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June 1999


Customer Interaction Software: Three Critical Steps Lead To The Right Purchase

BY STEPHEN PACE

Businesses battling for market share find that service is the key to customer wins and loyalty. In an increasingly competitive atmosphere, call centers become strategic assets, allowing a level of service that harks back to the days of personal, individualized attention. Not only can the right customer interaction software provide clients with satisfying vendor interaction, but it allows companies to mine, gather and coordinate data to target customers with near pinpoint accuracy. The call center can become a customer relationship management (CRM) center, boosting the bottom line and bringing a strong, rapid return on investment (ROI).

Customer relationship management software products are not "one-size-fits-all." CRM applications must address the needs of businesses with different models, goals and existing technology infrastructures. Without a structured plan, such as a request for proposal (RFP) template, companies investigating the market might find the experience more frustrating than beneficial, and possibly fruitless rather than profitable. How can you decide which software will bring in the results you need?

In a growing market of CRM applications and vendors, creating a RFP template requires three critical steps. From needs and goals assessment to product demo to project plan, this adaptable process offers a plan that will eliminate confusion regardless of your company’s size or goals.

Defining Goals And Requirements
The first step in considering CRM applications is to specify your objectives, and in order to do this you must gather accurate information on your current status. Businesses often see call centers in terms of sales force or customer service automation. They are drawn to the customer relationship management promise of gains in sales, productivity and customer loyalty. But the ROI will be clear only if you have baseline data to compare.

When your CRM application goes live, you can track activity and use the data to calculate ROI. To help put the possibilities in perspective, consider that a 20 second time savings on a three minute call means an 11 percent increase in productivity. You might want to enlist an experienced consultant or vendor to help establish other measurable cost-saving applications. For example, compare time spent per call, problem resolution speed, deal closing rate, contract renewals, customer retention and customer satisfaction.

But a focus on just sales force or help desk automation might exclude other opportunities. With CRM, you also have a chance to develop marketing strategies that will raise the barrier to competition. Data integration features allow you to merge information from multiple systems and applications to create a unified customer profile. The result is a dynamic database that stays current throughout the customer life cycle and can be available to every customer-facing employee.

A comprehensive CRM platform can tell you everything about your client, which means you can tie sales, marketing and service information into one customer record. This kind of readily available information can transform cost centers into profit centers. For example, the marketing department can arm service agents with the information to interest their customers in additional products, and efficiently pass prequalified leads on to the sales group.

As you work out your objectives, either on your own or with a consultant, use the full capabilities of CRM as a reference point. In addition to the obvious goals, keep several features in mind:

  • A CRM application with an open architecture will make the most of your legacy systems and integrate smoothly with back-office applications. Consider any technology changes you plan to make that might affect your decision and also determine the application’s ability to handle migration, transition and growth as well as the vendor’s service and support offerings for these inevitable changes. Plan ahead.

  • The capability to change customer interaction scripts in-house, without hiring consultants, can mean big savings for an organization that frequently alters these scripts. The best products will enable this type of frequent information change at the end-user level.


  • Ease-of-use is one of the most important features and one that can dramatically reduce your training costs. Imagine being able to hire temporary employees, quickly train them and use this new resource for special promotions. Now imagine losing sales because you didn’t have this capability and your existing staff could not handle the overwhelming response.


  • If your business has an international scope, look for applications that have integrated multinational features such as multilanguage capabilities and Euro currency support. Add-on products are a distant second best and could create more work for you with interoperability issues.


Evaluating A Customized Product Demonstration
A CRM solution is not always an out-of-the-box application. The complexity of your needs may require customizations or modifications. Vendors should be prepared to show how their applications can meet your needs and how their data models fit with yours. If a CRM vendor does not seem to share your vision of a customer-centered business, you have cause for reservations.

Two things can really indicate how CRM will work for you 1) A chance to see an enterprise with similar needs benefiting from the applications; and 2) A live demonstration of the product. Observing how an installation meets another company’s requirements will probably raise new questions and help you understand issues as well as advantages. But only a customized demo is a good indicator of how well a product will work with your company’s existing infrastructure.

Your goals and needs assessment should determine the nature of a customer demonstration. A simple customized demonstration can be ready within a few days. More complex scripting and workflow with numerous screens and database tables may require a week or more of preparation, depending on the detail required.

With all the promise of CRM before you, it may be tempting to rush into buying the final product. That would be a big mistake. Considering the investment and potential returns, you want to be sure the application and the vendor can implement your vision and meet your goals.

Building A Statement Of Work
A statement of work covers the details of implementation. Everything from site to system requirements should be part of this project plan. In this phase of analysis, the prospective implementation team addresses cost, customization, estimated time for implementation, personnel needed for maintenance, ease of management and the plan to facilitate user training. This is also the point at which the vendor considers integration, including everything from the operating system to front- and back-end hardware and software to telephony standards and middleware.

