Real-Time CRM:
A Competitive Advantage Today, A Competitive Imperative
Tomorrow?By Ross Sedgewick,
Siemens Global eCRM Solutions
Lost productivity, lost sales and lost customer satisfaction all make a
compelling case for addressing customer issues as quickly as possible by
bringing the right people and information to the discussion on the first
contact. Ideally, this should be achieved with zero latency in 'real-time'
to ensure customer satisfaction.
Unfortunately, because of today's business imperative to lower costs,
companies typically put lower-paid, lower-skilled employees on the front
lines of their contact centers, not only risking their brand reputation but
also current and future sales. These employees often lack the skills, data
or knowledge required to close the customer query or opportunity on first
contact. The result? Delays, additional callbacks and possible loss of
credibility and satisfaction with customers.
Results like this can be avoided, given the fact that within the company's
domain resides all the information or knowledge a customer service
representative (CSR) may need to close a customer contact the first time.
It's just that many CSRs don't know where the information or knowledge
resides or how to access it, or if they do know where to find the
information, they don't have the time to access it. This describes the
current pain most companies are experiencing, a pain that is crying out for
a real-time CRM solution.
What is real-time CRM? It's the ability to interact effectively with
customers round-the-clock, across multiple points of contact with no lag
time in bringing the information or knowledge to bear on a customer matter,
be it a problem or an opportunity. Putting real-time CRM to work involves
meeting the needs of three key constituents in a customer interaction: the
customer, the contact center agent and the contact center manager. What
follows is some insight into the different views of each party to a customer
interaction, then an overview of some tools that can bring real-time CRM
into practice.
Customer view. Let's first look at the customer's perspective. With time
more precious than ever for most working people ' and with attention spans
getting shorter due to media influences ' patience can wear thin when
customers experience long hold times, incomplete or irrelevant answers or
agents who are simply unable to help them because they lack the data and/or
the knowledge to do so.
Companies can spend millions to build brand equity in their markets, yet
erode it faster than they built it if their customers cannot engage them
efficiently and effectively. People don't want to revisit their issues, they
want them solved on first contact. What's more, with the Internet in
addition to the telephone, they have more ways to communicate and want to be
able to use the channels with which they feel most comfortable or which they
find most expedient.
Agent view. Now let's look at the other side of the customer interaction,
the CSR. Over one-third of North American firms use temporary labor in their
contact centers, and that figure will grow as cost pressures continue to
mount. Temporary workers are people who, almost by definition, do not have
the company's or the customer's best interests at heart ' not when the
company has no professed loyalty to them.
After an average training period of three to four weeks, the average tenure
of a CSR is 12 to 24 months. Aside from the temporary nature of so many CSR
jobs, a key source of agent frustration and ultimately agent turnover
results from a lack of tools and information to handle customer interactions
effectively and decisively.
Imagine, for example, the stress a CSR can experience if too frequently he
or she cannot adequately respond to a customer issue due to a lack of
real-time information about a contact or the inability to consult with the
right expert or decision maker who could solve the customer's problem. It's
not an overstatement to say that if this kind of stress accumulates day
after day, a CSR can develop a syndrome of helplessness that leads to
burnout and turnover.
Contact center manager view. Since business conditions change on a monthly,
daily or even hourly basis, with demand and service issues often
unpredictable, contact center managers need to assess and react to these
changes quickly and effectively. This means having their fingers on the
pulse of the contact center, whether they're onsite or off, so they can
adjust routing strategies and staffing levels accordingly.
Contact center managers, too, can experience burnout via the same
frustrations their CSRs face, especially if agent turnover is high and
forces them to constantly hire, train and console their agents in attempts
to retain them. Add to this the possibility that the manager is subject to
repeated escalations of customer issues because their CSRs are not equipped
with the tools and information needed to resolve them on first contact.
Both of these situations can be further aggravated if contact center
managers feel chained to the facility because they don't have the mobility
tools and actionable information they need to understand and respond
proactively to real-time business and operational conditions.
