Customer Relationship Management

I recently called customer service of a leading telephone company for updating my billing address. I was surprised to receive response that I will need to go to the nearest office of the telephone company and fill out a change of address form. At another instance, I called the same company to change my call plan. Again, the agent expressed his/her inability to help me out, I was asked to submit another application – and, I was also required to provide my photographs and various other documentation, which I had already submitted when I enrolled with the company.

I have hence observed that it is not the complex issues that cause discomfort to customers like me, but seemingly trivial tasks, for example, a change of customer address. When an issue is perceived to be complex by the customer, customer is generally willing to give more time to the company for resolution and is willing to contribute additional effort from his/her side as well. However, in the event the issue is perceived to be simple, customer tends to become increasingly dissatisfied if time for resolution increases above expected and/or if the resolution involves substantial effort from customer. In many companies, 24-hour customer support has been reduced to at most, the creation of a service ticket number; and the agent does not work towards resolution of issue itself. 

While lack of CRM technology, market immaturity, regulatory guidelines etc. may be to blame in many cases, my premise is as follows: 1. Companies have unwittingly transformed simple tasks into complicated business processes, rendering intervention by the call center agent useless. 2. Companies have emphasized call center agents’ interpersonal skills (such as lingual ability - grammar, accent etc. and behavioral ability – politeness etc.) to achieve customer satisfaction, all the while ignoring the fact that satisfied customers value issue resolution more than sweet conversations that go nowhere.

I would like to conclude by emphasizing that companies need to give more power to the call center agent – and this is not merely about technological improvement. First, companies need to look at simple tasks that the agent can resolve and ask – are we bringing unnecessary complication into our business processes? Second, call center agents at first level of call handling should be trained to resolve issues by themselves. This would mean a shift in agent training – from language-oriented to business-oriented.

Posted by Arun George at 3:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Busy day at Azune Solutions in Bangalore...

@impcust: @custsvc_azune: your prior solution did not work and i do not have enuff space to explain will send mail
@custsvc_azune: we value your mail and will respond back

Meanwhile in NY...

"The biggest question on our minds right now, here at the Corp HQ of Azune is the need to arrive at a strategy for our CRM offering with Social media in tow, the 'trend' of the year. We really wonder what we are doing with all the tweets/comments/bookmarks/Q&A aggregations!"

So how and where do you think Social Media and Social CRM are from the same parentage? Cousins, are they? Much as we can be skeptical about this concept, Social Media is here to stay and CRM to benefit from it. The adoption and adaptation of Social media in an organization cannot be based on hype and competitive adoption rates! (This sometimes blurs the vision and the understanding of what these terms mean.) This will yield more heartburns than the soft comfort of your pillow that you may seek. Having a "social framework" to your business neural network is more important than adopting and investing in the various social media channels that are available, just to be Social savvy.

What use is a LinkedIn network with X  no. of people in it where you have not helped anyone or received/derived any benefit from the same?

The 'social framework' in the neural network needs to leverage the social media to help the CRM offering to become Social and thus drive and derive revenues and benefits, from the same.

In the opening sequence of this blog on Twitter-world, if the customer is to use multiple channels to find a resolution, the investment in that social channel is already kaput! What is the time and effort from the customer’s side that is spent in such an exercise? Will this social channel help drive loyalty? My guess is as good as yours.

Social CRM, on the other hand is about how effectively the tools are used to benefit the existing CRM strategy in place. The tools enable and Social CRM needs to help the business by taking in the right amount of conversations (a social media tool can help) to benefit the process. In the Twitterworld example, Azune had the tool but it was not weaved into the business neural network to help drive the strategy.

What Azune could have done is to use the tweet conversation feed (along with prior ones) to analyze and arrive at a customer score (this calls for constant social monitoring) and compare that with the reputation management results that a Social Media tool can provide. Such customer profiling could have helped address the situation and also made use of the tools more effectively. This could have added benefit to the existing CRM in place The Customer experience could have been improved. For all you know the customer might have decided not to proceed further with their service, after that, for the simple reason that the “social-savvy” company is not savoury enough.

Here is a small illustration of what I believe would make sense to adopt and adapt the “Social” in a business. The scale as you see can tip, if either of the tool or the management push is heavy. To balance these, what is needed is “The Social Strategy” which will help businesses in the long run.

What is Social Strategy then? Well, more on that later. But, mere governance policies and social tools introduction only do not make up this Strategy. I thought of a matrix for the Social framework would be relevant in this context to further understand and make it relevant for investment in this space for a business, since we have already touched upon Social Strategy. This also helps us distinguish the tools clearly from the CRM side.


Social Media is technology and Social CRM is strategy – let’s make no mistake Social Media and Social CRM aren't twins.