Phasing in the project is generally a better idea than developing specifications in isolation. The vendor should be willing to provide a product with basic functionality and initial modifications for your team to try. Your input after a live run with the basic application will help develop the requirements that result in a smooth and successful implementation.

A simple, complete CRM application with basic customization should be ready in about three months. Integration with complicated back-end and legacy systems, sophisticated workflows and databases and extensive customization requires more time. A streamlined system provides dynamic, far-reaching capabilities and a quicker time to market.

Whether you have 15 or 500 customer interaction stations, the issues for choosing a CRM solution are the same. To revitalize your company’s customer focus, you need to wade through some very complicated technology. A structured analysis of CRM options will help you with call center design and evolution, taking it from a tool for sales force or help desk automation to the heart of your revenue-generating organization.

Stephen Pace is vice president, Americas Operations for POINT Information Systems, Inc. He is responsible for sales, marketing and professional services in the U.S., Canada and Latin America. Founded in 1989, POINT Information Systems is an international supplier of advanced enterprise relationship management solutions that let companies link their sales, marketing, customer care and back-office functions into an integrated, enterprisewide customer interaction platform.


Tips To Evaluate Customer Interaction Software

BY ALBERT SUBBLOIE, IMA

Customer interaction software technology plays a key role in the process of helping businesses in the never-ending effort to acquire, retain and expand their customer bases. Trying to stay ahead of the ever-changing customer interaction software (CIS) marketplace can be confusing and overwhelming, especially when faced with evaluating the effectiveness of your current call center technology against the decision to purchase new systems. More than a bolt-on replacement for existing call center applications, today's front-office CIS solutions empower the call center to be the hub of a multichannel, enterprisewide customer contact center, managing voice, fax, Web and e-mail communications. This is a critical issue in today's customer-focused, Internet-enabled business environment * your customers expect to contact your company when and how they want, and you need to have the infrastructure to support these preferences.

The world of customer relationship management technology is changing rapidly. Single-function, text-based agent screens were not long ago considered "state-of-the art" in call center systems. There was very little integration between the computer on the agent's desk and call center devices such as automatic call distributors (ACDs), predictive dialers or interactive voice response (IVR) systems, not to mention the company's legacy databases and back-office operations. Now, feature-rich CIS systems with computer-telephony integration (CTI), running in a Microsoft Windows or browser-based environment, are the norm, synchronizing the desktop, network and telephone system and providing sales, marketing and customer service functionality.

These modern CIS systems provide agents with a comprehensive suite of common applications and instant data access for both inbound and outbound sales, marketing and service operations, offering quick resolution of customer issues and the opportunity to upsell and cross-sell additional products and services. In addition, leading-edge CIS applications can now be linked to multiple databases, enterprise resource planning (ERP) or legacy systems, providing true front- to back-office integration for immediate access to customer information from anywhere in the enterprise, across several call centers and departments.

A key consideration when conducting a CIS evaluation is finding a solution that can fulfill a long list of user demands yet still meet strategic corporate objectives while integrating with your existing technology architecture. It should meet the company's immediate customer relationship management needs, yet be scalable and extensible enough to expand for projected long-term growth. The solution must be flexible enough to fit your business without requiring drastic modifications to your existing operations or processes, yet still be able to quickly support new processes. Will it also accommodate the communications media of the present (telephone, e-mail, fax and the Web) with those of the future (video, kiosk and others yet to be delivered)? Will the software and platform deliver the reliability and performance needed for the mission-critical functions provided by front-office CIS systems? The following points address the business and process issues that need to be reviewed prior to making a CIS technology decision.

Evaluate The Sales Process
How does your company sell? Do you employ an inside sales force, a field sales force, catalogs, distributors or some combination of these? How do these different areas communicate and share information? How are leads tracked and who responds to them? What type of database, if any, is used to track sales and customer information? How could each step of this sales process be made faster and easier? Could your sales representatives use their selling time more effectively if they were more aware of customer needs before a sales visit?

Review Telemarketing And Database Marketing Needs
Does your company have an inbound or outbound telemarketing group? What type of database is used for marketing promotions, direct mailing and telemarketing campaigns? How are the results of these campaigns analyzed? Do you currently have a reporting process that can determine quantity of leads, cost per lead and response rates for each campaign?

Assess Customer Service Requirements
Who currently handles customer inquiries and support issues? Is there a standard process for resolving customer problems and responding to any sales inquiries? Are there required steps in managing your customer incidents? How do you ensure that these steps are followed by those responsible for resolving customer complaints? Is the customer service group linked to other company departments, providing them with an enterprisewide view of the customer or account history?

