IDC's Advanced Customer Care & Retention (ACCR) Live web conferenceis designed to help ICT vendors understand key trends around customer care and retention and position their solution to meet the growing challenge that their customers are facing.

In the present economic situation, most companies in Asia and elsewhere are facing flat or declining markets for the goods and services they offer. Although most companies are responding to the situation by cutting costs across the board, many others realize the necessity of investing in solutions that can have a direct positive impact on earnings. IDC believes that these companies will be the best equipped to deal with the downturn and that they could have a clear advantage over their competitors once it is over.

A pivotal revenue-generating investment area is customer care. Customer care emerges as not only a key differentiator between companies but is also fast becoming an invaluable tool to capture new markets and new customers. Fortunately, new technology is transforming the way Customer Care can be provisioned. New ways to apply customer analytics, virtual call centers, multiple modes of communication, Web 2.0 and virtual worlds are changing how companies reach new customer and keep existing customers engaged. IDC refers to these new tools as "Advanced Customer Care and Retention" or ACCR.

Using the findings from recent industry polls and surveys that IDC has conducted, this live web conferencewill provide insight into what role customer care plays for enterprises in Asia/Pacific, and whether they understand its value as a sales-generating tool. The web conferencewill also explore which customer care technologies Asian enterprises are willing to invest in, in the coming year.

• Are Asian companies focusing more on existing customers in light of the downturn?
• How do customer care solutions fit into their sales approaches?
• Which customer care technologies and services do Asian companies plan to invest in?
• How do they plan to deploy these solutions?
• What are their expectations for ROI?