What do you feel that differentiates Social Media from Social CRM? Have you been toying with the idea or have been questioned on the same many a time? Any comments and POV’s are more than welcome and are much appreciated.

 

Posted by Venkataraman Ramanathan at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Cloud Computing is no longer an innovative idea to be hyped about and then shelved! It’s a big a reality and next generation industry giants are likely be guided by who wins in the cloud. Couple of years back when it was a privilege to be in the cloud has turned out to be a necessity now. Driven by reduced TCO for application conceptualization to build to maintenance, improved agility and QoS is aligning the industry to move into Cloud. On top it transforms your company into Opex based IT spend from Capex model. Recession hit almost at the right time to give it the push it needed for this shift.

Initially we moved from on premise to on demand in SaaS based model. SOA enabled further growth and from SaaS, we saw IaaS – server, storage as a service, then PaaS – even runtime environment is sold as service. Now we call it cloud as whole. Although most of the organizations are still not in the public cloud, especially due to initial hurdles and lack of formalized structure for SLA based payment, security aspect and yet to prove criticality requirement of apps, but the race for public cloud is already ON. It will catch fire once these road blocks are moved aside. Bottom line is cloud movement has started and will not stop until we see some other disruptive innovation coming our way.

MDM programs should be business driven and address business pain points to gain business competitiveness. I would completely agree with this, however I would also see a tremendous impetus to go into MDM program due to next bigger goal of moving into cloud. Moving into cloud, even if private cloud, means:

  -You need to ensure that your cloud services are providing the necessary information to its accuracy and without cluttering your cloud space. All cloud based applications need a good quality data and with no ambiguity. Especially talking about the key information asset like Customer data, product data, location data, supplier, employee data etc highly needs to be as close to unique, and as perfect as possible.

  -Almost all critical systems, processes need these data and without a cleaner and single truth of data it would be too difficult to move into cloud for most of the apps. 

  -More over it would not only delay the current apps to move into cloud, but would also hinder new apps to move into cloud. Without MDM, enterprises need to find out a reliable source of data for these key data types, and might need to forge way out with two three different sources. This delay still may be acceptable and may allow enterprise to move the dependent applications into cloud, however on the way it is taking another pain which if not addressed would make a mess out of it in sooner than later. 

  -Every time a new application development and deployment is needed it would add up to complexity to choose the right service or app. How long should you continue and live with this dilemma/confused source of data?

Instead having a right MDM solution can put this speculation to rest. I mentioned right MDM solution because MDM is not only buying a product and installing it, it has to be well defined and well thought process. It must and should enforce data governance, continuous data quality improvement and business process enablement for better data. Now with such kind of MDM implementation you are one step ahead in the game for cloud movement. Isn’t this a compelling reason

  -to go with the MDM program?

  -to rethink current MDM solution, and make appropriate adjustment?

  -to give MDM a top priority?

I am sure enterprises are over hearing this benefit for some time, however I think it should go as a direct imperative than an overheard or less prominent need! Any thoughts?

Posted by Prabir Majumder at 5:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The most important element of CRM is “Relationship”, and surprisingly, it takes the backseat too often. Is it not important that we invest time in our customers, we partner with them in times of need and we lend a helping hand to them in changing dynamics ?

If we look around in the customer relationship space, the way you make the first connect with a potential customer is through building a relationship through a medium, getting them to relate to the product in one way or another. But sufficient importance is not given to maintaining that relationship with an existing customer, the result being that that over time the relationship is strained. Consequently, when someone else offers a better relationship, the switch is natural.

What could be some of those elements in building strong customer relationships?

- How would you feel if in your bill you suddenly get a discount for a specific month for being the privileged customer, probably a small cost to the company keeping in mind the costs associated with churn.
- What if the customer gets a Thank You card delivered after they raised a specific glitch in the system – the solution of which could save you significant amounts?
- Events like customer meet could give a much needed boost to relationship building with your customers and knowing from them what clicks.
- Even automated birthday or anniversary wishes makes your customers feel special and makes the relationship feel less transactional.

How do you benefit in the bargain?

- From a business perspective, an increase in business revenue is a good benefit to begin with. What is also equally beneficial is that each customer relationship is so strong that it results into a word of mouth referral for your business. However, with rising competition, simply retaining the customer with the same business (at lower internal costs) could be a big positive in itself.
- Using the relationship paradigm you slowly help customers move to newer avenues of revenue, something which also adds value for them. If done consistently, this can go a long way in successful retention.

Like every other “relationship”, customer relationship needs to be nurtured – one step at a time. If the relationship is strong, there is every possibility that a customer will accept the occasional misstep on your part. And that could be the true test of the deep strength of your customer relationships.

