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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a term often overused and
frequently misunderstood in the contact center today. Ask any industry
technology vendor, and they'll tell you what CRM really means is you
should buy their products. CRM should not be viewed simply as a single
shrink-wrapped application. Instead, CRM represents a comprehensive
business strategy, of which any particular piece of software is only a
small component. The CRM strategy emphasizes the concept of customer
share-building business from each customer through repeat business and
long-term loyalty over traditional market share.
Doing It With CRM
CRM has two main themes: (1) Giving every customer the specialized quality
service they deserve regardless of how they choose to communicate with
your business. (2) Knowing as much about every customer as possible and
providing access to this information to the entire enterprise through
integrated and shared databases.
Historically, the principal method customers used to reach a company or
organization was the telephone; hence, the "call" center.
However, with the advent of the Internet and e-commerce, the number of
contact points between customer and enterprise has grown substantially:
telephone, fax, e-mail, Web, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and even
video over IP. These developments have led us to more appropriately refer
to the call center as the "contact" center. Datamonitor predicts
that over the next five years the number of Web-enabled contact centers in
the US will grow from 5,560 in 1998 to some 31,000 by 2003 -- representing
40% of all contact centers.
In today's contact centers, the leading Internet applications adopted
(most to least) are e-mail (automated e-mail response), Web chat, VoIP,
collaborative browsing, and Web call. And most Web-enabled contact centers
today have a combination of two or more of these applications.
Quality Management Moves To The Forefront
With the proliferation of new media and technologies, the issue of
training takes on even greater importance. Despite all of this new
technology, two-thirds of the cost of running a contact center remains
personnel, and training that labor force in this new environment will be
the contact center manager's greatest challenge.
In a November 1999 report, Datamonitor states that, "Providing
effective on-line customer service requires a higher skill set than
providing customer service over the phone since stronger reading and
writing skills are required. Agents will have to not only be able to read
and write well in real-time, but also to navigate the on-line service
application's interface quickly. Consequently, standards for performance
and service levels must be clearly defined and incorporated into the
training of such agents, and a significant amount of a call center's
resources will have to be devoted to accomplish these objectives."
The Role Of Logging And Monitoring
So where does logging and monitoring come in? And how can it help us
achieve the high standards of performance and service that have become so
essential? First, let's look at all the tools used in today's contact
center: IVR systems, ACDs, CTI servers, screen pops, predictive dialers,
intelligent call routers, and many more. To these we add the Internet:
e-mail, Web sites, chat capabilities, voice and video over IP, e-commerce,
and dynamic databases.
In the "good old days" of the early 90s, logging and
monitoring in the call center was relatively simple: you recorded incoming
or outgoing calls to verify transactions or to gather samples for quality
monitoring. Those days are gone forever. Today's multimedia contact
centers are doing more, and that means the agents are doing much more. The
contact center is now viewed as a strategically critical profit center, no
longer just a revenue-draining help desk. And the contact center manager's
role is increasingly vital to the future success of the organization.
In today's contact centers, the goal is to track and evaluate the
entire customer experience. If the customer is communicating with us about
an insurance policy, we want to capture every e-mail, Web chat, and
telephone conversation linked to that customer and his insurance policy.
We also want to evaluate the customer's experience in utilizing automated
systems, such as the IVR or call routing system. From the customer's
perspective, we want to see how well the agent is handling the call,
responding to the e-mail, or interacting with the customer over the
Internet. The role and importance for logging and monitoring in evaluating
these varying customer interactions has expanded significantly. The
ability to play back all customer interactions will enable contact center
managers to improve agent productivity and quality across all of these new
media, share customer feedback about products and services across the
organization, improve systems to make them more user-friendly and
efficient, and dramatically improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
The CTI Server Is Central
With multiple points of contact, an organization needs to have expanded IT
capabilities for linking legacy databases dynamically with the Web.
Furthermore, enterprises need a means of linking the varied forms of
interaction together to document and understand each individual customer.
Computer Telephony Integration, or CTI, is fast becoming the glue for
holding together this 360-degree view of the customer experience. Today's
CTI providers are positioning their solutions as a "universal
queue" for all forms of inbound and outbound media.
