Customer Relationship Management

By Mehul Ishwaridatt Joshi

People say that customer is the king. Wonder why! A few days ago, I got internet activated on my smart phone. I started browsing various applications online and happily chatted with many of my friends, until my phone got hung the next day. Restarting it, got the shocker of my life - a huge amount deducted from my main balance. I had pretty much no option but to immediately contact the Telco operator to get my issue resolved.

In a state of shock, I tried contacting the call center. After spending about 10 minutes on the IVR (interactive voice response), I was finally able to connect to the call center executive. The executive's wait time was another 5 minutes. In short, I had to spend around 15 minutes just to connect and speak to the call center executive. Alas, finally connected. The problem explanation was of no avail as the executive was unable to help me, explanation provided - browsing session had started before the service was activated and ended the other day when my phone hung. The agent tried convincing me that it was not their problem, but mine, as I didn't wait for the activation message and browsed.

The problem seemed far from being resolved. After lingering for long, I decided the next best channel to take up was the retail store. Although the nearest retail store is at a distance of 10kms from where I stay, I decided to pay a visit. As it was a peak time, had to wait 15-20 minutes to talk to the store staff. Post explanation of my problem, the staff empathized with me and logged a complaint, assuring me the complaint shall be resolved in 2 days.

48 hours passed and I still did not receive my amount back. What surprised me was that no store/ customer executive from the company informed me regarding the status of the complaint. As usual, it was the customer who had to search another channel and this time it was a not so conventional channel - WEB. Using the Telco's website and various communities I was able to get the contact details of the zonal manager. Peer groups also helped me guide through their experience. Email was another channel I accessed and mailed the manager hoping my problem would be resolved as he/she was the highest authority.

This channel clicked, my complaint escalated and finally resolved. The least a customer expects in times of trouble is someone to understand, empathize, hear and solve the problem. In spite of having all above channels, the problem had to escalate, the customer was troubled and the resources of both (customer and the company) were wasted. This customer was treated badly; leave apart being treated like a king. Had I received good treatment in the first place, I would still be a customer of this telecom company.

Availability of numerous contact channels alone is not a testimony to a great customer service. There are other factors like hiring the people with right attitude, providing employees the right training and information, cross channel integration, having good back end front end integration, etc. One must understand that to retain the customers, reduce the churn and improve customer satisfaction as well as customer loyalty; it becomes imperative for the Telco operators to provide a plethora of channels, provide efficiency in all these channels, and last but not the least, provide the right type of people to service the requests at the right time. Telco's should continuously evolve and innovate in order to stay competitive in the market.

In my next blog, I will write about how these channels can be seamlessly integrated to provide the much desired - "Customer Experience".

Posted by Guest Blogger at 1:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Atin Harsh Bhola

The efficient use of household energy and its consumption has become imperative to save energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save consumers energy bills. This can be achieved by giving every household and business access to timely, useful and actionable information on their energy use. By giving people the ability to monitor and manage their energy consumption through phones, computers or other devices, the power of millions of people could be harnessed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save consumer's energy bills.

Google already has a free downloadable application which is called the PowerMeter. This application can monitor the overall energy consumption in a home with an installed energy detective transducer. Intel has taken the approach one step further by personalizing energy management. It has crafted a prototype personal-energy monitor that plugs into the wall and uses artificial intelligence to deduce which appliances in a household are on and how much power they are using.

The application has a 'Live Dashboard' screen showing figures for 'Real time KW usage' , 'Peak KW for the day' recorded at a particular time of the day, 'Peak amount spent' recorded at a particular time of the day. The screen also shows values for energy used since midnight, energy used for the day, energy used for the month. Based on the historical values, the application also computes the average daily energy consumption and also projects the energy usage for the month. The application also consists of screens showing the 'History', 'Graphing' and 'load profiles'.

The application detailed above has been taken one step further by Intel to deduce which appliances in a household are on and how much power they are using. All this data can be integrated to a mobile device such as a cell phone, laptop or even an automobile like a car to enable the user to remotely switch off the appliances based on energy consumption levels.  The application can be used to set daily energy limits for each appliance based on which alerts would be sent to the consumers to remotely switch off the particular device.

