The Front And Back
Office: Connecting The Customer Dots
BY PATRICK J. SMITH, YELLOWBRICK SOLUTIONS, INC.
Many companies will argue that customers are their
most important asset, especially those whose future
business is likely to appreciate. They also realize
that electronic CRM (eCRM) is evolving in definition
and practice and as a result, the associated technical
challenges are numerous and difficult to overcome.
In the back office, customer data originates from
multiple sources and is stored across disparate data
stores, while front-office systems are often
channel-specific and do not interact with the
back-office systems, which results in inconsistent
customer information that is difficult to collate.
Furthermore, business intelligence tools are used to
analyze information, but lack the ability to
operationally drive interactions in the contact center
and at other touchpoints.
Corporate efforts to be more effective in managing
relationships and maximize sales opportunities on
every communication channel are evident in the large
investments in personalization technology for digital
channels such as Web and e-mail as well as business
intelligence tools designed to gain greater
marketplace insight. However, for most companies, the
contact center is the central point of eCRM,
accounting for 80 percent of customer interactions.
Ironically, the build-out of online channels has been
largely conducted independent of the contact center
communication strategy, leaving these digital channels
out of sync.
The rate at which customers are adopting
multichannel interactions is increasing, as is the
expectation that when they change channels, they can
pick up where they left off and close the loop. This
increasingly popular perception is turning up the heat
on companies to synchronize the call center dialog
with online channels using strategic back-office data.
The goal of obtaining a single view of a customer
is unlikely to be realized if the enterprise can only
see a percentage of the picture. There is a new
approach, however: the mid-office platform that can
shorten the gap between the front and back offices.
The way it works can be compared to other traditional
avenues.
Multichannel Woes
Web and e-mail personalization applications are
generally coupled to dedicated, if open, databases,
each with customer-specific information. These data
are separate from information available in the
database that supports the contact center. This means
that customer interactions on one channel do not carry
over to other channels.
Deploying customer data warehouses to address the
shift from products to consumers and centralized data
provides more effective one-to-one cross-selling and
upselling. But channel-specific personalization
technology ultimately promotes collecting additional
relevant customer data that are stored outside the
warehouse -- a striking contrast to the advocacy of
the single view of the customer. Effectively managing
relationships requires three problems to be addressed:
- Customer information that is stored in a
marketing data warehouse as well as other service,
sales and billing databases, which does not
provide a complete and timely view of the customer
and prevents it from being used to aid real-time
decisioning.
- Personalization rules to drive scripts and
content must be crafted for each of the contact
center, Web and other channels, leaving
opportunities for gaps where customers can receive
an offer at the contact center, which is
unavailable on the Web since the site has not been
updated yet.
- Touchpoints do not interrelate, which prevents
interactions on one channel from having an impact
on another.
Campaign Management: The Traditional Approach
During the boom of the late nineties, companies were
looking for new ways to acquire customers and
traditional campaign management technology was viewed
as the engine of CRM to drive product-focused
campaigns. This involved connecting a campaign
management application to an existing customer data
warehouse for offer management.
While this allowed the reuse of the existing
corporate data warehouse, attempts to integrate these
batch-oriented tools with the contact centers and
other online (live) channels have had little success.
Campaign management applications lack the ability to
seamlessly synchronize inbound and outbound
communications because they rely on the concept of
list-pushing. This is the process of generating a list
of individuals to receive a specific offer. The list
is then forwarded to the touchpoint where it is
updated by the channel application and then sent back
to the database for reconciliation. This makes
closed-loop marketing very difficult, resulting in
such inconsistencies as trying to cross-sell a
customer a DVD player to complement the television
recently purchased but returned due to poor customer
service.
The direct mail model upon which campaign
management tools are based does not scale to fit the
real-time multichannel model, and expensive software
integration is required to tie in back-office data and
front-office touchpoints. This has proven to have a
high degree of risk in addition to being costly and
time-consuming with limited ROI.
Multichannel Applications: The Enterprise
Approach
Enterprise CRM application suites are newer, more
mature and offer analytics, personalization, contact
center and other touchpoint applications wrapped
around a proprietary marketing database. The
enterprise approach, when integrated with an existing
data infrastructure, can provide customers with a more
consistent experience across channels.
Dedicated analytical and campaign-management
applications are used to segment customers and a
campaign-manager app is used to configure rules that
will be executed on each channel. The apps are coupled
or "hard-wired" to a prebuilt data model that is
included in the package. This single data model will
run on most database platforms and provides each
application the same view of customer data. The single
view also allows all channels to present the same
message to the customer and the campaign-management
application provides real-time decisioning within a
single channel to drive the dialog during a customer
interaction.
