A return to the corner shop?

Until recently, businesses would nod sagely about the need to ‘improve the customer ‘journey’ yet, when it came to taking investment decisions, the harsh reality was that the customer would be all but forgotten in the drive for greater operational efficiencies and a better bottom line.

Within the call centre itself, this was reflected in a quantitative focus on productivity – how many calls are being made in the shortest answer times – rather than a more qualitative assessment of how many were being dealt with satisfactorily at first pass.

In short, for most it has been a case of lip service rather than customer service.

Today, however, the picture is changing, driven by a number of factors. Markets have become more global and competitive, giving customers greater choice. At the same time, with the advent of such information tools as the internet, customers have become more knowledgeable and promiscuous, ever more willing to ‘vote with their feet’ if the product or service fails to meet expectations.

And finally, with products becoming increasingly commoditised, there is a growing need to differentiate the business through the quality of its service and support.

The development of CRM

Over the past half-century, as businesses have expanded, so the essential familiarity and customer understanding typified by the old ‘corner shop’ has been lost. Indeed, it could be said that this has been one of the main drivers behind the emergence of customer relationship management (CRM) technologies, in that true CRM will have been achieved when the enterprise has the equivalent level of knowledge about their customers as the archetypal local shopkeeper.

This kind of familiarity is something to which any consumer can positively relate and any corporate aspire, yet in some ways the technology has yet to catch in delivering the experience both desire. It must be recognised, for example, that CRM has received more than its share of poor publicity, as implementations have fallen short of the high expectations of the marketplace.

One of the main reasons for such failures is the fact that CRM solutions have focused almost exclusively on the acquisition of customer information Yet the most sophisticated database will be of limited value unless that information can be accessed and used intelligently at the point of customer contact.

Integrated approach

The result is that there has been something of a reality check among end users in particular. Though still seen as a worthwhile goal, earlier misconceptions that CRM by itself might provide a ‘quick fix’ have now been superceded by a more sanguine recognition that this needs to be part of a broader approach, encompassing both infrastructure change and putting in place the right people and processes.

So what steps should a business take if it wishes to derive both the operational and external service benefits from a more intimate understanding of the customer?

• ‘In the customer’s shoes’

If the objective is primarily about improving the customer experience, at the outset the business should put itself in the customer’s shoes, in order to determine how easy or difficult it is to communicate and resolve issues with the organisation. At first sight this may seem blindingly obvious, yet few companies take this step back in seeking to remove the barriers to enhancing customer response.

Having identified those parts of each process which hinder rapid and effective problem resolution, the ideal solution should incorporate the following elements:

• Interaction management

Every business has the necessary knowledge of each customer: the key is to be able to access and react appropriately to that data at the point of interaction and decision-making. In a contact centre environment in particular, in which the interaction is not face-to-face but primarily telephony-based, this relies on identification and qualification of data to initiate that recognition.

In order to be able to make this essential link between the caller and the information held on them within the business therefore, the chosen solution must seamlessly combine the database management capability of a CRM system with some form of customer interaction management (CIM).

This provides two key benefits. By understanding who that customer is and predicting why the customer might be calling, it becomes possible to connect them immediately with a call agent with the appropriate skills for dealing with their anticipated enquiry – the principle of ‘one and done’. Further, it enables the delivery of differentiated services levels: if the caller is identified as a premium customer, for example, they can be answered within an agreed call time ahead of others ahead of them in the queue and put through directly to their account manager.

This directly benefits the customer, as their problems are solved quickly and at first pass. And for the company this is operationally more effective, as fewer agents are required to deal with a given level of customer enquiries.

In a commercial environment where developing the existing client base is much less costly than converting new prospects, the ability intelligently to use trend analysis to predict customer behaviour also provides the basis for more proactive marketing capability designed both to promote loyalty and encourage upselling.

A simple example: a travel agent who booked a skiing holiday for a customer who has replied positively to a subsequent satisfaction survey, can automatically call up the relevant customer data to market a similar holiday to them at the appropriate time the following year.

• Presence management

One of the key tools in extending contact centre capability across the broader enterprise is presence management. This breaks down the historic barriers between the contact centre and other departments, by providing visibility of the status of any employee throughout the business.

If the call centre agent needs to resolve an accounts query, for example, they can see the availability of a suitable member of the finance team and, at the click of a button, put the call on hold, briefly explain the nature of the query and then connect the caller – resulting in a ‘warm’ introduction in which the customer does not have to repeat the enquiry.

Equally, if the customer dials that employee directly, presence management enables the call to be forwarded to wherever they are situated, whether in another company location, home office, on the mobile or a partner’s extension. Further, if they are not immediately available, a voicemail message can be emailed to the recipient as an alert, enabling an early response.

• Single comprehensive modular platform

Historically, contact centre operators have acquired point solutions to deal with point problems, building up a complex infrastructure of multiple licensing and maintenance contracts in which the various applications do not talk to each other, resulting in a slow and ‘clunky’ customer response.

In adopting a single unified communications platform based on open systems, the end-user reduces the reliance on multiple third party vendors, significantly reducing cost and management complexity. Importantly, an open-systems solution, which can integrate with a CRM package or other third party applications already in place, will also help leverage existing investment.

Few businesses either need, or can afford up-front, the range of technologies. By adopting a solution based on a modular architecture, the end-user can invest in such differing applications as

automatic call distribution (ACD) skills-based routing, interactive voice response (IVR), unified messaging, predictive dialling, multimedia recording and more, so cost-effectively addressing nearly any contact centre or enterprise requirement, at a pace which suits the broader business strategy.

A word of warning here. There is a view, still commonly held, that ‘customers don’t like self-service technologies’. As research has shown, the reality is that users have no problem with the inherent technology, but rather with poor self service implementations – those which are designed purely to save the business money, with little or no concern for the customer experience.

As a result, as IVR and speech recognition becomes more reliable and practical, they increasingly form part of a company’s ability to satisfy demanding customers looking for rapid and effective response to their needs via the communications channel of their choice.

A balanced response

Today, from both a commercial and technology perspective, call centre managers must put in place more qualitative measures which also look at the customer experience and the impact of each call on customer satisfaction. However, the technology is now available to enable them achieve the tricky balancing act of keeping call centre costs to a minimum, at the same time achieving ‘corner shop’ service quality.

For the corner shop-keeper, customers are real people with real needs which are well-recognised and understood. The enterprise looking to differentiate their offering through superior, individualised service, must also now recognise that it is no longer a numbers game.