Customer Relationship Management

Recently, I was asked by a customer how we could deliver an “out the box” solution for a back office billing project.  Their reasons for asking this are sound; they’ve heavily customized package applications in the past and have been unable to follow product upgrade paths without large expense. On the other hand, they also understand that their business cannot simply adapt itself to mirror the functions of an application whilst maintaining a competitive advantage in terms of process and products.

Our challenge, as the transformation partner, is to help strike the right balance between supporting business needs, cost, timelines and maintainability.  This is never an easy task given the number of options available.

Billing systems have evolved into very complex system offering support for many business models and providing myriad ways of achieving their core function of producing invoices.  We have moved from billing simple, single services to convergence with quad play (and beyond) offerings across multiple industries.

The options become even more complicated when you consider the ability of application frameworks (such as AIA ) to allow the transformation of almost any interaction between applications without making changes to the base product
.
In my opinion, configuration forms part of any out of the box implementation, whereas customization involves major changes to underlying code or the development of new modules, neither of which will be supported by the vendor.  I view the use of “out of the box” options as paramount for architectural imperatives such as account and product structure.  

I’m happy to consider customization where the solution offers business benefits that can be clearly identified.   There are the obvious caveats about managing future support and appropriate testing,
however I feel these can be managed without undue risk and cost.

Overall my view is that businesses need to focus on their signature processes and products and look to leverage their billing package’s functions to achieve this.  Market advantage is not achieved by having a “me too” implementation of software.

I would be interested to hear other people’s perspectives and experiences.

Posted by Ian Williams at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

by Sheetal Sharma

With the customer at the focal point of all business activities, a great amount of business energy is being devoted from a strategic perspective towards satisfying a customer’s needs. The telecommunications arena is no different. In fact, in a stiff market place as that of telecom, the customer truly rules. Innovative strategies, new technologies, products and plans are being developed and evolved constantly – keeping solely the customer in mind.

However, efforts are being made only from the CRM perspective – which is essentially uni-dimensional. The reason being that CRM deals with the ‘what the company thinks of the customer’ piece. The significant piece of ‘what the customer thinks of the company’ tends to get overlooked, which results in the jigsaw puzzle of Delighting the Customer never really getting complete!

This important other dimension is that of Customer Experience, or “the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier” according to one description. By focusing and investing in improving the Customer Experience, the company is really investing in developing long term relationships with its customers. With Customer Experience being the buzzword, service providers are coming up with on path breaking ideas and sashaying down innovative products to win and retain customers. But are these arrays of products – that claim to cater to every possible need of their customers, really helping? Are the service providers ensuring that the flood of newer products or features are not in fact confusing or overwhelming the customer? There lies a danger of running a blind race – that of offering more and more products to customers, in anticipation that the customer will use them and go through an enhanced experience out of using it!
 
This anticipation might not become a reality. Take for example, the bill payment service through mobile phones launched by some service providers. A text message is delivered to the customer for activation of this service on their mobile phones. However some customers might find it just too complex to use or be simply hesitant to try it out!

Efforts and measures need to be taken for getting customers to use the new experience enhancing features/products. Smart customers will do it anyways – they will want to try out different and new things instantly. It is the latent or the passive customers that need to be guided or shown the way. Innovative new products, features and services might just be the answer to their needs. A little hand holding might just be the solution! Going a step further by guiding and assisting such a customer in trying out and using the new solutions can go a long way. In the context of the earlier example, say after having launched the service and informing the customer about it, it would be a good idea to share the steps involved in activating/using it and the benefits that the customer can derive out of it. If this is not feasible using a text message, the same can be shared along with the monthly bills or over an email with the customer. Other ways could be by means of making courtesy calls or also by making the IVRs more capable to support this. Self-help portals need to be made intelligent and capable to be able to proactively guide and help the customers visiting them.

These methods involve cost to the service providers, you might say! But then aren’t the service providers already investing heavily in customer service and customer care innovations? A more targeted investment for customer care can help the service providers retain their customers and also tap a larger customer base and increase revenues as well. Once the customers appreciate the assistance and the enhanced experience, the returns will be truly manifold – both in terms of increased customer loyalty and repeat business. Therefore, Customer Experience enhancing innovations alone won’t do, making the customer truly experience them will determine the winner.

