The marriage of e-commerce and call center operations offers unsurpassed opportunities
for developing your customer relationships. At most companies, the call center is already
the hub of the customer relationship management (CRM) strategy. The Web gives you an
opportunity to build on that hub. Customer need for speed and service has transformed the
call center into a strategic tool; that same need is behind a similar, far more rapid,
adoption of e-commerce. With the Web, you have a tool that allows you to analyze data and
personalize interactions on a whole new level.
To successfully meet customer demand for ever-improving service, you must tie your Web
interactions into core business processes. Companies that merge Web capabilities with
their other CRM technologies will realize a competitive advantage: a fully integrated
strategy allows you to share information across the entire enterprise.
Without adequate integration, deploying the technologies to create a Web-enabled call
center might create irregularities in both content and service. Customers might find
inconsistent treatment or information on the Web and in the call center. Agents may be
unaware of client Web interactions. The system may fail to capture vital data about a
customer's interests and inclinations. Prospects and patrons might not receive timely
responses to requests for information.
Benefits Of A Web-Enabled Call Center
With integrated systems and processes, you can build a Web-enabled call center
that enhances your customer relationships. Consider some of the possibilities:
The site visitor on the verge of buying pushes the "call
me" button. The request flows immediately into the workload of an outbound agent for
follow-up, and a call center agent responds via phone, already aware of the client's name,
history, and current interest.
A client logs a product complaint on the Web, and the sales
representative making a call the next day is already aware of the problem and armed with a
solution.
A customer requests product information via Web, phone, fax,
or e-mail. CTI merges the flow of incoming requests and routes them into the call center.
The company's CRM solution receives the request and applies a predefined workflow to
determine the appropriate follow-up.
Building Effectively On The Call Center Hub
Building Web-enabled call centers always involves the same challenge: total
integration of business processes and customer information across all channels. The
Internet is no longer a frill or a novelty, it is a strategic channel for distribution and
communication. Combine the customer information from the Web with the material you gather
from phone calls and mail. Over time you capture a total picture of your customer and can
present more targeted, personalized offers. An optimized, Web-enabled call center
reinforces your branding and provides a consistent customer experience on which to build
the foundation of a long and loyal customer relationship.
A Web-enabled call center infrastructure should integrate and manage hybrid
communication channels dynamically. You should be able to model a business process (such
as a scripted dialogue) once, and then apply it in any channel in a consistent manner. For
ease-of-use, look for a graphical tool for building scripts, workflows and intelligent
software agents. This important feature for any CRM solution makes your business processes
easy to maintain, less expensive to modify, and less reliant on expensive IT support to
implement changes. All these elements result in flexibility and speed for addressing
market changes and demands.
The system should capture Web interactions the same way it captures call center agent
data entries. With complete integration and a central repository for data, every
customer-facing employee can have access to accurate, current customer information. That
way, when a customer initiates a live interaction via the Web, the staff person replying
knows the customer's history -- regardless of the medium they used in past interactions --
and can personalize the interaction to help grow the relationship.
For the site to build effectively on the hub of the call center, certain features are
critical. All e-mail must give an immediate and automatic response. The customer must
offer an opportunity to open communication, whether it's a customer request for a phone
call, or voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). The call center agent responding to the
customer should know which page of the site the customer was viewing. An effective CTI
product should route interactions from multiple channels to the CRM workflow engine to
manage the process without live intervention. Skills-based routing should enable the call
center application to route calls to appropriate agents based on skills, past experience
with the customer, or both. All this activity should become part of the customer's record
in your database, to be used for future transactions.
Return On Investment
The more functionality you find in a product on the shelf, the more likely you
are to find success when you integrate the Web and your call centers. The result is a
customer-focused business model that enables a wide variety of service and performance
measures. Effectively done, you find quantifiable ROI in almost every aspect of your
integrated CRM initiative:
- Rapid lead qualification.
- Increased up-selling and cross-selling.
- Improved customer satisfaction.
- Reduced customer churn.
You may even find that the varied dimensions in the call center agents' jobs add
interest, promote employee retention, and help reduce hiring/training costs.
On your Web site, a hit is a prospect. If your call center is Web-enabled, that
prospect is more likely to become a customer. Technology has shown us without fail that
today's cutting edge "extra" is tomorrow's requirement. Yesterday, you could do
business without a Web site. Today, you are contemplating VoIP to stay ahead of the game.
Soon Web cameras and video phone calls will be as commonplace as e-mail on the Internet.
When you look for Web-enablement throughout the enterprise, look to the future now.
Galen Bales is a founder of POINT Information
Systems, Inc. The author may be reached at galen.bales@pointinfo.com.
POINT is a worldwide provider of advanced customer interaction center solutions that
enable organizations to link their sales, marketing, customer care, and back-office
functions to form an integrated, enterprise-wide customer interaction platform. POINT
applications are currently deployed in 18 languages in 35 countries.
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