Squeezing more superior provision of service from a team, whilst driving down overheads, is perhaps the holy grail of any service driven organisation.

With brand loyalty at a low and customer scrutiny at a high, the challenge of increasing customer or stakeholder satisfaction and loyalty, whilst driving competitive advantage for private sector providers, is great. But it can be met head-on with proven platform-independent technology.

However, helping service providers make decisions 'on-the-fly' is a complex operation demanding analysis of requirements. This can involve consultation, extensive documentation and lengthy meetings to assess and establish requirements - often at great expense to the provider.

Allied to these challenges are myriad opportunities for broader transformation, reducing operational costs and growing volume and value of service provision globally. Optimisation that can equally be applied to public sector service delivery scenarios.

• Harmonising, consolidating and improving internal & external information sources to a central data repository and creating better visibility in the supply chain
• Opening collaboration between the many touch points of indirect worldwide supply chains
• Leveraging a clear 360 degree insight across a community
• Optimising a team to do a better job faster without costly training
• Improving job satisfaction and employee loyalty
• Streamlining route-to-market
• Reducing transactional costs to help deliver more volume and value
• Maximising productivity to add value to the bottom line
• Unlocking time for providers to spend more time serving customers and stakeholders

Be more productive, be better informed.

Mercato Knowledge Manager is underpinned by powerful Data Management that brings together and provides granular product or service information. It provides 100% accurate and reliable data driven by a central, unified, context sensitive data repository. This is integrated with a very powerful Decision Engine that links the data to weighted questions and answers.

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The Decision Engine enables simple generation of qualified questions and configuration of appropriately rated responses. Most people engage based on needs and asking questions is about identifying requirements and guiding people through a process to ensure 100% accuracy in meeting their needs.

Question & Rating Engine

Quote Summary

Any Q&A driven process can be fully automated and configured to match any customer's business model, product or service provision needs. This automated methodology drives better business outcomes and can be applied broadly from selling bespoke insurance to high end IT solutions or advising patients of medical diagnosis 'live'.

With a dynamically rendered and intuitively surfaced user dashboard, Mercato Knowledge Manager delivers a guided experience like no other and helps people make choices quickly. It structures end user behaviour and business workflows to improve productivity and reduce cost. The tool provides high levels of flexibility and extensibility.

• Configuration to deliver very powerful business logic, providing pipelines between variables, questions or entire sections of data
• View, edit and configure structure, sequence and weighting of questions
• Configure and map response types and actions
• Quick dashboard configuration to match any step-by-step sales environment
• Localisation tool unlocks deployment on a world-wide scale by language, product sets etc
• Provision of real-time tailored pricing/specification/service delivery, so business or service can be won or delivered quicker
• Interaction with back end systems to automate in-stock and price level updates, guaranteeing accuracy of business offers and releasing time for other tasks
• Point-and-click product detail and technical resource online
• Indicates 'promo' or incentivised products or services for up/link sell
• Complete search functionality, including parametrics on any variable
• Can offer direct cross referencing to competitor products for comparative sell
• Offers an auditable RFQ for simplified quoting, removing time wastage on requotes and returns
• Records all communications to exceed corporate governance requirements, including product references, customer numbers etc in one accessible central repository
• Platform independent - web, desktop and mobile platform compatible for all customer consultancy scenarios
• Short implementation process and protection of existing ROI in both training and infrastructure
• Management functionality unlocks total sales visibility from central control point to track, forecast and audit

Mercato's Data Management engine that underpins the tool can also generate new supply chain data from existing data to offer verified and accessible business intelligence that enhance the Knowledge Manager and the service provision process yet further.

Mercato's unremitting focus on data quality, useablity and accessibility is what often makes this tool so strong and powerful. It can be configured to pool intelligence from the Data Management engine to automatically weight further questions based on previous 'touches' and information gathered from an individual. This means a telesales operative or an end user answering questions on a website, can be more accurately guided through the sales process based on their profile.

Equally, the Knowledge Manager can seamlessly and automatically integrate with Mercato's CRM tool to prompt other areas of an organisation to contact a customer or stakeholder based on outcomes. For example, further to discussion the patient needs tests doing in six months time, the solution will automatically prompt an appropriate person in the organisation to call on that timeline empowered with specific intelligence to hand to better drive through the actions.

Mercato uses its proprietary Mercato Application Suite to rapidly deploy its tools via a SaaS model.

The deployment of tools requires no customer application programming, hosting or special skills as Mercato manages implementation, training and maintenance end-to-end.

• See this tool working for IBM
• View IBM Pre-Sales Advisor overview video