About the Author

Sheetal Sharma is a Project Manager with the CME unit, currently working on a project for a telecom major. She has worked in the areas of Customer Care and Enterprise Management, with key achievements in delivery excellence and knowledge management. Sheetal will blog on CRM and Customer Experience.

Posted by guest at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently came across an interesting post in the ittoolbox blog, where the author has used the word CMR (Customer Managed Relationships). It really set me thinking. All we are doing in most CRM applications is maintaining customer information in various forms (interests/interactions/orders/service requests etc). But not relationships!

 

Yes, the customer maintains the relationship and he/she is in charge and has the power to churn/chose the product/service provider. As they say, 'The customer is not an idiot. Customer are aware of what products to buy and from whom to buy.

 

Traditional CRM packages provide the capability to store some information and do analysis on competitor’s products, but not to the extent to help customers maintain their relationship with companies. I think companies and users do expect these capabilities from CRM applications. As I said, these CRM applications are just customer information management.

What the user community needs is:

1. Capability to offer the right products and services based on the needs of customers

2. Capability to predict trends and demographic needs

3. Capability to collate information, communicate with the customers on the extent to which features of services/products are utilized and help them to make better use of the product/service’s features.

4. Capability to do some statistical analysis and employ in-built intelligence. (See Vamsi’s post on Intelligence CRM)

5. Of course, established business processes are always important.

Can CRM vendors match up to these requirements and produce such applications that help customers maintain their relationship with the companies? Where do the leading enterprise application vendors stand on these parameters? Do industry analysts address this aspect in their research?

Posted by Raja Sekhar Ravi at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

by Venkataraman Ramanathan

The comment from Ray in my previous post cannot be more relevant. The sooner MDM embraces social media the better it can serve and evolve. This is one parameter that will take the game more closer to the CRM+MDM realisation.

It was a hectic day for Michael (young Mike to us) and was traveling home, when he caught in a downtown traffic jam. “Well, why not tweet something for the lousy 15 minutes that I spend here. Let me vent out my ire here”  and he picks up his iphone and puts in a tweet – “ Today, at work I found it very difficult to resolve all the false positives and false negatives. This just isn’t the way it should be for what I paid”. Now Michael is a consultant at his firm and has close to 3500 followers on Twitter. Some of them being the vendor consultants and sales people he is constantly in touch with. The next minute, he sees an alert on his iphone that says – “ Let’s set up a meeting tomorrow Mike, to discuss your issues with our product”.

Easier said than done eh? But, not far away too. Recently, Salesforce announced the launch of Service Cloud 2 which integrated Twitter with their CRM offering and moved to KaaS (yeah…SaaS, PaaS and it just doesn’t stop, does it?). The Knowledge-As-A-Service offering allows users to get personalized answers. It also provides Answers from various sources among which the best bubbles up. Will there be a vendor who will provide a widget on the user’s dashboard which shows that its time to re-run the weights for the master data in the DB? But, it is not as easy as saying that MDM should embrace the social media and all the vendors out there start doing that. It requires a lot of stakeholder management and commitment and top management commitment not to forget the business relevance for the industries that they serve.

There are a lot of hurdles, fine-tuning in terms of the offering, evolution of products on offer in the marketplace that needs to happen. Issues today like integration, complete customer end-to-end data updates, better compliance and regulatory reporting are still being hunted by customers. What else can help build the next step to a combined offering? How can CRM help in this direction? What is the impact that the Cloud will have on CRM that will percolate to MDM? As my previous post says, On-demand alone or can Hybrid be a successful model here? More thoughts and rants later.

Posted by guest at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Customer Surveys are an effective tool, not only to measure but also to foster Customer Loyalty.

As helpful as it would have been, there is no magic bullet to promote customer loyalty!
It still, pretty much is  achieved by sticking to marketing basics, ie, having a great product/service, providing superior customer experience, imparting high quality customer service, building favorable brand perception/awareness and engaging customers continuously.

However, taken with a pinch of salt, Customer Surveys can be deemed a magic bullet in fostering customer loyalty.
 It wouldn’t be surprising if most of us would object to this assertion, both as a marketer and a customer. A customer generally regards surveys as long, cumbersome and unsolicited. For marketers, the ‘sample bias’ introduced by low response rates is worrisome though surveys are perhaps the only routine measure of customer satisfaction and to some extent, the only insight into customer loyalty. Unhappy customers rarely have the urge to fill out a traditional customer satisfaction survey, a fact which contributes heavily to the unreliability of this data as a customer loyalty measure.

