Slide 1
One of Dialog’s greatest strengths is our dedication to you, our customers. In 2010 we re-emphasize that support with a newly-organized group—the Global Customer Support team. Read on to find out who makes up the team, the role they play and how their responsibilities continuously evolve to provide even greater service to you.
Slide 2
Q: Explain briefly what you see as the Global Customer Support’s main mission?
A: Our team consists of the field-based Training and Applications Consultants and the phone-based Knowledge Center. Our goal always has been to help our customers use Dialog’s products and content in the best way possible and to answer their business, intellectual property, science and technical questions. In 2009, we will have communicated with more than 30,000 customers – and most of those communications are one-on-one.
Slide 3
Q: Who is on your team?
A: There are 25 individuals in the team throughout North America, Europe and the Asia/Pacific region. We are an experienced group with over 250 years of combined service at Dialog. Among the group are individuals with advanced degrees, including PhDs, JDs, MLSs, MBAs. Our team members also bring experience prior to their roles at Dialog – at laboratories, governmental agencies, management consulting firms, technology companies and, in fact, Dialog’s competitors. Besides English (or its American variant!) some of our team members also speak French, German, Spanish and Italian.
Slide 4
Q: What tasks support your mission?
A: Our job has many categories. We offer content and product training, product and content support, technical assistance, Alert set up and maintenance, and our project bureau has the capacity to conduct searches for customers if there is a need because of illness, leaves or an overabundance of research requests. We work with customers over the phone, in-person or by email, and our training sessions can either be live or via the Web. That training can be a public session, where many different customers are together, or customized for one specific customer’s needs and held at the customer’s site. We also assist in creating subject-specific training materials and aids to facilitate research needs.
In 2010 and beyond, our primary overriding responsibility will be to help our customers transition to Dialog’s next generation platform.
Slide 5
Q. Can you give us a specific example of one of your tasks?
A: One such area would be the Alerts Bureau. Many customers know when we mention Alerts that these are ongoing, recurrent automated searches, executed independent of searcher efforts. The Alerts Bureau is a time-saving resource that puts the power of Knowledge Center specialists to work for you! Our subject experts work with customers to define the specific information need; then we create strategies to push results to users to keep them up to date. Customers short on time use the Alerts Bureau, as do customers researching a less familiar topic. It’s easy to have a member of the Alerts Bureau recommend databases or strategies, or set up or edit an Alert. Just fill out the easy-to-use form located on the Dialog web site [support.dialog.com/alerts/] to have the Alert set up on Dialog or DataStar.
Alert topics cover all subject areas and can be created in almost any database. For example, an organization might need to stay abreast of new regulations or legislation in the pharmaceutical industry. Or, a company might watch a competing company’s patents to see what new products it is developing. The newswires, trade literature, patents and trademarks on Dialog can help to find this kind of information. You might want to know who is citing your patents or make sure another company is not infringing on one of your patents. Dialog has patent files that cover all regions of the world. These are just a few of the projects the Alerts Bureau gets involved with.
Slide 6
Q: Why is your team’s role so important to Dialog customers? And, what makes your job at Dialog so exciting, especially since you have been with the business for such a long time?
A: Every customer at Dialog has a sales representative, and we like to say they own the relationship with the customer entity and our group is responsible for the relationship with the individual users at that customer entity.
We train the customer’s team on how to use the product and, more importantly, help the customer understand how to apply Dialog’s content to their business needs. We are the ones that answer the calls for help from the users – 24 hours a day, five days a week (at 800-3-Dialog). We also respond to customer’s written inquiries (email or otherwise) to meet their needs.
What we are especially proud of, and what we really enjoy about our jobs, are the long-term relationships we have built with individual users over the years. Whether they come to one of our Update Forums, attend a session with a Training and Applications Consultant, or hear a familiar and friendly voice on the other end of a help call, Dialog’s customers tell us they feel we have their best interests in mind and appreciate our help. It’s very rewarding.
Slide 7
Watch for interviews with other groups at Dialog in the coming months.