This Top 50 Inbound Teleservices Agencies issue gives me a great opportunity to focus
on the role of customer loyalty in customer relationship management (CRM), which is the
essence of inbound teleservices.
CRM involves CTI, e-commerce and Internet telephony and how they come together in the
call center, which is the heart of CRM. CRM is vitally important because it is your
company's only sustainable competitive advantage. You need to use it to its fullest extent
to differentiate your company from your competition. Since 75 percent of a buying decision
is based on emotion, CRM becomes vitally important.
A major way to differentiate your company is through superlative customer service. The
essence of customer service is engendering customer loyalty and trust. If your customers
trust you, so long as your product/service is topnotch and competitively priced, then they
will want to stay with you. As I discussed in my November 1995 "Publisher's
Outlook," there are at least two approaches to fostering and developing customer
loyalty. First, in a business-to-business environment, focus on your customer's customer.
That is, understand your customer's business so you can recommend methods and innovations
that your customer can use to promote personal loyalty for his or her own customers.
Second, build a personal relationship with your customer based on your solid business
relationship. If you can do both of these, you will keep your customer for life. You must
ensure, however, that your employees treat your customers well, since you don't have
daily, personal contact with each of your customers. Nothing will undermine customer
loyalty as swiftly as shabby personal treatment. One way to ensure your employees treat
your customers well is to treat your employees well. Reward them, thank them and give them
the tools (training, equipment and direction) to ensure they will work well and hard.
Specify and communicate your expectations, train employees to meet them, and then let them
develop their own initiatives and allow trusted people to do their jobs. Make certain you
monitor them, not only to correct mistakes, but, more important, to provide them with
positive feedback. Almost everyone wants to do a good job - if you can mentor employees
when they need it and help them develop their own skills, you will be developing their
loyalty to you, which will come across on the phone in their contacts with your customers.
Teleservices agencies are the perfect partner to help you in your quest to build
customer loyalty. If your customer service department is overwhelmed and callers spend
endless time on hold and e-mail is going unanswered for days, or you simply want to focus
on your company's core competencies without investing in costly technology upgrades and
what can be a never-ending cycle of hiring and training new agents, then you should look
to partner with a teleservices agency. They possess the knowledge, experience and
technology to provide you with a cutomer service department that is second to none. You
may find many teleservices agencies that specialize in CRM by looking at the
advertisements in C@LL CENTER Solutions.
Doing CRM right is an extremely complex task. Take a look at Figure 1 - proper CRM involves many disciplines, i.e., advanced call center
technologies such as CTI, Internet telephony, database marketing, data warehousing,
voice/data integration, unified messaging, etc. In other words, for CRM to be effective,
hardware, software and, most important, humanware, must all be integrated into a unified
whole. Without judicious selection of CRM technologies and effective convergence of them
with humanware, CRM is little more than wishful thinking, for in the final analysis,
people buy from people. (For further amplification of this point, see Matthew
Vartabedian's article "A Roofer's Guide To CRM".)
Customer relationship management involves manifold processes and departments. The
advent of the Internet and the accessibility of information made possible by open
databases are reshaping the corporate landscape. Hopefully your company has progressed
from the days of shotgun marketing and one-size-fits-all standardized customer
interactions to concentrate on the penultimate audience, your customers as individuals.
Proper customer relationship management is a complicated and long-term process that
cuts across the entire enterprise to bring business processes, technology and employees in
line with the business strategy. That business strategy needs to be an adjunct to
marketing in establishing long-term relationships with your customers. You also need to
consider the lifetime value of each customer. This involves segmenting your customers into
demographic groups as well as defining which are the most profitable and which are the
least profitable. This encompasses information on your customers collected by in-house
systems as well as purchased behavioral data. (One note of warning: here you may run into
resistance from some departments as they may feel they have sole ownership of customer
data that should, in fact, be available to all departments.) You should analyze this data
and construct models that will predict which customers will buy a certain product and
through which media they will purchase, e.g., direct mail, telemarketing, online, trade
show, etc. This will allow you to design marketing campaigns with higher returns because
the customers will receive information about products they want in the manner that will be
most likely to prompt them to action.
To accomplish this goal, you will need to set up a data warehouse that contains all
customer data, account data, transaction data and channel data, providing interfaces to
all communications channels so information can get to both your staff and your customers
the way they want it at the time they need it. Anyone in your company who comes into
contact with a customer should have access to all pertinent customer information. Your
customer relationship management system should also naturally provide analysis tools for
manipulating the data in the warehouse and campaign management programs for marketing.
As more and more customer interactions now take place on the Internet, you should
develop your Web site to provide customizable pages to give your customers the information
and multimedia services they want. You should also pick up information from customers on
what is missing on the site so that marketing can keep the site updated and always let the
customer know the site has been updated and the information they were searching for is now
on the site. Also of prime importance is an e-mail management system that allows for
automatic response, provides easy access to various databases and allows customization to
fit into your business plan.
Business rule updates should go automatically to your Web page and should include which
method of customer interaction is the most profitable for your company: should a customer
inquiry be handled by e-mail, interactive Web chat, phone call, fax, IVR menu or a call by
the sales team? Which transactions deserve an immediate, highly personalized response and
which can wait, or need only a more generic response? Obviously, you want to handle your
more valuable customers on a more personal level than those who provide you with only a
marginal return. In short, a properly established CRM program must foster customer/vendor
interactions wherein both parties are fully aware of each other's needs and address them
accordingly.
The above should also apply to your telephony systems. Interactive voice response (IVR)
systems can also provide for customization and be tied in to back-end databases. IVR
should also be linked to the business rules to evaluate a customer's value to the company,
pass calls on to the most appropriate call center agent, or use real-time prompts to offer
cross-sell or upsell options. It goes without saying that your call center reps should
have all pertinent customer information available to them, as well as prompts for
cross-sell and upsell opportunities based on a customer's history with the company.
But the technology is only part of the story. You will need to factor into your
implementation plan how the new technologies will affect your staff. New technologies mean
not only new roles for staff members, but also new thinking. Encourage them to take
advantage of new technologies and think out of the box when defining their new roles. Too
often I have seen new technology introduced by this or that department in great
expectation, only to find out a few months later that it is not being used and people have
gone back to their old work habits. When introducing a new way of working, make sure you
educate the end users thoroughly on not only how a new application works, but also how
they can use it to improve their jobs by doing more in less time.
You have many islands of information about your customers. Explore them for uncharted
gold, but don't forget to populate them and keep open the lines of communication between
them. Customer relationship management is the territory of the entire company.
Help Is On The Way
Recognizing the complexity of effective CRM, we have developed an extensive conference
program at CTI EXPO Spring '99. (For complete details, see www.ctiexpo.com.) You can take the guesswork out of CRM
by joining me at CTI EXPO May 24-26 in Washington, D.C. to learn how to do it with impact.
As always, I look forward to receiving your valuable comments.
Sincerely,
Nadji Tehrani
Executive Group Publisher
Editor-in-Chief
ntehrani@tmcnet.com
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