Customer Relationship Management: Surviving the Slowdown and impact on contact centre and CRM

Most of us are concerned about where the economy is headed. Think of any project / business initiative so many questions arise in mind which are multi dimensional in nature. How long this recession is going to last? Will it be a long U curve lasting more than 12-18 months? Can we think what will be the impact on Call centers and customer care? Will there be a decrease in the spending in this area?

Call centers--
The summary is call centers are still hiring! What for? To survive in this market by doing more sales and marketing!

New products and promotions--
The companies are trying to put forward innovative products and promotions. For example, a free valet parking service near the shopping malls for buying a BMW car!

Customer Loyalty --
Also companies are trying their best to ensure customer loyalty by under promising and over delivery. Even though the customer is promised of 5 day delivery of a product/service, ensure that it reaches the customer in a day.

Do you think that these alternatives will make companies survive? What do you think on this? What would be the optimized approach in this hard time?

Comments

While the economic pressures are on, callcenter models will re-align to adapt into new way of serving the customers. M&A, reduced product life cycle, product & services bundling, complexity of product features and pricing model shifts will increase the demand for customer care. As the demand increases for customer care so does the expectation of SLA's by customers - normalizing commitments and delivery by organizations.

Posted by: Lax Gopisetty | January 19, 2009 5:05 AM

In these times, cash is king and a customer will be very tight fisted especially since the end of these hard times is not in sight. So upgradation of assets may be a luxury (e.g. buying a bigger car) which she/he is willing to do away with for the time being. But they would much rather try and utilize their existing products to the maximum before discarding it. This builds a very strong case for sustained investment by companies into contact centers for service enhancements.

If the service received goes beyond expectations then the customer in all likelihood will end up buying the upgraded product/service from the company once times change for the better.

So contact centers acquire that much more importance in this current scenario.

Posted by: Shreedeep Panicker | January 28, 2009 4:29 PM