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Every now and then, TMC Labs learns of a new product that, while not
feasible to thoroughly review in our usual style and format, looks truly
exciting and of potential benefit to our marketplace. CHARTER frontline
from Swallow Information Systems, Inc. is one of those products. Due to
the fact that Swallow Information Systems employs a customized approach to
software development, we are unable to provide you with the usual details
of the product's documentation, installation procedures and operational
testing. Nevertheless, the concept of the products was too compelling to
let slip by without at least an overview, hence this "first
look" at the product's features, functionality and areas for
improvement as opposed to a true TMC Labs product review.
The main tenets of customer relationship management (CRM) essentially
constitute a return to basic business. Among them, and most important to
this overview is the concept that it's easier to sell people products and
services when you know what they really want, so gather feedback wherever
you can. And businesses are realizing that real-world opinions from
real-world customers can be infinitely more valuable than those garnered
through stilted focus groups and expensive analytical guesswork.
To most, CRM product vendors have focused their attention on those
places where companies and their customers interface via some form of
technology -- whether by telephone, e-mail or the Web. What they've
neglected to account for is the amount of feedback lost in situations
where a company's primary contact with its customers is face-to-face, in a
retail environment.
Swallow Information Systems is hoping to help companies leverage
interpersonal contacts through CHARTER frontline, a module within a
greater CRM suite called CHARTER continuum. frontline is essentially a
stripped-down version of manager, the suite's core customer service
application. In many ways, manager appears to be standard CRM fare:
located at a company's headquarters, it allows call center agents to
record customer interactions (including feedback) while assigning and
prioritizing related actions, all the while interacting with Oracle or SQL
databases to make customer histories available to all departments.
frontline is usually installed along with customer databases and the
rest of the CHARTER continuum suite on a dedicated NT or Novell server
located at a company's headquarters. A Web-serving application -- usually
MS Internet Information Server -- delivers the frontline component so
remote users can access it through a browser. The result is that retail
managers on the literal "front lines" can quickly enter into
simple, automatically dated note fields information on customer problems,
resulting actions taken and any direct feedback garnered as a result of
the interaction. They can also assign or address previously assigned
pending actions, the status of which are updated by the system just as in
a call center application like manager. In this way, frontline basically
allows a company's retail arm to leverage the functionality of a more
complex CRM application in a simpler, Web-based form streamlined for a
retail environment.
As for corporate headquarters, the marketing people can now extend the
sweep of their scythes during feedback harvest, since frontline posts
information entered at remote locations to the central customer databases.
Current versions of the product allow only a one-way relationship
between frontline and manager. In other words, while headquarters can gain
access to information gathered by remote frontline users, those remote
users can't view customer information contained in the database at
headquarters -- at least not in an off-the-shelf version of the product.
That capability requires a custom modification, and is not available in
any kind of standardized, tested and documented form.
According to company engineers, a more standardized version of this
feature could be in the making. It seems it should be: not providing
frontline users with customer histories could, in some instances, be
likened to military headquarters not providing soldiers on the front line
with sufficient ammunition. For example: a consumer strides up to the
counter of a retail outlet and, filled with righteous indignation,
exclaims that they've purchased a damaged product that must be immediately
replaced. While the main database at headquarters may indicate a
suspiciously high number of product exchange requests placed to the call
center by that same customer, current standard releases of frontline would
not alert the remote store manager to that fact.
This is not to downplay the numerous benefits still available in a
product whose first release, according to Swallow personnel, is admittedly
focused more on feedback gathering than anything else.
One of Swallow Information Systems' customers, the U.K.-based WHSmith,
will be adding the module to their existing continuum implementation. The
company receives some 90+ percent of their customer feedback in over 500
retail stationery/book/ magazine/gift shops located throughout the U.K.
alone, and aims to use frontline to hop up an already rather high-powered,
call center-focused customer relations strategy. frontline could allow a
company like WH Smith to capture a vast amount of information on customer
product and service preferences, statements of positive and negative
experience, and other feedback which is normally lost into the air at the
close of numerous interactions between consumers and store personnel. One
would imagine frontline should not be a difficult upsell to other
continuum users with a strong retail presence such as office supply giant
Staples. Other clients include Toyota, Mitsubishi Motors and McDonald's
Restaurants Ltd.
While frontline could expand a company's perspective on its customers,
both in general and on a one-to-one basis, another potential benefit would
be the way it enhances customers' perceptions of a company. Call center
agents armed with frontline information can show individual customers an
awareness of interactions that happened face-to-face between them and
retail personnel. This is a branding issue tied in to the customer's image
of your company. While you should be able to deal with consumers
homogeneously, regardless of how they contact you, they should in turn
view all faces of your company -- whether presented to them through a Web
site, by telephone or in person, as aspects of the same, personally
attentive organization. For frontline to be most effective in this manner,
though, it would really need to provide two-way access -- offering remote
workers the same access to information contained at headquarters.
Swallow Information Systems could be sitting on top of a very valuable
idea with this product module. To fully capitalize on their idea, though,
it would seem extremely important to further "productize" not
just frontline, but the whole suite -- isolating a fixed set of
standardized, documented features and then offering customization on top
of that.
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To The January 2001 Table Of Contents ]
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