June 2000

BY CAROL DRZEWIANOWSKI

But how can you be sure that your company is optimizing the voice and data solutions available?

Let's take a look at what some other companies are doing to successfully implement CRM strategies. Cephren, for example, is an online workplace for the global construction industry with a wide array of customers, including developers, architects, engineers, general contractors, subcontractors, distributors, and manufacturers. They have selected eConvergent to provide a complete customer satisfaction solution. eConvergent's solution is designed to give online businesses (both business-to-business and business-to-consumer) the ability to offer a completely new level of customer interaction that is fast and simple.

eConvergent supplies the complete solution -- technology infrastructure and in-house services that are required to run, monitor, and evolve customer service -- allowing Cephren to seamlessly manage customer interactions via the Web, online chats, voice chats, e-mail, and fax. With the eConvergent solution, Cephren customers experience a higher level of customer service through multiple means of communication.

Don't forget the SOHO contingent. Small businesses and home offices need to implement a CRM strategy, too, if they are to remain competitive. REAL and e2 Communications recently announced that they will jointly market and sell turnkey solutions that will enable small and medium-sized businesses to capitalize on the marketing power of the Internet by adding one-to-one customer relationship capabilities to their existing Web sites.

The cost-effective hosted solutions will be based on e2's flagship product, e2Mail 4.0, which enables small and medium businesses to build their e-business by capturing, managing, and building customer relationships through targeted and personalized e-mail messages that rely on demonstrated preferences, purchase histories and browsing behaviors. Through its lead management and generation functionalities, e2Mail v 4.0 enables businesses to convert passive site visitors into returning customers through a variety of methods including Web site offers and services, inbound messages and other sources.

CRM is not a particular product. A complete CRM solution is a combination of many things; it's not something you can just buy off-the-shelf. However, no matter whether you're running a Fortune 500 business, or a start-up from your garage, if you have customers, implementing CRM technologies will help you manage your customer interactions.

BY JACKIE WIEDNER

There's an old concept often forgotten in today's fast-paced world -- truly "listening" to our customers. In the new e-business economy, there is much ado about better customer service. We provide countless entry points into the contact center through the telephone, e-mail, Web, and VoIP. We improve efficiencies with IVR systems, call routing, screen pop, and other CTI tools. We collect a wealth of information on our customers within CRM applications -- but who is really listening?

THE CONTACT CENTER AGENT -- OUT IN THE COLD?
In today's competitive environment, those keeping a close ear on what the customer is saying about a company's products and services will win their loyalty. However, too often, the only one "listening" is the agent handling the call -- who has the least influence over the future of a company's products and services.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE: ACD, CTI, AND CRM
In your contact center, the ACD enables your customers to "start talking," CTI enables "smart-talking" with system intelligence for routing and screen pops, and CRM applications help collect information about the customer and ultimately "close the deal." After the deal is closed, however, what compels the customer to come back? Customer loyalty is earned, and only by creating a better customer experience.

The concept of CRM is really about building "customer share" as opposed to simply market share. To achieve this we need to motivate the customer to return again and again. In the CRM equation, capturing, evaluating, analyzing, and improving the customer experience is the key to earning loyal customers.

CRM -- IT LISTENS, IT LEARNS
Recording and quality management applications do just that -- capture the customer experience and enable users to listen, analyze, and respond more effectively. Fortunately, for today's contact center manager, advanced recording solutions can help achieve this in a much smarter way. By integrating directly with CTI and CRM applications, you have a powerful tool to gather the right information to truly see and listen to interactions in a multi-media environment handling calls, e-mail, Web chats, or collaboration. This enables contact centers to capture and play back the actual customer interaction, linking conversations to e-mails and other Internet interactions for a single customer.

Start-to-finish recording enables you to capture your customer's journey through your contact center. Each step within the contact center in dealing with the customer experience is recorded, scored, and tied to a single CRM case number. In this way, one can identify potential patterns and root causes of customer dissatisfaction, as well as opportunities to improve business processes, products, and the quality of customer interactions with the company.

By capturing and analyzing customer transactions with your contact center, we can identify opportunities to automate services via VRUs/IVRs or the Web site, as well as identify needed training to overcome service gaps that exist. Play back recorded voice, synchronized with the agent's computer screen activity during the call provides a complete and accurate picture of what's going on in the contact center. These recorded contacts can be shared with decision-makers across the organization who can influence products and services offered based on recorded feedback from a sampling of customers.

LISTENING TO DATA
Datamining can provide clues for better customer navigation through your contact center, especially when the data is backed-up with the actual recorded interaction. Automated IVR or Web-based customer surveys also provide an effective vehicle for soliciting customer feedback. Linking these surveys to other recorded interactions is yet another avenue to listen and respond to your customers.

CONCLUSION
CRM recording combined with quality management in your contact center provides a complete picture of customer experiences, supporting a customer-driven business that builds lasting customer relationships. Most importantly, it closes the loop in CRM by enabling us to listen and respond to customer needs, ultimately helping us achieve our prized goal of greater customer loyalty.

Jackie Wiedner is director, quality applications for NICE Systems. For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.nice.com.

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BY EVANGELOS SIMOUDIS

Enterprises are adopting customer-centric practices at astonishing speeds. At the same time, they are struggling to integrate their customer interaction channels. Companies that have successfully converted from product-centric to customer-centric have found that such a transformation requires a balanced investment on organization, process, information, intelligence, and technology.

A typical CRM investment consists of purchasing either a call center or a sales force automation application, which is driven by a data mart. While these data marts contain the proper customer data to drive the particular application, they are not open and accessible to other organizations. Their contents are not adequate for providing an enterprise-wide view of each customer relationship.

Several industries keep enterprise data warehouses, which contain detailed information and support analytical applications, often providing input to data marts. However, because they must support such a variety of applications with diverse requirements, they are unable to provide a complete, enterprise-wide view of each customer relationship.

In order to present an enterprise-wide view of the entire customer relationship and further facilitate customer-centric operations, the following should comprise a customer-centric data warehouse:

• Customer Data -- at the individual, household, and account levels to determine demographic, lifestyle needs, and life stage information.
• Transactional Data -- information such as transaction frequency, transaction types, cost per transaction, channels through which these transactions are executed, to help understand a customer's behavior, as well as the customer's current and future profitability.
• Product Usage Data -- in order to identify the breadth and depth of each customer's relationship with the enterprise, as well as to identify future sales opportunities.
• Contact and Campaign Data -- the data warehouse must include all outbound contacts made with a particular customer and/or household through any of the available channels (inbound contacts made by each customer, the results of marketing campaigns, summaries of data from other channel databases, etc.).
• Customer Intelligence -- data analysis should yield a collective intelligence --for each costumer. Typical analyses may include profitability and lifetime value, various measures of risk, loyalty measures, propensities for particular product acquisitions at a specific time and through a particular channel, the next product the customer should be offered, etc. Armed with this type of information and intelligence the enterprise can start answering questions about customer behavior.

A customer-centric data warehouse whose contents can provide answers to these types of questions will not only enable the enterprise to better manage each customer relationship, but will indirectly empower the customer to manage their relationship with the institution. For a customer-centric data warehouse to reach its full potential, organizations must continuously collect the data necessary to address the questions above. In this way, the warehouse contains the necessary data to manage every customer relationship with all departments becoming stakeholders to its success.

Evangelos Simoudis, Ph.D. is president of Customer Analytics, which develops Web-based ERM applications. For more information, visit www.customeranalytics.com.

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