Even so, a good Customer Survey, with little semblance to the traditional customer satisfaction survey, can be an effective tool to not only measure but even foster customer loyalty.

It is apparent how customer surveys are an effective device to collect customer satisfaction data and thus being an able aid in measuring customer satisfaction. However, their value doesn’t end there. Studies have shown that customer surveys can function in fostering customer loyalty too. Customer psychologists point to the innate human need to appreciate and be appreciated, to explain this phenomenon.
Surveys are advantageous with both happy and unhappy customers. Satisfied customers would welcome the opportunity to interact and appreciate the product/service they enjoy; while a survey (and follow up action) provides the marketer another opportunity to win back a discontented customer!

Attention to the following aspects (not an exhaustive compilation), enable a customer survey to be useful as a customer retention strategy by fostering customer loyalty

1) Keep Customer Surveys short and succinct
A Customer Survey is not the occasion to gather information on the customer’s favorite football team, or any such demographic data. Keeping the questions fewer in number and specific to a particular interaction would ensure that the data collected is relevant. Also, one needn’t ask all questions to every customer being surveyed. The statistical robustness of the survey will not be compromised, if each customer is required to answer a randomly selected subset of the survey questions.

2) Follow-up and Act on the customer surveys
This is particularly crucial to ensure that an unsatisfied customer who was surveyed has his grievance addressed. Follow-up action is also necessary to keep response rates high by maintaining trust, for future surveys.

3) Don’t use a survey as a Sales tool
Surveys can provide awareness and encourage positive opinion about your company. However, use it judiciously, as masking sales collateral as a survey may lead to customer annoyance and ‘selling under the guise of research’ is deemed illegal in many countries.

4) Measure customer’s emotional loyalty vs rational loyalty
 Just because a customer is a repeat purchaser, doesn’t mean he is emotionally loyal to your company. Rationally loyal customers, who appreciate a product/service due to the tangible benefits it provides or a customer displaying loyal behaviour owing to high switching costs or lack of competitor options, need focused effort to be converted into emotionally loyal customers.
A sample question to gauge emotional loyalty would be: Is XYZ company fair/socially responsible

5) Have a target audience
Customer Surveys that are sent as mass mailers provide ambiguous results at best!

6) Use online survey tools
Email, website links are quick and convenient ways to conduct surveys both from the customer and marketer’s perspective. Social Media can be used extensively for this purpose.

7) Integration of results with the CRM application
Plans need to be formulated to integrate the survey results with the CRM application so that they can be shared with the customer facing employees/partners and used in decision making. Most SaaS CRM solutions like Salesforce.com, Right Now have effective online surveying tools.

The effectiveness of Customer surveys in engaging customers and the relative ease of implementing such an initiative, make it a worthy contender to the proverbial magic bullet, in customer loyalty management. So, are you using Customer Surveys to its true potential?

 

Posted by Sinoi Daniel Mathai ( Daniel ) at 08:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently came across a research forecast that marketers would shave off 9.5% from market research spend over 2009, reversing a 20-year trend of annual spending increases. It appeared in Marketing Week and here is the link. The article highlights the following as one of the research findings:  "….while survey data and company sales data continue to be used by nearly all market research professionals, other methods, such as focus groups, syndicated research and scanner data, have all experienced decreases. For instance, use of focus group data has dropped from 80% for the past two years to 74% to date for 2009."

While I do not know the reason for the drop in usage of focus group data (the research, the full report of which I have not seen yet, might have some pointers), to my mind, this inflection may point to a long term trend for focus groups. I believe that the increasingly available customer generated qualitative data around attitudes, preferences, opinions, reviews, etc. in the Cloud - specifically the Social Media - will eventually lead to that.