Essentially, e-mail and VoIP will be treated much like voice calls, and
will be funneled through the CTI server. By flagging each interaction, an
agent will be able to enter a customer code or ID number and pull up every
recorded call, screen session, e-mail, and any other data associated with
that customer. The CTI server will become the focal point for all of this
activity. All the various applications of the contact center will rely on
the CTI server as the information and traffic hub, and all will be
required to integrate with the server.
CTI + CRM = Superior Monitoring Of The Customer Experience
C.K. Prahalad, originator of the concept of "core competencies,"
recently stated that Internet users all combine to shift the balance of
market power decisively toward the consumer. In fact, customer
relationship management is the strategy that enables companies to shift
their sights from inside the organization to an external, more
customer-driven focus. For example, in any particular CRM experience, the
organization must ask: Did we handle the customer correctly? Could we have
done it in less time? Why did a solution require three calls, four
e-mails, three Web sessions, and one letter? Each step within the contact
center in dealing with this customer experience is recorded, scored and
tied to that single CRM case. In this way, we can identify root causes of
customer dissatisfaction as well as opportunities to improve business
processes, products, and the quality of customer interactions with the
company. We can also identify ways to automate services via VRUs/IVRs or
the Web, and provide training to overcome any service gaps which exist.
Close integration between today's CTI servers and the CRM applications of
tomorrow will be paramount for logging and quality management solution
providers to capture the complete customer experience across all forms of
communication.
A Better, More Challenging Job
Staffing the Web-enabled contact center will present managers with a new
set of challenges. Agents must acquire and maintain a much broader skill
set than before. In addition, managers will need to measure and match
agent skills to the medium that fits them best -- real-time typing for Web
chat vs. telephone service, for example -- rather than trying to train all
agents for all potential skills. Logging and monitoring will be central to
developing standards for performance and service levels so managers can
best identify which agents fit which tasks. The good news is that all
these new capabilities and technologies will make life much more
interesting for the contact center agent -- hopefully leading to greater
job satisfaction and lower turnover for the contact center.
The Ultimate In Customer Relationship Management
A key objective behind CRM is to have the ability to retrace and achieve a
complete picture of each customer's experience with a business, and to
understand what customers are saying about products and services. CRM data
is analyzed to improve business processes through customer feedback and
complaints about products, services, etc., as well as to understand how
each customer's request was handled. CRM will allow contact centers to
better determine where service breakdowns occur that lead to customer
dissatisfaction. This CRM information will be used to build customer
loyalty, keep existing customers, and attract new ones. Logging and
monitoring is central to this entire process. In fact, it will become an
essential component to any CRM strategy by allowing contact centers to
essentially re-enact the customer experience. Logging and monitoring will
answer important questions, such as what exactly what was said or what
action was actually taken on behalf of this customer. CRM data alone is
only as good as the notes entered into the CRM application. However, link
a recording to that interaction, and you now have a very powerful CRM
solution.
Partnerships Are Key To Future Success
For the future, enterprises should carefully consider the long-term goals
of the contact center and how recording and quality management
applications fit into that plan. CTI integration capabilities and their
importance to contact center performance cannot be overstated. As contact
center managers face these challenges, an essential criterion to evaluate
is how close a recording vendor's technical partnerships are with the
leading CTI and CRM vendors. Is there an existing, comprehensive technical
integration, or is it simply marketing hype? Does the vendor have existing
customers with a core environment similar to yours? Does the recording
vendor have the CTI and systems integration capabilities to make it all
work in any customer environment? Ask these questions, and ask vendors to
show you, not just tell you. Decisions made now will impact the future
importance of your contact center and the competitive position of your
company.
Summary
In essence, the role of logging and monitoring in the emerging contact
center environment is to track, record, and provide applications for
evaluating all the activity discussed above. Logging and monitoring
evaluates the entire customer experience with an external, customer-driven
focus, and then identifies what opportunities exist to improve services,
products, and business practices in order to achieve greater customer
loyalty. How this is achieved will continue to evolve and change, but the
core concept will always remain the same: Capture it, analyze it, and
improve it.
Jackie Wiedner is director of applications for NICE
Systems. NICE Systems is a leading global provider of integrated
digital recording and quality management solutions. NICE's innovative
solutions help customers improve their business by effectively recording,
storing, evaluating and managing voice communications, call data, desktop
screens and video. NICE serves the business needs of multiple markets,
primarily customer contact centers, financial institutions, air traffic
control (ATC) sites, public safety centers, and closed circuit television
(CCTV) security installations.
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