Customer Relationship Management

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?