Looking back at my role as the Market Research Manager for a well known Consumer Goods Company in India, observing focus group discussions was one of my regular activities. Typically, this is how it used to be done:

• The brand manager together with the research manager would evaluate the need for a focus group discussion. Of course, there was the budget factor.
• The research manager together with the research agency would identify the target audience
• The research agency would enlist, often on a paid basis, folks who would participate in the discussion
• A moderator from the agency would conduct the session which would be taped with the research manager observing it remotely
• The agency would analyze and present the findings back to the company

While the last step of analysis of data had a bit of technology enablement (often and more heavily for analysis of quantitative data collected through other techniques), all the other steps leading to that were rather 'non tech'. However, the advent of social media - which resulted in unprecedented amount of customer generated content available on the cloud - seems to be impacting all the steps in the process flow above. Consider these:

• With blogs / reviews / opinions abundantly available, getting customer feedback does not seem to be that hard anymore. In fact, the challenge now is to recognize one in the social space and react to it appropriately.
• With the social media tools becoming more common place and cheaper to use, there does not seem to be a need to 'evaluate' the need for a focus group discussion. In fact, it seems like it is an imperative now to be watchful and continue listening for customer discussions / feedback on the net around the your brands / company.  
• Rather than waiting for someone to tag them as the 'right target audience', through bookmarking, RSS, search alerts, etc., the customers seem to be associating themselves to the right 'brand'.
• With customers becoming more 'social', the companies can potentially reach them directly without going through the agencies by going through blogs, twitter, forums, etc. With reviews, opinions, blogs, etc. there is a lot of 'free' information from customers on the cloud which no one has paid for.
• All the conversations are captured on the cloud. Even if the website hosting them does not have it any more, there is always the 'cached' page from the search engines.
• With the emergence of text analytics and other monitoring tools, a good amount of analysis work can be automated as well.

The point is not that the above developments will render the traditional research process obsolete. It is just that the cloud is accumulating a lot of data from customers, which can be gleaned to gather research insights. Now going back to the research finding, it may be interesting to know if the study has uncovered any increase in usage of this free data from the cloud. If not, that could be a good research direction!

Posted by Alex Rishi Sankar at 02:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Recently I visited a supermarket, after my shopping when I was about to pay my bill, the cashier offered me their membership at nominal joining price and showed me a few benefits for enrolled members. The same incident is repeating at every retail outlet. Every retailer is trying to tie the customer by issuing a membership at a nominal price and showing    them a few benefits. Same is the case with Loyalty programs, instead of building true customer loyalty these loyalty programs are becoming sales campaigns which only aim at increasing revenue from customer. With so many programs and memberships customers are treating these as sales pitches rather than relation enhancement/building programs.  Companies are forgetting the basics of building relationships and are actually trying to tie customer to their outlets through memberships and Loyalty programs. Customers are humans and not mindless creatures to stay still if tied to something.

One decade back before the emergence of organized retail sector, Indian retail market was dominated by “Kirana*” shops, where the shopkeeper/owner was a part of the same community where the customers lived.  These Kirana merchants knew the preferences, interests, needs, wants, any events in the customer family, any emergencies, financial issues, etc of the customers. This is more than 360 degree view of a customer; this helped the Kirana merchant to sell the right product to right customer and even give credit at times, if required. Since they know the customers personally Kirana shopkeepers could give customers credit based on their financial abilities and based on the need and situation of the customer. They rendered a helping hand during emergencies and thus gained customer trust and loyalty. Before the advent of organized retail such a strong bond existed between customers and retailers in Indian retail market, but as the organized retail is increasing its presence, these bonds are loosening and artificial relationships are being built where customer loyalty, customer trust, etc are either superficial or doesn’t exist. What is happening now is that companies are trying to do everything artificially, build artificial relationship with customer by enrolling them as members, artificial loyalty by enrolling customer for a loyalty program, and so on. The fact is that the customer still doesn’t trust the retailer since for the customer there is no real relationship! How many customers are willing to share their personal information with the retailers? Companies think about building customer relationships, but talk about experience, satisfaction, delight and so on, but forget the foremost thing which is “customer trust”. Your customer service might be excellent, customer might be happy, but if customer feels that he/she is paying more for a nominal product packaged with excellent service the trust is broken. Retailers are totally different from manufacturers, manufactures can sell more products if they build good brand image and have good retailers in their distribution chain, but retailers cannot sell if they don’t build good relationships. Though a retail chain might have a great brand value, if the relationship quotient is low, then they fail miserably. Terms like Brand Loyalty etc have very minimal controlling effect when we talk about retailers. There are several big brands which failed miserably in retail business.

