Nowadays in CRM
we see great strides made in analytics, which serves both to help the
enterprise determine the value of each customer, and also to create a
personalized experience for each customer across all the enterprise
touchpoints.
We don’t manage or control our customers, they control
us. And they know it…Customers know they have choices and they are
using this power to get their way. They are demanding transparency into
companies. They are demanding responsiveness. They are demanding highly
personalized value. – “Manage or Deliver?“
Analytics, and CRM itself, are fairly new technologies; they almost seem still in their infancy when we compare the wealth of social networking lessons
coming from the Web, and when we contemplate the customer’s blooming
empowerment. An older technology, skills-based routing, is on the verge
now of being inducted into the embrace of CRM analytics:
As time went on, the company started to notice they
were able to conduct more effective campaigns if they matched customers
carefully with customer service agents or sales people.
Using analytics, the company is able to determine the
best agent for the call not only on basic skills, but on a host of
other factors that increase the likelihood of the customer buying from
the agent…skills-based routing is a technology that has changed little
over the decades. The concept is simple—match the type of caller to the
person with the needed skills to service that caller, such as language,
product knowledge or a knack for salvaging troubled customer
relationships or soothing irate callers.
It may be that the time has come for skills-based
routing to share the spotlight. Over the last half decade, the concept
of using analytics in call centers and CRM systems has become more popular and prevalent. – “Good Customer Service for Dummies?”
Concurrently a new theme is arising, that of Customer Experience Management – CEM - said to be currently the fastest growing executive title in enterprise management teams. But CEM is still under the radar in terms of mainstream fame:
My personal theory is that CEM hasn’t taken off because technology vendors haven’t wrapped it into a package. I can definitely buy a CRM
system or a Business Intelligence system or Services Oriented
Architecture technology, but who-apart from the specialized Web and
customer service vendors—offers “CEM Software”? It’s not merely that
people selling these systems have marketing budgets to promote the
notion, although that’s part of it. It’s also that businesspeople
prefer problems they can solve by buying something. – “Customer Experience Management“
The enterprise attempting to become fully
customer-centric is really trying to emulate the customer relationship
that the small shopkeeper possesses naturally. However, the large
companies have no choice but to achieve this through institutional,
managerial, and technological means. Technology thus becomes important
for the ways in which it either enslaves or liberates the enterprise.
Technology is the part of the equation that we play a role in at Dovetail.
You’ll recall that yesterday we offered the opinion that technology can
impose a dictatorship on the business processes of an enterprise.
At
Dovetail, we like to make democratic software, with functions that the
ordinary customer-facing agent can use for greater freedom of
execution, albeit often with a little (fairly simple) help from IT. We
think in terms of the voluntaristic nature of people: most people want
to help others, to an extent, and most support personnel are trying to
save the day for their users and customers. We’re the same way
ourselves; this is why our product support is so acclaimed, because our
engineers are so deeply into helping our users.
Last week
we also related the story of the unnamed tech support agent who created
perhaps a lifelong customer by a simple act of service: sending some
replacement parts at no charge. This cascaded out into a blog post by
the customer about the company:
The point of this blog is that the CRM was so above what I had expected, that I had to write about just as I did when Vonage’s CRM was so abysmal which also leads to one of the most basic pieces of information regarding marketing:
1.
When 1 user has an experience that is strongly positive or negative,
they are likely to directly or indirectly influence 250 people.
2.
For every one person who has a positive or negative experience, there
are probably 99 other people who don’t say a word to the company, but
still directly or indirectly influence at least 25 people. – “Jabbering with Jabra: What happens when CRM goes right?”
So in the end, what this article says is this:
enterprises at their very top levels are striving mightily to put
systems in place that will retain customers by giving them support and
service; and at the same time, down at the field levels, where the most
crucial plays are often made in customer retention, agents are facing
customers directly, and require the most powerful tools, and the most
flexible software options, they can get.
Simple enhancements,
that’s our point, and that’s where we aim our products. We bring to the
users of a Clarify™ database system, for example, the ability for an
agent to create a custom Web portal for a customer case file. Or the
ease of attaching documents to a customer record instead of having a
multitude of emails archived clumsily. Or for agents to do their own
research and make their own customized reports. Empowering
customer-facing agents to the fullest extent within enterprise-wide
protocols is a key to customer service. Software makes it happen.