Posted by Ravi Agarwal at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The year 2009 has been quite an eventful one, and would be remembered for a long time for the action packed days..we’ve seen it all the … Government bailouts, companies being bought or dissolved, CEOs getting sacked etc etc..inthe middle of it this there has been something that has seen a tremendous growth - A beast called Social Media, digital consumer today has fuelled the engines of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other similar portals so much so that if you were to look at the following stats you would agree there is that there is something that is happening around us that neither the end customer nor the companies around can afford to ignore.

( Data compilation courtesy- econsultancy)

• If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populated place in the world. This means it easily beats the likes of Brazil, Russia and Japan in terms of size
• Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the internet is on social media sites.
• It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people... In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.
• Wikipedia currently has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique users a month and it’s often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopaedia.
• Formed in 2004, Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.
• It’s been suggested that YouTube is likely to serve over 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during this year.
• The top three people on Twitter (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears) have more combined followers than the entire population of Austria.*
• Since April this year, Twitter has been receiving around 20 million unique visitors to the site each month, according to some analytical sources.

Who can forget the famous YouTube video, “United Breaks Guitars.” , with 7 Million views Dave Carroll did more damage than United airlines could have thought. It would not have costed United anything around $ 1800 to fix or replace the Taylor guitar , however what they suffered was a lot of negative mention on blogosphere, news coverage and much more for first breaking Dave’s guitar and then not agreeing to accept the claim. Times UK went on to report that this ‘Bad PR caused United Airlines’ stock price to suffer a mid-flight stall, and it plunged by 10 per cent, costing shareholders $180 million.’

On the other hand we saw the much awaited Zappos sale to Amazon, a small shoe maker shot to fame by brilliantly using the power of Facebook and Twitter to market themselves. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has nearly 1.48 million followers on Twitter, and the company's official Facebook page has almost 21,000 fans. On their webpage, they have 500+ employees tweeting regularly ( total employee strength of 1500 ) they tweet regularly about what they're doing at work etc etc…. their valuation at the time of Acquisition 1.2 billion. My earlier blog covers this in detail

My favorite however is Ford and their Fiesta Movement. Ford as we know apart from Starbucks, Wells fargo, Dell ( my other favourites) has a very focused Social Media strategy and they are betting big, no wonder their online figures talk about their popularity – more than 1.8 million YouTube views, more than 270,000 Flickr views and more than 1.8 million Twitter impressions, resulting in more than 13.2 million interactions. It is interesting to see their last Qtr results ( a big positive shift ) and I would be keen to know how much they attribute to the future positive figures to the good work Scott Monty and his team are putting up.

The gone year has seen a huge shift in the Digital consumer’s behavior and the figures above and the stories are just a small reflection of how customers today are changing the face of Company- Consumer conversations. We are already seeing a lot of companies take a serious note of this subtle change and starting to reach out to their customer on their ground, 2009 has seen most of the Fortune 500s investing more aggressively on blogs, forums, videos etc than ever before and am sure going forward this would only bring about a dynamic shift in broadly three areas: greater honesty about products or services offered, transparency in style of working and finally more Company Customer Conversations as opposed to static marketing /advertising push based approach.

Posted by Rituparn Prem Dixit at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Customizability and Simplicity would be the distinguishing characteristics of smart-phone CRM applications.

“Hi,  I’ll take the iPhone”
“ Sir, Why don’t you try our other smart-phones models like…”
“ I’ll take the iPhone”
“..we have a special offers with monthly bill discounts, for these other models…”
“I’ll take the iPhone”
“ …Sir, we have received numerous service complaints with the iPhone and ..”
“I’ll take the iPhone”

The above exchange was of an anguished, but extremely loyal Apple customer with a New York AT&T store representative last week, after AT&T reportedly ‘halted’ iPhone sales on 28th Dec ‘09. After an ambiguous statement released by AT&T explaining the changes in strategy, iPhone sales were resumed, the very next day.. (source: ABC news)

This was just to underscore the importance, customer loyalty and wide spread adoption of smart-phones. Smart-phones like Blackberries and iPhones are revolutionizing the cell phone market. The smart-phone market is even expected to surpass normal cell phones in sales, in a matter of years, experts predict. Iphones are not even the biggest player in the smart-phone industry, albeit their enviable growth and seemingly recession proof demand. They are the third largest player (17%) in the smart-phone market behind Nokia (39%) and Research in Motion (RIM)/blackberry(20%) [source: BBC news] and Google has just launched their new Nexus One smart-phone , which some believe could be a category killer.

So if smart-phones are proving to be a major Customer trend, how can the CRM practitioner be far behind? – They aren’t!