Before you make any decisions about which software to purchase, define the weaknesses of your current technology based on the business evaluation mentioned above and create a wish list. A simple one-to-one replacement of your existing system means you're upgrading your old problems and broken processes with newer technologies. Think beyond the "now" to project where your business will be two, three or five years out, and what applications will be needed to support that business plan. Once you understand the myriad issues that impact your operations, use the following guide as the framework for evaluating CIS technology.

CIS Functionality Checklist
These are some of the key functional requirements to look for in a comprehensive CIS system:

  • Sales And Marketing. Does the technology maximize the revenue-generating potential of every customer contact? Are agents upselling or cross-selling based on predefined criteria that are triggered by the customer's history? Can you easily capture orders and integrate with order-entry and fulfillment systems?
  • Account Management. When agents accept calls, do they have "screen pop" or application access to the most current detailed account activity and history for a quick and accurate response to a customer request? Can they quickly update customer and account information and identify characteristics that empower them to resolve the issue or to up- or cross-sell? Specifically, an effective account management module provides user-defined profile leads to track customer information, unlimited free-form comments, multiple contacts per company or entity, separate notes for each contact, the ability to customize screens, the ability to generate recall lists for follow-up calls and a search engine for locating customer data based on a variety of criteria.
  • Campaign Management. Can you monitor and interpret the success of a sales or marketing campaign through its ability to track, manage and organize leads and analyze activities and results? A full-featured campaign management module will include ways to track the effectiveness of marketing promotions, measure the progress of prospects through the sales cycle, measure revenue generated against expense per campaign and track lead sources per campaign.
  • Customer Service And Support. Can agents quickly determine the status of a particular customer's account or service request, regardless of where in your organization that case has been routed? Does the system seamlessly integrate with popular case-based reasoning (CBR) packages for faster resolution of routine or common problems? The customer service and support component of a CIS system should include incident tracking; keyword searches for question and objection handling and workflow processing for the management and routing of cases. In addition, built-in workflow, or integration with third-party workflow systems, allows standardization of common business processes or consistent response handling and levels of service.

Other aspects of a comprehensive CIS solution include:

  • Flexibility. Does it offer dynamic scripting, allowing you to modify campaigns and business rules on the fly to respond to changing business conditions? Are you able to easily modify or extend the application modules themselves through a toolkit or integrated development environment?
  • CTI. Does the CIS solution offer a computer-telephony abstraction layer, allowing it to be used with a wide variety of telephony devices and not requiring substantial coding if new devices are added? Does the solution provide its own telephony links or does it require you to purchase a third-party CTI middleware product, adding another technology layer and vendor relationship to your management responsibilities? Can it deliver customer information to the agent's desktop based on dialed number identification service (DNIS) or automatic number identification (ANI)?

Vendor Experience
In addition to the product, evaluate the CIS vendor to verify their expertise in the areas most vital to your project's success. Does the vendor have accounts that can be referenced with applications similar to yours? Do they have experience in large-scale or complex CIS deployments and a proven history of successful installations? Do they understand your business and provide a product that will fit your organization and culture? Does the vendor have partnerships with key hardware and software providers, as well as systems integration firms that have CIS practices?

Installation Game Plan
Once you have chosen a CIS package that will strengthen your customer management operations, work with the vendor to create a game plan for implementation. CIS installations take time and complex deployments involving CTI and legacy system links can quickly turn into an exercise in frustration unless they are properly managed. Once you have chosen a software package that will strengthen your call center operations, create a game plan for installation. This plan is a time line of events outlining your installation process. Often, one of the most overlooked aspects of a CIS deployment, having a detailed yet flexible implementation plan, will dramatically enhance the overall success of the project.

It's well known that it is easier and more profitable to keep a customer than it is to acquire a new one, but a growing business needs to do both. An effective CIS solution helps you do that and more by leveraging technology to deliver superior sales and customer care and providing you with a powerful tool to market your products and services. Each customer contact should quickly end in a tangible result: orders have been processed, questions have been answered and problems have been resolved. Customer satisfaction breeds loyalty.

The key to CIS buying success is a thorough evaluation of your technology and functional needs, researching and test-driving different software packages, verifying the expertise of the vendor and developing a well-planned installation strategy. If you apply these tactics to purchasing your company's sales, marketing and service software package, you will come out ahead of the ever-changing CIS marketplace with a powerful solution that supports your call center's needs today and one that fits your enterprise customer relationship management strategy for the future.

Albert Subbloie is one of the founders of IMA and has been the president, chief executive officer and a director of the company since its incorporation in 1990. He currently serves as Chairman of the Connecticut Technology Council, a state-wide industry group.

IMA  is a customer interaction software provider based in Shelton, Connecticut. IMA's EDGE family of CIS solutions has been helping companies worldwide integrate sales, marketing and customer service activities through the call center for 15 years.







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