Message delivery is API based and can be complex to
integrate with third-party touchpoint tools, albeit
superior to pushing lists. The data model is
proprietary, however, and usually cannot be extended
since the applications are designed to work with the
data in a specific format. ETL (extract,
transformation and load) tools must be used to
populate the database as a scheduled batch process and
the batch nature of data access prevents the database
from having a real-time view of customer data across
corporate divisions. The campaign application can only
change a call center script, e-mail or banner ad after
the analytical database is updated, which is fine for
offer management, but may not take into account the
affect of other information about customer activity
elsewhere in the enterprise, such as in sales or
service.
Eager vendors of enterprise CRM suites have wisely
employed IPO proceeds to assemble a collection of
nonintegrated applications. While these remain
campaign focused, the combination of tools into a
suite more closely addresses the shift in thinking
from campaigns to message consistency on multiple
channels, so if a high-risk customer is appropriate
for a retention offer, the same message can be
delivered on every channel.
Campaigns To Context: The Platform Approach
Market pressures are accelerating a shift in thinking
from pure campaigns to strategic dialogs or customer
context management. This is the ability to remember
the customer in the context of the relationship
as it spans product marketing, sales and service and
build on the previous interaction.
The mid-office marketing platform is a unique
approach that combines customer context rules engine
technology deployed on top of a software platform. The
platform is a framework to which analytical tools,
back-office databases and front-office touchpoints,
including the high-traffic contact center, are
connected without costly integration. The mid-office
marketing platform delivers all the proven capability
of campaign management, but extends to context
management by allowing the back office and the front
office to operate in sync.
Platforms sit between the databases in the back
office and touchpoint systems and are typically
equipped with a series of software adapters that serve
two purposes -- data access and message delivery.
Much information can be found in the marketing data
warehouse, but additional customer information can be
found in contact center databases for service, sales
and billing as well. The platform connects to multiple
databases via back-office adapters that combine, for
example, marketing information, service history and
billing data to provide a virtual real-time view of
customer data -- a real-time complete view can be used
for decisioning.
The customer context engine executes business rules
on this real-time view and can make decisions on
individual data elements that are available through
any database on the enterprise network. Based on the
outcome of rules, the appropriate messages for the
customer are sent to the current channel with which
the customer is interacting.
Since touchpoint technologies vary greatly in
implementation (contact centers use scripting whereas
Web sites deliver graphical content), the exact
rendering of the message must be performed differently
depending on the channel. Touchpoint adapters in the
platform engage during a customer session to translate
relevant messages from the customer context engine
into a format specifically displayable at the
touchpoint. This can be a contact center script or an
e-mail message.
The mid-office marketing platform allows companies
to engage with customers across channels by:
- Employing analytics to create business
intelligence from the myriad customer information
that spans customer service, sales, billing and
other areas.
- Creating relationship rule sets that govern the
dialog and maximize service, sales and marketing
opportunities.
- Connecting rule sets to business intelligence
and to multiple back-office databases with
real-time, native access.
- Employing a real-time interaction engine across
channels that delivers content or messages and
collects responses in real-time to close the loop
on the dialog at every opportunity.
- Connecting to the front office via a set of
touchpoint adapters.
In this paradigm, companies would automatically
recognize a customer's position in the value chain at
the contact center and other channels, and would
engage in an appropriate real-time dialog. Context
management allows companies to go beyond the coveted
cross-sell/upsell credit card offer to providing
customers with a plethora of relevant information such
as an opportunity to check the status of their most
recent service request or an opportunity to sign up
for online billing.
There are several advantages to the platform
approach. The first advantage is the ability to use
the customer context (the complete picture of the
relationship) in the decisioning process that drives
the conversation: multiple datasets, one customer,
data access on the fly. The only other way to achieve
the complete view is to ensure that every actionable
piece of information is available in the warehouse,
and that is unrealistic. The second advantage is the
ability to configure a single set of business rules
used drive the relationship, regardless of the
channel. This can provide contact center
representatives with information used to follow-up
with customers on their latest Web interactions, in
real-time. Perhaps the most appealing thing about the
platform approach is the ability to scale, as the
enterprise needs dictate, even if this means starting
with one channel and expanding by connecting new
touchpoints or databases to the platform. This is a
low-cost-of-entry and low-risk approach to CRM.
Look At The Risks And Choose An Approach
At the end of the day, effective CRM will add value to
the bottom line, and synchronizing the contact center
with other channels is a key element. The investment
and timeframe to implement a complete solution depends
on the requirements and projected enhancements to your
business model. Integrating a campaign management
system is a perfect way to more accurately target
market, and while integration can be expensive, the
ROI is a factor of the current marketing expense. The
enterprise plan delivers a lot of functionality, but
this is an investment in a technology as well as a
vendor. The tools are maturing, with the mid-office
platform being the newest evolution and a good
strategy to control cost and risk.
Patrick J. Smith is vice president of Product
Management for YellowBrick Solutions, Inc. He oversees
the company's product management team responsible for
product vision, definition and market positioning.
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