The emergence of Social CRM might help in building customer relationships if properly leveraged to build trust rather than considering them as tools to gain customer information. If companies continue with the latter perception, soon the customer relationships die as Social CRM sites can spread the negative image of companies as fast as they can spread the positive image! This approach will not build the trust factor and which will in turn lead to customer playing safe and not revealing their personal details. Hence companies should try to be a part of the communities and build trust in the customers.  Loyalty should be from both sides, don’t expect customer loyalty if you are not loyal to the customer. This holds true for retailers globally, what is your opinion and any inputs on how retailers can leverage on Social CRM?

* “Kirana Stores” are the typical “Mom and Pop stores” operated in a single location in towns and cities where the shop owners are the members of the local community

 

Posted by Vamsi Krishna at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)

Taking off from my previous post on FCR, here are some further thoughts if you are wondering where to start your call center transformation. Especially if you are managing a small or medium call center, you may very likely find your answer in the form of a simple process design supported by hosted CRM (I would even go to the extend of recommending it for some larger enterprises, depending on factors that I will detail in a subsequent blog)...

 

The market is beginning to see hosted CRM as a seminal game changer for small/medium call centers. Based on my experiences in this space , here’s an open attempt at reasoning this change.

 

1.       Ease of renovation – At times, even leading organizations have more primitive call centers than you can ever imagine! Fundamental abilities to know the customer, track their need and measure effectiveness of the center are absent. Typically, organizations are tempted into larger transformations since there is a very evident business case. However, failure rates of big bang changes in the industry are extremely high. A hosted CRM acts as a perfect and very timely baby step to test some of these fundamentals. Not only may it enable you to reach your ultimate end result, it is guaranteed to significantly reduce your chance of failure.  What more, a leading hosted product like Oracle CRM on Demand for example can come at the cost of a mobile phone for your agent… it is no longer an elaborate program but just an operational expense to start with.

 

2.       Tightening operating efficiencies – Back to my favorite topic of FCR. Hosted CRM provides a direct starting point at measuring this – both from a telephony as well as a customer experience angle. In addition, there are opportunities to measure telephone/email/fax type service factors and to slice and dice critical ops data. Not many small/medium centers may have had the luxury of using such powerful analytics tools in the past as are available in hosted CRMs. Some of these centers have traditionally relied on reporting based on the available telephony equipment. I’m yet to see a telephony technology that effectively tracks the customer’s experience. How effective can an operating efficiency get without being studied from the customer’s angle? I’ve seen some delighted center managers who have  clearly acknowledged that hosted CRM provides a very good platform for operational reporting.

 

3.       Modernize your call center eco-system – It is not uncommon to see agents who work in the order capturing/management function toggle through some of the tough and unintuitive mainframe screens. Hosted CRM helps kick-start the modernization process by making the agent function more ‘front-office’ type, light on the UI and more heavy on the customer experience. In turn, this ends up being a very good starting point for a ‘segregation of duties’ type transformation. It helps answer the question on where a highly efficient call center’s responsibility really end. Some very high end integrations are being attempted by both Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM on Demand (including having your entire UI embedded within your mail box); some of these advances will hit the market by next year, further increasing adoption of this new technology. One caveat though… in order to get your modernization right, your internet backbone needs to be spot on. There have been some hiccups in this area for early adopters of hosted CRM.

 

4.       And finally, your Customer… At the risk of sounding redundant, I do need to emphasize that hosted CRM tools have very good CRM capabilities. There is a method to tracking your customers, their requests and respond to them consistently and effectively. Hosted CRM, with a near-zero training footprint, is very easy for your new agent to adopt to the tool and react to the customer’s need. Your manager has a visibility into what is not going right for the customer, poor response times/methods etc. In a recent manufacturing company experience, I have seen a beautiful adoption curve for the agent directly translating into a 10+% satisfaction increase for repeat callers.

 

Today’s hosted CRM may not be your transformation platform but it will certainly take you in the right direction. Your thoughts?

Posted by Badrinath Srinivasan at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Of late, while going through the proposed solution architecture of MDM implementations at major enterprises by product vendors, I see more often that BPM tool is one of the solution components in the overall footprint. The immediate thought I got, was that there is no stoppage of prospective vendors introducing more and more products into the overall solution footprint and hence making things more complex. But recollecting my recent experience of MDM implementation based on a industry leading product  for a major bank, where there was no separate BPM tool in place, I started appreciating the value add a BPM tool could  bring in such  scenarios.  The kind of challenges we faced in orchestrating various fine grained services into composite services and the performance bottle necks in calling the services of other enterprises of the systems using the integration layer available within the product, I felt that it makes more sense to use a BPM tool for large MDM implementations.

