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Waiting for the Great Leap?
Executive Briefing, Issue 5, callcentres.net - June 2007
Customer Relationship Management software has long been touted as an ideal solution for the contact centre. But some commentators now believe CRM has had its day and must give way to other applications that offer agents assistance to help customers, not process to drive sales.
JANE HAD A SAVINGS account and a mortgage with her bank and visited its web site to look for a new credit card.
Jane spent a few minutes browsing the site and then got most of the way through an application form for the card. But with just a question or two left, Jane paused and then stopped entering data into the form.
A minute or two later, Jane left the site and instead moved on to a rival bank’s site where she completed a form and eventually secured her new credit card.
Both banks run Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Yet the bank with which Jane already held a mortgage was unable to use its CRM to intervene and coax the customer to complete the form. Indeed, the bank’s CRM software, its contact centre and all of its customer service professionals were unable to help Jane in any way because they were completely oblivious to the fact she was browsing the bank’s web site in the first place.
This kind of scenario, which companies across many industries admit is being played out thousands of times every day, has the customer service industry wondering about CRM and its role in the contemporary contact centre.
This renewed analysis of CRM’s role comes partly from the fact so many customer interactions now take place in the largely anonymous environment of the Internet or interactive voice response (IVR) systems. It is also being fuelled by less-than-satisfactory CRM experiences for customers and contact centres alike.
“CRM has had a lot of bad press because it has not delivered,” says Ann Burns, Accenture Australia’s Managing Executive for CRM.
Allison Higgins-Miller of CRM vendor RightNow believes this is because CRM’s focus on sales process and selling more to customers is hostile to what customers actually want. “The majority of traditional CRM systems are focused on what the organisation wants from the people they are interacting with,” she says. “It operates from the organisation out, rather than delivering what the customer wants from the organisation.”
CRM may also be an inappropriate tool for many contact centres, says Accenture’s Burns. “One fundamental people overlook is the difference between sales and service,” she says. “People think that if you are on the phone you should be able to up-sell and cross-sell. But sales people and service people are fundamentally different and have different motivations. Asking them to blend roles is not always possible or successful.”
Further, customer reaction to the experience on offer is not always good. Burns says that in the UK some contact centres are now offering their customers the chance to opt out of any up-sell or cross-sell activity to counter hostile reactions to CRM-driven offers. That hostility comes from the fact that for all the good intentions expressed in the name “CRM,” the software is generally introduced in order to help an organisation sell more. Customers recognise this and are fighting back while contact centres are realising that CRM is there to increase sales, but not to increase customer satisfaction and may therefore not be entirely suitable for their needs.
A New Role for CRM
Organisations are therefore beginning to recognise that CRM’s aims are not always compatible with the activities of a contact centre and are re-thinking the role they give the software in their businesses, says Gary Lowe, NEC Australia’s Contact Centre Business Development Manager.
“A lot of simple call handling is being moved to self-service,” Lowe says. “And agents, who are of course very expensive, are being held back for high value consumers or complex calls.”
Because those calls are more important or valuable, organisations Lowe speaks to are using CRM to give agents the information they need to better service customers, a shift from previous uses of CRM as a tool that narrowed agents’ options by giving them processes to follow.
“The high value agent is now being offered more data to make those important judgements,” he says. “In the past, agents using CRM were being dictated to by the software. But that rather sterile approach where CRM tells agents what to do is on the way out. There is now a change in that paradigm and we hear a lot of people say they want CRM plumbed into the applications agents use, to offer them the information they need to satisfy a customer.”
Satisfying a customer, however, is a different goal from those built into most CRM systems, which have historically focused on the sales process and measure financial outcomes rather than ‘soft’ metrics like customer satisfaction.
The CRM industry is beginning to move in the new direction of striving for happy and engaged customers instead of just good-looking balance sheets.
“Most CRM is about new sales,” says RightNow’s Higgins-Miller. “We think it should be about improving customer experiences. Most CRMs are obsessed with transactional data so their analytics systems are all based on transactions.”
Higgins-Miller says that RightNow is instead focusing on delivering abstract information or “freeform knowledge” to agents, as this enables them to understand customers’ needs rather than just to identify their next possible purchase.
New Types of Software
The idea clearly has legs: a software company called Panviva now offers an “electronic performance support system” aimed at delivering the right information to CRM users.
“We have technology that sees what screen the agent is on in CRM applications like Siebel,” says Panviva’s CEO Ted Gannan. “It understands what kind of customers the agents work with and can create screen pops that offer insights into how to successfully conclude the call.”
Gannan says his company succeeds because CRM fails in focus. Concentrating on sales does not help a contact centre to improve by capturing information about the techniques that work best in each contact centre, or to share that information with their peers.
“Medibank is one of our clients,” Gannan says. “They have 600 agents who collectively send 800 feedback messages each week.” Allowing those agents to access that information and put their peers’ experiences and insights to work is allowing the organisation to be more effective on the phone in ways that CRM is simply not set up to deliver.
Another new type of software is Customer Interaction Management, a category championed by Talisma, which says its software makes it possible for customer service personnel to become aware of online customers and initiate interactions that convert them from anonymous browsing to actual sales.
Paul Bunn, Talisma’s Country Manager – Oceania, imagines contact centre staff being made aware of a visitor to a web site hovering over a form and being offered the chance to engage in live chat to help them complete the task, with this intervention seen as a way to prevent them visiting rivals’ sites or giving up on a transaction through frustration or indifference.
Bunn says his company’s wares are also noteworthy because they are built with the contact centre and agents in mind, versus CRM, which he says is “not designed for contact centre management and agent optimisation.”
But the idea of online intervention circumventing CRM’s reliance on known participants in a transaction could spark other problems.
“As soon as you enable the agent to change the outcome in the Internet channel, you ensure the customer will never go back to online,” says RightNow’s Higgins-Miller, because intervention shows them that self-service is not the way to resolve an issue. That outcome is not desirable given that the Net, IVR and other self-service channels lower costs and help to control agent churn. She therefore cautions that “there is room for more work to be done in this area.”
That work seems, however, to be under way,according to Andrew Briggs, Managing Director of Dimension Data’s Global Customer Interaction Solutions practise.
“The principals and expected benefits from CRM have not changed,” Briggs says. “But CRM is now becoming a way to express the philosophy of a business.” And that philosophy is increasingly attuned to customer satisfaction rather than just financial outcomes, with the idea being that securing the former will take care of the latter.
“The reason for the shift from CRM driving sales processes to CRM enabling insights that improve customer service, is a desire for greater customer satisfaction,” says NEC’s Lowe. “Most call centre metrics do not measure customer satisfaction, but many organisations are saying that is more relevant than other metrics.”
CRM is therefore being pressed into service to assist agents to improve customer satisfaction, it is also becoming the tool to measure customer satisfaction. And in this new role, CRM’s analytical tools come to the fore, as they are often superior to contact centre management software whose main concerns are call times and workforce optimisation.
CRM’s ability to integrate with those tools is also bringing it back into favour.
“The most important thing is to have one system with all the information,” says Dimension Data’s Briggs. “Otherwise it is hard to make strategic improvements...” that add up to greater customer satisfaction.
But while CRM can deliver the one system Briggs recommends, its earlier failures mean it now has competition. New-breed applications like customer interaction management tools, Panviva’s offerings or RightNow’s eponymous suite, which operates as conventional software or software-as-a-service, are all competing for the role of bringing useful insights to agents.
All are, however, heading in the same direction: customer satisfaction. And if the industry gets it right, you’d imagine the evolution of CRM will represent an important step forward for customers and companies alike.
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