Innoveer IDs Contact Center/CRM Integration Benefits, Challenges, Solutions

Customer care can be compared to a vehicle. If so then customer relationship management is analogous to the engine, routing to the transmission, differential, and axles, and customer interaction management to the wheels. If customer care is to run smoothly all of these components must be integrated so that they work together automatically and in response to driver actions.

 

TMCnet interviewed Innoveer, a leading CRM, customer strategy and solutions consultancy, to get its take on contact center/CRM integration including CIM. Here is the interview we had with Bernard Drost, Innoveer’s (News - Alert) chief technology officer:

 

TMCnet: What is and what are the benefits of contact center/CRM integration?

BD: Some of the benefits from the integration include:

1.         A 360-degree view of what is going on with the customer/prospect/lead and the ability to see the activity history, assets (bought product), tickets (problems or enhancement requests), opportunities, and participation in marketing campaigns

2.         No double entry of data and the mistakes that this could cause, thus the flow would be opportunity -> quote -> order -> cash. The order would no longer be in contact center/CRM but in an ERP (enterprise resource planning) system. With integration the product, quantity, and discounts would automatically flow instead of having to retype the data

4.         High data quality. One can link data to the same customers/prospects/leads and not have activities and opportunities attached to different accounts when they are actually the same

5.         Integration to CTI (News - Alert)/IVR for a screen pop so that the call center representative [agent] does not have to ask for a customer's name again, which makes the customer feel good and contributes to increased customer satisfaction

6.         Integration to different channels such as SMS and the Web that can also lead to better customer satisfaction

TMCnet: What issues do you see in contact center/CRM integration and what are the causes of those issues?

BD:     There are several issues and causes of them:

 

1.         What is the system of record? This only relates to master data like Accounts, Contacts, Addresses and such. It has to be determined which system holds the truth about a company and persons you correspond with and on what address. The cause is that different people own different application areas (CRM/ERP/etc.) and they all want to own their data. Ultimately the CIO/CTO is the overall decision maker but they may be too far removed from the day-to-day operation of the systems.

2.         Data structures are different between CRM/ERP/Marketing Systems/the Web which causes long data mapping exercises and complex transformations.

3.         Proprietary protocols. If a company has an older system that does not support Web services, a one-off integration may need to be built instead of using more generic methods like Web services or integration hubs/buses.

4.         Performance. When transactions are flowing in high volume it causes performance challenges and could become an issue. High cost because lots of hardware may be needed to support the volume could also be the cause.

5.         Too many exceptions. Too many rules that govern processes are doomed because it causes too many human interventions to resolve exceptions and thus bogs down the process and integration.

6.         High costs. Because of the issues above, contact center/CRM integration can be costly

7.         Determining what level the integration should be at. This means do we keep it at the header level of an order or all the details, or only the open activities/tickets or all? Besides the number of records mentioned in point 4 this has bearing on the size of the record. This is especially relevant with XML. When XML messages are big Web service becomes slow to interpret and query the transactions.

 

8.         Frequency. Is the integration real-time or batch? Either causes major or minor integration challenges

TMCnet: Has the economic conditions, the rise of multiple channels, and the renewed emphasis on quality impacted contact center/CRM integration and if so how?

BD:     The economic conditions have many companies focused on sales and marketing, so it has increased the emphasis on that specific integration point. Because most integrations are fairly costly, all others are taking a back seat, although now is a perfect time to gain competitive edge on your customers by spending in this area.

Multiple channels have always been one of the main focuses of contact center/CRM. Web/chat/SMS/phone always needs to be integrated so that the customer can choose how they do business with you. Without a Web presence, nowadays, it would be impossible to operate. Chat has become less important, I believe, but SMS and the ability to look at your bank account balance from your iPhone (News - Alert) seems to have grown in popularity.

Quality has been the bane of contact center/CRM, mostly because the data is being pulled from many places such as ERP/Marketing/Outside list providers and somehow the data never lines up perfectly. Then the way people search for records in contact center/CRM is often inadequate. People are always in a hurry, so instead of really looking for a record, the representative creates a new record and now a dupe is created. Stringent processes are needed to counteract this.

TMCnet: Customer interaction management solutions have been identified as key tools to enable contact center/CRM integration. Discuss generically the benefits, and any challenges and if so what are the solutions to those challenges, of CIM?

BD: Like contact center/CRM, many people define CIM differently but at its core it manages every interaction between a company and its customer/prospect/lead/etc. Additionally, I believe the concept has been around for a long time but then it was called collaboration or portal. What it does define more clearly is how a customer can communicate with the company. New channels have been identified, such as SMS/iPhone, and others have fallen away in importance such as call me now and chat.

The challenges with CIM are these:

1.         What exactly is it?
2.         Cost of integrating all channels (implementation/hardware/support)
3.         Security issues when exposing parts of internal systems to the outside world (Web/mobile/SMS)
4.         The question is always do you want to know everything or is less data okay?
5.         Interpreting all the information. Without BI (business intelligence) /analytics tools to really slice and dice the information there is really no need to capture all of the interactions

TMCnet: Discuss what is new and what is coming down the pike from the various CIM solutions suppliers. Discuss how these tools improve the contact center/CRM integration, including handling specific issues.

BD: SaaS (News - Alert)/cloud computing are the major hot topics (besides Twitter/social CRM, of course). What I see is that more and more companies are rethinking how to best approach system implementations (in-house or in the cloud), how to migrate what they have now to the cloud, and especially security. Everybody seems to be pretty lax about Google (News - Alert) being down or another cloud service not working. Everyone seems to think it is okay that these services can be down for a few hours. If you are a small company and all your applications are in the cloud and it is raining (you cannot access your apps) you are dead in the water.

 

Of course contact center/CRM is often not considered as mission critical as your invoicing system, but I believe this opinion is changing. Especially in an economic downturn, sales is becomes more and more important.

Another new development, although not new but just a different angle, is that everything needs to be instantaneous (SMS/iPhone) and that you can share the good and the bad with your fellow customers (especially the bad) with Social CRM. We will see a backlash, I believe, because at this moment with blogs and wikis there is too little oversight and rumors can be spread very quickly. Governance will be key.

Lastly speech recognition will eventually make a comeback (navigation system in cars and voice controlled and IVRs will soon be as well – it is already being done but often the recognition quality is still bad) as well as BI/analytics (now a bit on the sidelines because of cost). With all the data being captured, companies will need good analytics to actually make use of the data.