The smart-phone revolution hasn’t gone unnoticed by marketers and CRM practitioners. They have been creating products to cater to smart-phones. CRM vendors are fast entering in partnerships with mobile service providers or smart-phone manufacturers to develop and distribute CRM products. SAP has joined hands with RIM to run SAP CRM on Blackberrys. Oracle has released Social CRM products for the iPhone. Salesforce.com has their mobile version available. Even many Apple's AppStore and BlackBerry AppWorld products work like simple CRM applications.
Arguably, even the emergence of CRM trends like SaaS and Social CRM are fuelled by the proliferation of smart-phones. Cloud computing/SaaS allows powerful web servers to handle storage and processing requirements, making smart-phones sufficient for most day to day computing needs.

The CRM applications for smart-phones can be broadly categorized into two, based on the target users: applications for end users and for the mobile workers.

The evolution of Social CRM will be closely tied to how end users/the general public will adopt CRM through their smart-phones and I would reserve discussion on this area for a different blog post.

Mobile workers like field salesmen and field service representatives, expect their CRM vendor to provide products that enable seamless transfer of CRM information between different channels and work modes. They demand CRM that works with their smart-phone-class devices, rather than just the laptops. CRM functionalities like creating leads, verifying customer information, entering contact information, creation of tasks, task debriefing and communication with other mobile workers are prime targets for smart-phone CRM applications.

However, adapting an existing CRM application designed for a notebook/desktop to a fit a smart-phone screen, alone won’t help. CRM for smart-phones needs to be smarter! There is a fundamental difference in the objective and method of use of CRM through smart-phones. It closely mirrors the differences between smart-phone and laptops/desktop computers, in terms of functionalities and business applications. The development and design of these applications would be very customer driven too, compared to the management driven traditional CRM/ERP systems. Like many companies have found out, the employees first buy their personal iPhones and then force the IT department to support it.

Customizability and Simplicity would be the distinguishing characteristics of smart-phone CRM applications. Applications heavy on functionality and that are miniature replicas of traditional CRM applications will be rejected by users. They would expect brand new applications that integrate enterprise data  from CRM, SCM, ERP, business intelligence and the internet…and they would expect it fast, frill-less and hassle-free like the other ‘cool’ applications they find at the online Appstores / Appworlds.

Customers would expect CRM to be smarter.
 

Posted by Sinoi Daniel Mathai ( Daniel ) at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Most CRM initiatives are started with much expectations and enthusiasm and perhaps with much funds allotted as well. But the key success factor is having a systematic approach to identify and assess levers for business value and impact for these implementations.

The objective in almost all cases is that of an increased revenue and competitive positioning that the CRM strategy would provide. This ambitious goal is definitely not misplaced but what is often overlooked is the need for a clear Value assessment focus from  the beginning of the CRM Implementation. Most RoI exercises are done mid-way or post CRM implementation and result in a blame game on who is the cause behind a poor RoI. Although having the End to End Implementation plan is a core component of a successful CRM Initiative , equal if not more emphasis needs to be laid on Value Assessment and Change Management.

This post aims to outline a systematic approach to assessing the impact and value from a CRM initiative within an Organisation. Different phases that would need attention include Goal setting, Measurement, Evaluation and Monitoring  of business value and impact. Involvement of all key stakeholder communities is crucial while doing this exercise.

Goal Setting: This phase would involve identifying key areas of impact expected by varied stakeholder communities from the CRM Implementation. Brainstorming and having a matrix of expectations with Priority and Probability assigned would be the intended output of this exercise.

Measurement: Methods and means to measure the areas of business and technical impact would need to be captured during this phase. This would act as a reference-able framework that the team can use all through the implementation cycle and post implementation for RoI assessment. Formulae and the mechanisms to measure the metrics would also be discussed and finalized in this phase.

Evaluation: A robust evaluation mechanism for the metrics and value levers is important to ensure successful and accurate Value Assessment. This phase aims in evaluating the metrics identified in the earlier phase and gauging the inclusion of these metrics at the right stages of the implementation cycle. Apart from the IT project , a major role is played by Processes and People oriented changes that needs to be effective to deliver the identified value and impact. Change Management Challenges and revision in probability and priority of set goals and inclusion of any revised goals can be included during this phase.

Monitoring: Assessing the value delivered and business impact at various key milestones from Process, People and Technology perspective of the CRM Initiative is key to take corrective measures at the right juncture with minimal loss. Monitoring the Value levers and Impact Drivers at milestones performs a Value Health Check of the CRM initiative. Triggering levers and drivers can control the Value and Impact parameters to deliver goals identified.

Active involvement of all key stakeholder communities is essential to convert the approach above to a successful Value Assessment and Change Management initiative.

I intend to write more on this in days to come but would love to hear your thoughts before proceeding.

Posted by Khanchana at 8:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)