CRM
will continue to be an unsatisfying investment to executives until it
enlarges its focus to include customer service and support. Merging
analytics and the customer loyalty paradigm into the sales force
automation model disguises the fact that enterprise culture doesn’t really understand customer service, and remains tightly focused on top-line revenues that derive from the actual sale.
“Customers are asking for technologies to enable them
to accomplish four things: quickly understand a customer’s intentions
in contacting the contact center; locate the information that pertains
to the service request; analyze the best “next step” to take with the
customer; and capture an opportunity or lead where appropriate. To this
end, analytics and business rule engines will play a more significant
role in this process, and collaboration technologies will be essential
to connect employees and customers as part of the service experience.”
– Service and Support Leader Corner
But customer loyalty offers can only work
with customers who stay with you in the first place, and customer
retention itself follows from genuine service and support. Despite some
rhetoric, the CRM development industry as a whole remains locked in its focus on SFA and analytics, and the Forgotten Space of customer service and support continues to fall outside of development plans.
“Companies give lip service to the issue and say they
want to improve customer service, but budgets for training and salaries
remain static,” – Five Tips To Optimize New Service-Rep CRM Training
The market remains fragmented, with differing degrees of service and support capabilities offered from the major CRM vendors. Siebel has in recent years been the strongest in this area, appearing top in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report covering CRM
customer service and support suite vendors. Amdocs also figured as a
strong competitor, with the drawback that the company targets the
telecommunications vertical.
”’There’s more of a fragmentation in the
marketplace,’ said Michael Maoz, distinguished analyst with Gartner and
author of the report. ‘The idea that there’s a customer service and
support suite, that hasn’t panned out. It’s too complex an issue the
way a business achieves customer service excellence. We’re not seeing
any one vendor or any one vendor type able to create a full suite.’” – Gartner ranks customer service software
Owners of Amdocs Clarify owners, who by and
large are neglected outside the telco space, can make great gains in
service and support with Dovetail CRM,
which is developed specifically to enhance the Clarify install overall.
Dovetail supplies replacement applications for all the Amdocs products,
leaving only the database core, with which all Dovetail apps seamlessly
interact.
The greatest sea change in CRM
development is the shift in the call center from cost center to profit
center, and the concurrent technological challenge to rewire the
enterprise to customer-centricity. Corporate culture remains the
hardest thing to change, and focus on top line revenues forces
customer-centricity into a front-office model, rather than a
whole-company service approach.
“Customers expect a seamless experience, one that
reaches across channels, whether they contact a company first via the
Web or online, they want to be able to continue that process in the
other channel. Additionally, “secret” service is enabling this process,
acting as an unseen person in the communication loop aiding the
experience, whether it’s through proactive chat when someone abandons
an online shopping cart or a premier customer struggling with the IVR. Service avoidance is also emerging as customers are turning to communities of their peers to help solve problems.” – Social networks forcing customer service change
Analysts and experts continue to lecture the
enterprise in the nature of customer service, and the nature of the
customer. Companies learn slowly, and even though it is well
demonstrated that scrimping on customer care backfires, in the end, as we suggest often, it may be the saturation of the enterprise in collaboration systems that changes the culture into one of truly caring for customers.
