBMS makes it possible for
end users to create, read, update and delete data in a database.
The DBMS essentially serves as an interface between the database
and end users or application programs, ensuring that data is
consistently organized and remains easily accessible.

The DBMS manages three important things: the data, the database
engine that allows data to be accessed, locked and modified, and
the database schema, which defines the database's logical
structure. These three foundational elements help provide
concurrency, security, data integrity and uniform administration
procedures. Typical database administration tasks supported by the
DBMS include change management, performance
monitoring/tuning and backup and recovery. Many database
management systems are also responsible for automated rollbacks,
restarts and recovery as well as the logging and auditing of activity
in databases.

The DBMS is perhaps most useful for providing a centralized view

of data that can be accessed by multiple users, from multiple
locations, in a controlled manner. A DBMS can limit what data the
end user sees, as well as how that end user can view the data,
providing many views of a single database schema. End users and
software programs are free from having to understand where the
data is physically located or on what type of storage media it
resides because the DBMS handles all requests.

The DBMS can offer both logical and physical data independence.
That means it can protect users and applications from needing to
know where data is stored or having to be concerned about
changes to the physical structure of data (storage and hardware).
As long as programs use the application programming interface
(API) for the database that is provided by the DBMS, developers
won't have to modify programs just because changes have been
made to the database.

In a relational database management system (RDBMS), the most

widely used type of DBMS, this API is SQL, a standard
programming language for defining, protecting and accessing data
in an RDBMS.

Popular types of DBMSes

Popular database models and their management systems include:

 Relational database management system (RDBMS) -- adaptable

to most use cases, but RDBMS Tier-1 products can be quite
expensive.
 NoSQL DBMS -- well-suited for loosely defined data structures
that may evolve over time.
 In-memory database management system (IMDBMS) -- provides
faster response times and better performance.
 Columnar database management system (CDBMS) -- well-
suited for data warehouses that have a large number of similar
data items.
 Cloud-based database management system -- the cloud
service provider is responsible for providing and maintaining the
DBMS.
Advantages of a DBMS

Using a DBMS to store and manage data comes with advantages,

but also overhead. One of the biggest advantages of using a DBMS
is that it lets end users and application programmers access and
use the same data while managing data integrity. Data is better
protected and maintained when it can be shared using a DBMS
instead of creating new iterations of the same data stored in new
files for every new application. The DBMS provides a central store
of data that can be accessed by multiple users in a controlled
manner.

Central storage and management of data within the DBMS

provides:

 Data abstraction and independence

 Data security
 A locking mechanism for concurrent access
 An efficient handler to balance the needs of multiple applications
using the same data
 The ability to swiftly recover from crashes and errors, including
restartability and recoverability
 Robust data integrity capabilities
 Logging and auditing of activity
 Simple access using a standard API
 Uniform administration procedures for data
Another advantage of a DBMS is that it can be used to impose a
logical, structured organization on the data. A DBMS delivers
economy of scale for processing large amounts of data because it
is optimized for such operations.

A DBMS can also provide many views of a single database

schema. A view defines what data the user sees and how that user
sees the data. The DBMS provides a level of abstraction between
the conceptual schema that defines the logical structure of the
database and the physical schema that describes the files, indexes
and other physical mechanisms used by the database. When a
DBMS is used, systems can be modified much more easily when
business requirements change. New categories of data can be
added to the database without disrupting the existing system and
applications can be insulated from how data is structured and
stored.

Of course, a DBMS must perform additional work to provide these

advantages, thereby bringing with it the overhead. A DBMS will use
more memory and CPU than a simple file storage system, and
different types of DBMSes will require different types and levels of
system resources.

Changes in how DBMSes are built, sold and serviced

By 2019, the most significant trends in the DBMS sector were how
databases were constructed and how they were used. Open source
DBMS technologies were rapidly gaining traction. In fact, Gartner
projected that open source databases would account for 10% of
total spending on database software by 2019 due to increased
enterprise adoption. Most mainstream IT organizations use open
source software in some of their mission-critical operations.

This trend complements two other trends: the acquisition of open-

source database vendors by bigger rivals and the expansion of the
cloud-based database service market. In 2019, MongoDB, maker of
the Atlas cloud platform based on its namesake NoSQL DBMS,
acquired mobile app database maker Realm to boost its abilities in
the mobile computing landscape. Also, Microsoft acquired Citrus
Data, whose open source software allows PostgreSQL to be used
as a distributed database in a public cloud setting