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April 1999


CRM:
Everyone's Talking About It, But How Many Are Doing It Right?

BY NADJI TEHRANI,
EDITOR IN CHIEF, EXECUTIVE GROUP PUBLISHER


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


Figure 1. [Click here to return to text]

figure 1


Congratulations To The 1999 Top 50 Outbound Teleservices Companies

I would like to take this opportunity to extend our sincere appreciation on behalf of the entire call center industry as well as the entire staff of Technology Marketing Corporation, publisher of C@LL CENTER Solutions magazine, to the 1999 winners of our industry's coveted Top 50 awards. Those of us who have followed the industry since its inception in the early 1980s and know the call center industry inside and out, also know how difficult it is to become a member of this elite and prestigious group of companies.

Fourteen years ago C@LL CENTER Solutions magazine pioneered this great institution known as the Top 50 inbound and outbound teleservices award program primarily to give due recognition to a group of hard-working people whose primary function is creating sales and thereby protecting and/or creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in corporate America. We know how difficult it is to hire, train and retrain multitudes of people and help them develop great careers, and also how difficult it is to deal with many demanding customers in a highly competitive environment. Earning a Top 50 award year after year is indeed one of the most difficult accomplishments, if not the most difficult, within the teleservices area. You bring respect to our industry through your excellent quality, while generating job security for the thousands of Americans who work for the companies that benefit from the revenues you generate when they outsource their telesales and teleservices functions to you. We salute you for a job well done. We stand in awe of your well-deserved growth. It is a pleasure to work with you on a daily basis.

[Go to the Fourteenth-Annual Top 50 Inbound Teleservices Agencies Rankings]







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