Customer Relationship Management

There is always scope for improving customer service but somehow most companies seem unwilling to change their processes or systems to provide better service to their customers.

For example, whenever you dial a call center, the first thing you would hear is the IVR menu. The options in this IVR menu could change from time to time. This forces the customer to listen to all the menu options each time, making him spend more time and money on the call. This can be resolved by adopting the thumb rule of implementing an IVR menu with not more that 4-5 option. The other option is to permanently fix the IVR menu options. Neither solution is ideally suited to business needs. So, what is the real solution?

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.

Continue reading "More power to the call center agent" »

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

‘Multichannel’ in contact centers refers to the different communication medium used by the companies to reach out to their customer and providing customers with multiple options to interact with the companies.

The list of channels that commonly feature in a multichannel scenario are mail, voice, email, IM/chat, fax, web self service, survey etc. The voice channel is still currently the most widely used channel which includes land lines, cell phones and interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Although most contact centers have email and a few have chat channel, a few advanced centers also have co-browsing, page-push and VOIP functionalities yet majority of inbound calls are handled by full time agents despite having IVR and voice self service channels. This clearly indicates that in spite of having multiple channels and advanced technology, today’s contact centers limit their focus mostly to the voice and email channels.

Continue reading "Underutilized Multichannel Capabilities In Contact Centers" »

Posted by Sushil Jadhav at 7:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A bill sent to a customer from the telecom service provider is a powerful tool of customer communication. Hope you agree to this fact. The 'Power of the Bill' can be unleashed in multiple ways. Mainly, for the operator’s revenue increase by means of cross selling and up selling. Cross selling and up selling can be effectively increased through the bill. The target product segment can vary, and cross selling and up selling strategy would differ based on the product segment- whether it is 3G mobile, Wifi Broadband, WiMax and so on.

Continue reading "Bill and Sell" »

Posted by Sripathy Srinivasan at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Hosted CRM - A game changer for your call center ops" »

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

Continue reading "Will the routing of contacts in future be done only by CRM?" »

Posted by Sushil Jadhav at 5:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Billing – Customer Satisfaction & Telecom Service provider’s gain – A win win scenario" »

Posted by Sripathy Srinivasan at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (19) | TrackBacks (0)

Many times people ask me to share the CC benchmark data/ metrics which may be asked by customer care executives / organization for comparison to gauge how their CC operations are performing. It is very important to have comparable metrics to have the confidence to say we need to make some changes or our performance is not up to the mark. But, are we also looking and considering the factors/methods behind the collection of metrics to find the correct reason for the gap?

Continue reading "Myths of Contact Center (CC) Benchmarking" »

Posted by Sushil Jadhav at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Fringe benefits of CRM" »

Posted by Vikas Kasturi at 7:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "An abused tool called IVR" »

Posted by Vikas Kasturi at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve had a hectic & eventful last few weeks, studying call center processes & agents in different types of call centers. I wanted to share some conclusions with this CRM community and take some feedback (and also break a chain of Customer Experience posts from my side!). This post is going to be less about the processes and more about the agents…
 

‘Average talk time’ and ‘Service levels’ continue to be the most significant measures of an agent’s performance. I have to jump into an analogy immediately… these measures are akin to a sales rep diligently tracking ‘SG&A’ as a key metric. These are certainly important & quantifiable metrics but need to be higher up in the pyramid. Levers to achieve good service levels and low SG&As are way broader than what a call agent or a sales rep can significantly influence. For a sales rep, the single biggest measure has been and will always be ‘Top-Line’. This, very clearly, is their raison d'être. I don’t know if we will ever achieve unanimity on this but what is the call agent’s raison d'être?

Continue reading "Empowering the Next Generation Call Agent" »

Posted by Badrinath Srinivasan at 9:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

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?

Posted by Raja Sekhar Ravi at 6:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)