Consider the wisdom of legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, who said "Winning isn't everything - but wanting to win is." Vince never managed a call center, but if he did he'd understand the importance of trying your best to win your customers' confidence. Sure, he might have gathered agents into a huddle before they took calls or required them to do calisthenics during lunch breaks. But he wouldn't lose sight of his ultimate goal: complete customer satisfaction.
Fortunately for you, providing efficient service to your customers is considerably less arduous than scoring a crucial touchdown at the end of the fourth quarter. By using customer relationship management (CRM) software, you can help ensure that agents can view important information such as customer histories with your company. When agents can automatically find out everything they need to know about each customer, they don't have to fumble for answers.
CRM software also helps your agents work together as a winning team. Vince Lombardi made sure that everybody on his team knew the game plan so that they didn't just run across the field randomly in different directions. Yet many call center managers don't make certain that all agents receive the information they need to help each customer. For example, let's say a customer sends an e-mail message to your call center, which one agent reads. The same customer then calls a day later only to reach another agent who never saw the message. That customer might patiently explain the content of the e-mail, but will more likely become frustrated at having to take the extra time to do so.
Yet CRM software can't fully ensure that agents provide consistent service to customers. Doculabs, a Chicago, IL-based research firm that reviews software for on-line businesses, recently completed a benchmark study on CRM software from seven leading vendors, including Avaya, Nortel Networks and Siebel Systems. Most of the software didn't enable agents to offer a consistent reply to customers' requests. Bill Chambers, group director of research for Doculabs, speculates why. "The continued focus of CRM vendors on customer service transactions, like capturing support inquires, hinders their ability to develop a consistent response across various channels," he says.
Steve Pratt, the global leader of Deloitte Consulting's CRM practice, agrees that the greatest challenge CRM vendors face is providing the same information about each customer to everyone who uses the software. He explains that although vendors can easily create a unified standard for helping customers, that isn't a practical solution for most businesses. "Implementing a common set of customer interaction practices is not a smart thing to do, nor is it achievable," he says, and he provides an example to illustrate his point.
"You take a large, diversified financial institution," says Pratt. "You have private banking, retail banking and commercial banking [divisions], all of them very distinct business units. As recently as a year ago, CRM vendors were encouraging one application with one set of screens and one set of business rules to apply to all of those businesses. The people running the businesses said, 'We're not going to do it.'" Pratt says that some CRM vendors solved the problem by enabling their customers to configure the software differently for each group of agents. As a result, private banking and retail banking agents, for example, can view the same customer data from screens tailored to help them offer different services to different types of customers.
Agents can also use the information CRM software provides not only to address customers' concerns, but to also find new sales opportunities. If, for example, an agent notices that a given customer previously called about purchasing a television set, the agent could mention a special promotion that your company offers on a new model. This is just one of the ways you can use CRM software to generate revenue in addition to providing customer support.
A recent study conducted by the Aberdeen Group, a research and consulting firm based in Boston, MA, found that CRM software for making sales represents the fastest-growing segment of the CRM marketplace. Sales-related products earned CRM vendors $2 billion in revenue in 1999, and they can expect to earn an estimated total of $6 billion by 2003. In the same study, the Aberdeen Group revealed that the customer support segment of the CRM software industry earned $945 million in revenue in 1999 and will earn a projected sum of $3 billion in 2003.
With more CRM vendors offering a growing number of products to choose from, a big challenge is selecting the right software for your call center. Here's a look at some of the latest CRM software that can help your company win customers' confidence.
Multimedia Mania Grips Leading CRM Software Vendors
As leading CRM software vendors create products to help agents handle on-line customers, the boundaries between CRM and eCRM software gradually fade away. Oracle (Redwood Shores, CA) offers Oracle Interaction Center Suite, a series of CRM modules that you can purchase with or separately from E-Business Suite. E-Business Suite lets employees working in other departments in your company find the information they need.
Oracle Interaction Center Suite includes modules that enable agents to view call scripts, receive phone calls and e-mail messages. You can use any and all modules from Oracle Interaction Center with modules from E-Business Suite so that agents and employees from other departments in your company, like marketing, human resources and accounting, can view the same information about each customer.
Lisa Arthur, the vice president of CRM product marketing for Oracle, provides an example to describe how agents can use Oracle Interaction Center to find customer data from different branches of your company. "A call center agent can view a customer's invoice history from accounts receivable through a screen pop," she says. "So if a customer has a question about a specific bill, agents can answer it right there without transferring the customer to accounting."
Arthur adds that many companies use separate CRM software for handling different types of messages, like phone calls and e-mails. She says that this approach can be costly and time-consuming compared to using one software suite for every type of message across your entire company, and she draws an analogy to prove her point.
"Let's say that I buy a BMW and get great performance and maintenance," says Arthur. "Or I could go out and buy the engine from BMW, the chassis from another company, the tires somewhere else and have somebody put it all together for me. That's what a lot of call centers are trying to do to build a 'best of breed' CRM software package. The complexity, cost and time involved is daunting compared to purchasing one option that gives you everything you need."