Complex algorithms can be written to optimize the power consumption by identifying the peak load periods.  Since the power plants are now shifting to variable load points billing patterns, it may be likely that energy used during peak load times may be charged higher as against energy consumed during lesser load periods. The power management applications can be made intelligent enough to generate the optimal times of the day to use the higher power consuming applications. Also the power management application could intelligently deduce the optimal time that should be used by appliances based on daily total limits set and based on factors such as current temperature etc. The application can be used to set ups rules to decide operation of one appliance only if other appliance is not running or to automatically switch off a device if another device is switched on. For example, if the television is switched off, devices such as DVD player, set top boxes, gaming devices using television should be automatically switched off.  Similarly room heaters and air conditioners in rooms could be automatically switched off if heaters or air conditioners in any other room are switched on.

This power management application can be intelligently used with sensors, transducers and other electronic devices used in smart homes to monitor the running of appliances. For example, all appliances in a room can be switched off by automatically sensing no persons in the room. This can be done by having sensors installed at room entry gates to identify the movement of people in and out of the room.

Thus the application can be customized based on the personalized need of each household which could bring about a substantial total of savings.

About the Author:

Atin has six years of experience in the IT industry, and currently is a Supply Chain Management Consultant at Infosys. He is an Association for Operations Management (APICS) certified Supply Chain professional, a master in planning of resources, and has expertise in the execution and control of operations.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With very few litres of petrol, a mobile phone which has no charge. With hailstorms and incessant rains and deserted road with no directions ...
I hope many of us may encounter these kind of situations. This gave me a start to think over, why not indian automobile market use the telematics technology which I have seen as  part of telematics implementation for a UK car manufacturing company?

Yes, I am highlighting on the emerging trends of Telematics - CRM in automobile industry. Let me explain you in this blog, what telematics is and how this is currently being used in the automobile sector and the scope of introducing in Indian automobile market.
What is Telematics? Telematics is a flow of information from  vehicle (both in and out)  through various communication technologies such as GPS , Wireless , Cellular).
CRM applications tying up with telematics would enable automotive manufacturers to develop more and more interaction with the customer  which in turn enable them leaders in the automobile market.
Below are the scenarios/cases mentioned in an automobile industry where CRM applications interact with telematics applications. 

Scope of implementing telematics in Indian market:

• India is fastest growing country in terms of new passenger car registration.
• Considering the urban mobile and internet penetration.
• Currently this technology was limited to high end cars like, BMW, Mercedes Benz and Tats Jaguar. Lot of potential to tap the mid market segment.
• Increase in customer satisfaction and gain competitive edge with in car manufacturers.
• Compared to Asian and  US markets, this technology is meagerly used in India and hence providing there are more opportunities to implement this.

In my upcoming blogs I shall explain you each usecase/scenario as mentioned above in my diagram.

Posted by Sridhar Ganti at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On Jan 31st Salesforce unveiled its customer service application for small & medium business enterprises.
It is called Desk.com & is based on Salesforce's acquisition of Assistly.
Desk.com is a cloud based offering for SMBs to support their customers.

Key Features -

• Build with keeping the Salesforce Social theme in the core, Desk.com allows the companies to support their customers over the major social channels like Facebook & twitter.
• Integration with Facebook & Twitter is the standard feature of the product and it takes few clicks to link organization's FB & Twitter accounts with Desk.com.
• Any or all the Tweets & FB posts on the linked accounts can be created & tracked as cases in Desk.com.
• Desk.com also supports all the traditional customer support channels like Phone, Chat & Email.
• Organizations can create a knowledge bank which can be made available to customers via their websites. This knowledge bank can act as the 1st step for the customers to resolve their issues.

Salesforce has also launched Desk.com for Mobile platforms. Desk.com for mobile is a HTML5 based application which supports all the major mobile platforms. Agents can respond to the customer while on move. All the major case management functionalities like sending responses, changing case priority, escalating the case etc. are available via Desk.com Mobile.

Pricing - 1st user license is completely free, create your account & start using it. After that it's US$ 49 per agent per month for unlimited usage. For part time support agents there is a flexible pricing option available which is US$ 1 per hour per user.

In this fast changing digital world where people spend a huge chunk of their time on internet nobody can ignore or deny the power of Social media.
But if Salesforce is targeting SMB's for this product then I am not sure how much the social part can be utilized by these organizations. Social interactions require a dedicated team to respond to Social media and if the responses are not handled by the experts then it can boomerang on the company and can have lasting negative impacts.

SMBs generally have very small customer service teams and they would like to respond to the actual customers/prospects rather than people posting random thoughts and queries on social media websites.
So I believe initially Desk.com will primarily be used for its traditional channel support & when the company grows in size and has enough support staff then they can start using the Social part of Desk.com.

 

Reference -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFEbcDojo1A&feature=related

Posted by Dinesh Singh at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)