Ideally this workflow sort of functionality should be available out of the box in the MDM products, to mix and match services, build the validations on top of these services and to route the calls based on the output of the preceding call. The Industry leading MDM products have some of this functionality built in them. But, I found it to be very much limited only to build   composite services using their own fine grained services embedding a few business rules. I think they are   not scalable enough when we need to call services from multiple systems along with MDM. As an example,  for a bank to on-board a customer, it would need to make calls to various other systems like risk monitoring system, CRM system and other ERP systems along with Master data systems. I think most of the MDM packages offer only limited functionality to meet this kind of use case requirements. In majority of these implementations customers build their own orchestration layer to meet these needs. Instead of that, I believe one should consider industry leading BPM tools to be part of the solution to meet these needs. All leading MDM product vendors have their own BPM tools to meet this need.  Having a BPM tool in the overall program can bring in the following additional values.

• BPM tool helps in defining the workflow like data flow and help leveraging full potential of the atomic level of services of typical MDM products.
• Data Governance related processes can be handled more efficiently encapsulating the Business rules against the data items spanning across multiple systems.
• Saves effort of Channels building their own orchestration of the services offered by multiple systems.
• Data Cleansing, Compliance related requirements can be effectively modeled as part of the integrated services spanning across multiple systems in the enterprise.

Major MDM product vendors have BPM tools available within their product portfolios and they also support seamless integration of BPM tools from other vendors with their MDM products.  

I am looking forward to opinions from people involved in evaluating BPM tool against a typical MDM implementation.

Posted by Sekhar Jyothula at 04:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Along with the current trend of universal queuing and multichannel contact routing, CRM applications are also becoming capable of queuing and routing of contacts to the right, suitable and available agent.

We can categorize the routing in broadly 2 categories:
1) Manual (rarely used) or automatic routing (widely used)
2) Skill based (rarely used) and rule based routing (widely used)

If we focus on automatic and rule based routing, it actually works depending on where we are defining the rules i.e. in the contact center (CC) application or the CRM application. Most of the time we see the rules are defined in the CRM application because they play a significant part in deciding on the routing capability, making routing functionality in  the contact center application redundant.

Normally, the routing operation is done in two stages. First, the Contact center application sends a request to CRM, to decide which agent to route a contact, as the rules are defined in the  CRM system. In the second  stage, based on the response from CRM, CC routes the contact to the respective available agent. However in current market scenario, almost all the major CRM applications have the intelligent routing capabilities in built, makes the routing to be done in one single step instead of 2 steps in very efficient way. Examples of having routing capability in CRM applications include Universal Queuing & Assignment manager in Siebel, Universal routing and queuing in SAP CRM, routing configuration in SalesForce.com, etc.
Does this mean an end to the era of having routing capability in CC applications?

Providing the routing capability in CRM helps customers to avoid, heavy investment in implementation, support and maintenance of CC routing applications and makes the routing faster than traditional routing methods. Currently in CRM, apart from setting the rules of routing you can also queue the contacts, group the agent by skill, you can blend the contacts, do the contact handling based on contact priority, rules, time zone , etc.. Considering the routing is done through CRM, any integration of CC with Work force management (WFM ) application is also no longer needed as the same can be handled within CRM.

Another constituent which plays a major role in routing decision is, output/data from IVR. As nowadays IVR is also capable of integrating with CRM applications through web services, routing from CRM makes it easier and a viable option as all ingredients required for having routing capability are  there within reach of CRM applications.

All this makes me think that the heart of CC applications i.e. routing engine is just redundant functionality. All the functionality & capability provided by CC applications around routing will no longer be needed and become quickly obsolete in CRM - CC market. What do you think?

