February 2004

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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