Oh that Forgotten Space!
How much money do companies leave on the table by not utilizing their
customer service and support functionality, or integrating it fully
with the rest of their CRM system, and their management protocols?
CRM consultant Richard Boardman tells an extraordinary tale of profit made simply from using capability already on hand within the CRM system. In his article titled “Productive Afterthought”, he speaks of the kind of return on investment that can come simply from utilizing the system.
“Revenues generated through the service department
have increased dramatically. The investment in the system has already
been repaid multiple times in the first year, and are projected to
repay the investment in the technology and our services around twenty
times in the first three years of operation.”
Boardman recounts how these large profits inherent in the existing service functionality were simply being neglected.
“Interestingly the service area was a little bit of an
afterthought having implemented the sales and marketing capabilities a
year earlier. The service area already had a system in situ, and it was
unclear what sort of improvement could be made. It was only after some
speculative initial analysis that we uncovered the true potential for
the technology. It all goes to show that some of the biggest pay-back
areas aren’t necessarily the obvious ones.”
Boardman lists tangible and measurable gains
directly resulting from employing the service and support functions.
These comprise a Snapshot For the CTO that ought to get any enterprise’s attention:
-Significant up-lift in warranty work billing
-Higher conversion of warranty renewals
-Improved resolution of calls at first level, thus:
-Reduced “on-site visit” calls
-Reduced costs through less reliance on third party engineers
-Increased efficiency in controlling loan machines, thus:
-Reduced capital needed to be held in loan stock
-More effective distribution of parts to jobs, thus:
-Reduced ‘emergency’ courier costs
-Improved customer service: better prioritization; fewer calls falling between the cracks
-More appropriate pricing of warranty contracts, reflecting the true cost of servicing per product
-New credit control procedures, thus:
-Reduced debtor days
-Fewer issues escalating, thus:
-Reduced management intervention
-Improved marketing through acquisition of better customer data
-Enhanced reporting capabilities, thus:
-Increasingly finer tuning, cost reductions, revenue increases, customer service enhancements
-Virtuous circle
We’ve
said this story is extraordinary, and it is in terms of how rarely
enterprises awaken to the hidden benefits lying dormant in their
CS&S functionalities. But we shouldn’t imply that the story
surprises us. We know at Dovetail Software that the neglect of customer
service and support (CS&S) is endemic to CRM, this is why we call it the “Forgotten Space”.
Even
marketing people seem taken by surprise sometimes that servicing and
supporting the customers you have results in profit that isn’t
discounted against the large cost of acquisition of new customers. Even
guerrilla marketers seem surprised.
In an Article that asks, “Is PR Really
About Driving Sales?”, and that suggests “The best comms programs are
those that have nothing to do with customer acquisition.”, the usual
focus of marketing efforts to bring new customers is overturned:
“Make it great for your existing customers and everything else falls into place. Your primary audience is no longer WSJ
readers, it’s no longer TwIT listeners, it’s Bill, a frustrated dad in
Des Moines who keeps reporting your product’s bugs and emailing
customer support, but never hears anything back [...] Maybe the best
comms programs are indeed those that talk to Bill first.”
The piece concludes with the most telling point of all, about the forgotten space:
“Now, sadly, there’s a whole other issue here. It’s a
bureaucratic one. Who owns the relationship with Bill? More often than
not, it’s not PR.” Media Guerrilla
Exactly. Who’s going to galvanize the entire
company to claim the forgotten space? Does marketing have the clout? IT
department? Sales? Customer service and support is an area that laps
into many disciplines within the enterprise, and rarely is there one
department that has the control to initiate full change in enterprise
procedures and culture – even the charismatic leader will fail to
inspire all agents fully if the infrastructure prohibits their
empowerment.
The forgotten space can be energized by any of
its stakeholders however, either from top-down command, or bottom-up
initiative, or variants in between.
“Contact center solutions provider Amcat and research
and analysis firm Datamonitor recently coordinated a study that
revealed that more than 63 percent of contact center professionals felt
that data sharing between the contact center and other parts of the
organization was very important, and that it would benefit customers,
agents, and the management.” Connecting to the Contact Center
Best use of CS&S of course requires total
buy-in from the enterprise in all its parts. Fortunately, these are
times in which the enterprise is striving to integrate all its
knowledge and culture in real time throughout all its activity – this
is so perfect a task for software.
We don’t despair at the
money left on the mousepad by the neglect of the forgotten space. We
see that software that liberates is the only software with a future,
and that “conscious” companies are the only ones that will be able to
satisfy customers in the long run. We keep building products like Dovetail CRM that liberate customer-facing agents while at the same time integrating enterprise-wide with its knowledge systems; and the CRM users continue to integrate, collaborate, and innovate – about which much, much more to come.