Posted by Sushil Jadhav at 05:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

by Venkataraman Ramanathan

When young Mike called up the Pizza delivery to find out why his most favorite pizza was not delivered on time, it was time to think how important customer satisfaction was necessary for successful brand recall and for repeat customer business. CRM was born.  CRM grew to encompass service, sales, support to improve service quality and hence provide a greater and much richer interaction with the customers. ROI swelled, it became the buzzword and lo! and behold - “You do not have CRM in place? I think you need to include that in your IT budget this year. It’s the strategy and vision that will help your ROI” - Years later, when Michael (young Mike to us) went in for a couple of policies for himself and his family he was getting frustrated of doling out his information everytime he had to touch base with the insurance provider. MDM was born. And  - “ How can you NOT have a metadata management in place, how do you think your customers will be served better?”. Well, back to Square one, are we?!

For all the inefficiencies that CRM created in terms of not having the master data (now it does resolve your duplicates and automates your sales processes) MDM tries to serve and augment those gaps w/o overlapping the functions of CRM. MDM is evolving and has very good contemporaries to grow with. Cloud computing being one of them. So, from initial custom development, we saw various vendors sprouting up and now we have analyst firms giving various analyses on MDM and the associated vendors. So what next? Is MDM here to stay? Will MDM evolve as CRM did  - from custom development-> Product Offering-> Open Source-> On-Demand-> Cloud-> Hybrid->???

Are we in need of a consolidation at this point? Maybe a CRM+MDM in a single offering to our customers? Will this offering benefit our customers with the mix of on-premise CRM and on-demand CRM (Hybrid CRM), coupled with MDM. As per the customer’s necessity can we see how effectively we can use a Private Cloud (more on the private cloud later) that can be strapped on to the public domain so that our customers are comfortable in having their master data on the cloud? The parameters of cost, ease of implementation, offering, organizational impact and ROI is critical to this evolution.

A good example of a combined offering to benefit customers and serve them was when Microsoft and SAP came together to offer Duet (formerly Mendocino). Duet is basically a collaboration between Microsoft and SAP to deliver SAP business processes on Microsoft Office applications. This industry collaboration example paves the way for CRM+MDM offerings and the CRM/MDM industry can draw a parallel from this excellent example.

About the Author

Venkat is a Senior Consultant who works on CRM and MDM solutions and implementations. He specializes in functional CRM and MDM with varied interests in Consulting, Cloud Computing and Technology. Venkat has led the team for the CRM and BPM implementation for a global financial services client. He has been involved in various trainings and organizational activities, besides pre-sales activities.

Posted by guest at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Is an occasional service failure desirable? I know it sounds ridiculous but the best laid plans of men and mice often go awry. And so is the case with the best amongst the service plans.

 

A service failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing to happen. In fact, it has at least two benefits- firstly, as a manager you now know one more potential area of failure and can take steps to minimize recurrences. Secondly and more importantly, what did you do when you failed to exceed your Customer’s expectations? A Customer who knows that she was adequately compensated when a Service failure occurs is likely to feel more trustful of you. And a Customer who complaint never got acknowledged feels belittled. This fact is lost upon so many Businesses that they fail to realize the potential of such opportunities. They mostly hide behind fine print of the Contract or deny or simply fail to acknowledge that something has gone wrong.

 

 

To quote a couple of examples of fine recovery- my mother received an offer of apology and a free air ticket when an airline messed up her tickets in the first place; the manager at a restaurant graciously waived the price of an entrée off the check when the food served was a little different from our expectation. Now, my mother and I did not stop buying those services because we had a less than satisfactory experience or we did not continue buying because of the freebies. We continued buying because we felt we could trust them to do the right thing when called upon.

 

 

There are several more examples from the professional world too. In all the cases we came on top, because once the unforeseen circumstance had already occurred we did everything right in terms of quickly dedicating resources round the clock to fix it while communicating updates that reflected the true statuses and finally working to ensure procedures to prevent such recurrences.

 

 

The points to note for CRM Managers are:

 

1. Are all the failures that have occurred in the previous year, captured for further analysis?

    

2. Are the failures one off cases or are there patterns (like lost baggage in different Airports)?

    

3. Was a genuine apology offered and steps taken to exceed the Customer’s expectation in each of the cases?

    

4. What can be done to fix the problem so the chances of recurrence are minimal?

    

5. Have the customers been thanked for bring this to notice? And have they been informed of the changes made since?

    

Trust in an existing service provider can be a huge entry barrier for competitors. And service failures can provide opportunities to rise to the occasion and work towards deepening that trust.

 

 

So, is an occasional service failure desirable? Depends on what you do with it.

 

Posted by Vikas Kasturi at 04:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)