Advanced Tools For Real-Time CRM
As a concept, doing business 'in real-time' isn't very new, but putting the
concept into practice to enhance customer relationships requires the
advanced tools and strategies that those tools can enable.
One such tool is adaptive routing, which takes real-time customer data such
as customer status/value and situation urgency to influence how the
interaction is routed and prioritized. As an example, a premium customer
might call his or her insurance company and enter the pertinent account
information in response to the IVR prompts. The system performs a real-time
lookup of the customer's file, with details regarding the customer's
loyalty, policy value and standing. This automated lookup notes that this is
a high-value customer with an outstanding claim that has gone well beyond
the two-week closure target. The system would then automatically route the
call to an agent for special handling, thus avoiding a potential high-value
customer defection.
Another tool for real-time CRM is presence management. For most companies,
the body of its knowledge base resides outside the contact center with
internal experts and other employees who are often mobile inside the company
' at meetings, on a teleconference, working under a closed-door deadline, or
even unavailable due to a run to the copier ' or outside the company, on the
road, meeting with customers or attending trade shows and other marketing
activities.
How then do CSRs tap into a field expert while a customer is on the line?
One way is via presence software that can provide both real-time
availability information and various ways to reach the needed experts,
including voice conferencing or instant messaging on the customer's issue.
Combine all this capability with skills-based routing and business rules to
ensure only appropriate, high-value escalations, and companies can go a long
way toward resolving customer situations on first contact, a key factor in
building customer satisfaction and loyalty.
The third tool for making real-time CRM practical is predictive modeling:
the key to driving proactive contact center management effectiveness and
productivity. Operating in react mode or acting on purely historical data
doesn't address the challenges of managing today's contact center. Take, for
example, the contact center manager for a major catalog retailer who learns
that a promotional mailer will be sent to all customers nationwide featuring
an incredible loss-leader item and the company's toll-free number.
Surely, the mailer will cause a huge spike in response, which could create
unacceptable customer wait times, but without predictive modeling tools, the
manager must resign the contact center to a 'best-guess' approach with some
mix of increased staffing, expanded operating hours, relaxing skill criteria
or changing routing tactics, changing service level targets or altering
telecom or network configurations. With the predictive modeling tools that
are now available, the manager can avoid the trial-and-error, reactive
approach and instead develop and apply an optimal mix of all these variables
in real-time as a comprehensive response strategy for the promotional
mailer. The result is better real-time decision making to support service
levels and responsiveness.
Finally, and just as important among the tools described above, is mobile
CRM. This tool, actually a set of tools, helps avoid the necessity of a
contact center manager being onsite minute-to-minute and hour-by-hour, yet
still gives managers access to the real-time data they need to sense
operational conditions and respond proactively. Event-driven messages,
notifications and other related contact center content from the multiple
data sources supporting the contact center are automatically routed to a
full range of mobile devices including pagers, laptops, phones, PDAs and
hybrids of the two. It also offers managers the ability to monitor these
data sources for key events that, in turn, can become event 'triggers,'
driving automated business rules in response based on predetermined
criteria. Again, sensing and responding to situations before they become out
of control helps companies provide a consistent service level and customer
experience.
Competitive Advantage
Clearly, the business impact of not adopting real-time customer interaction
capabilities can be abandoned transactions, customer dissatisfaction and
lost revenue opportunities. Companies that adopt a real-time CRM philosophy
with the goal of zero latency in response times and with multimodal
accessibility and flexibility on an anytime, anywhere basis will have a
distinct advantage over competitors. This requires providing real-time tools
and information to their customers, CSRs and contact center management. And
while today real-time CRM may provide a competitive advantage, as more and
more companies adopt this philosophy and put it into practice, real-time CRM
will become a competitive imperative just to keep up with market
expectations.
Ross Sedgewick is director of product marketing for Siemens Global eCRM
Solutions (www.siemens.com).
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