The customer is always right." This old wisdom motivated businesses before phones existed. But there's more to helping customers effectively than giving them what they want. To stay competitive in a tight economy, you also need to anticipate customers' needs. CRM software can help by providing agents with information about customers before they call.
Call centers seeking to improve the ROI for CRM software are realizing the technology's potential by not limiting its use to agents.
"CRM has evolved from a sales or customer service system into a way to share lots of information across the company," says Ben Holtz, president and CEO of CRM consulting firm Green Beacon Solutions (Watertown, MA).
Sharing customer information can help you to improve products and services in addition to customer relationships. For example, a software company receiving numerous complaints about a specific bug can use CRM software to send records of those complaints to the engineering department, which can fix the bug for future upgrades.
You can also rely on CRM software to collect customers' opinions about pivotal business decisions. Elizabeth Ahearn, president and CEO of CRM consultancy The Radclyffe Group (Fairfield, NJ), recalls how one client asked customers who called what they thought about new packaging for a product. Agents entered customers' comments into their CRM software records so the company could review them before approving an expensive re-packaging overhaul.
But with so many CRM options on the market, which one should you choose? Ahearn recommends that you interview CRM vendors' customers to ensure they have a strong support services track record. Ahearn also suggests attending users' group meetings for vendors to find out what issues users raise about a vendor's software.
"No solution, especially one as complex as CRM software, is without bugs," she says.
Bear in mind that CRM software is only as useful as the information that it provides to agents and other employees. Before you implement CRM software, you need to plan what that information should be. You'll also need someone to guide the implementation process.
"We try to find someone at a fairly senior level in an organization to be the CRM champion, usually the head of customer service or sales," says Holtz. That person typically requests feedback from one or two of the most experienced agents at the call center to learn what information they need to do their jobs effectively.
It would be a daunting task to provide a comprehensive listing of every vendor in the dynamic CRM marketplace. Rather than attempt to discuss them all, this feature focuses on the most recent vendor releases and on how call centers use them. And although there are vendors that offer CRM services or software for specific business verticals, like the financial and telecommunications industries, we've chosen to concentrate on apps intended for most call centers.
We're also limiting our discussion to software that provides customer information through proprietary desktop environments or through a Web browser. While some vendors offer software for routing calls, e-mail and text chat that can integrate with CRM desktop environments and browsers, our concern is with applications that can display the information to agents' PCs. And although knowledge management software can help improve customer relationships by enabling on-line self-service, we covered knowledge management in our January issue.
With these caveats in mind, here's how CRM software can help make relationships between agents and customers long and productive.
The Upshot Of Upgrades
Upgrades to CRM software are changing how you handle customers and how you manage your call center. Consider how most CRM suites let agents view customer information through a Web browser or from their desktops. That upgrade alone dramatically affects call center IT staff, in addition to agents.
"A lot of IT departments are looking for solutions that drive down total costs of ownerships," says John Grozier, group director of CRM product marketing at SAP (Newtown Square, PA). "Web-based CRM software does that by reducing configuration on agents' PCs."
Grozier says that Web-based CRM lets you save money by not having to install client software on each PC. Web-enabled apps also leave IT staff more time to handle more urgent tasks.
Using Web-based CRM software enables call centers to expand their labor pools by hiring remote agents. Siebel (San Mateo, CA) has among its clients a Florida-based company that hires retirees who work from home. These agents receive the information they need to help customers on-line. Hiring them also saves the company the expense of training and recruiting additional full-time agents.
On-line access to CRM software allows employees other than agents to improve customer service. The Halifax Bank of Scotland uses E.piphany's (San Mateo, CA) software so that tellers at bank branches can view customers' histories on-line. Because these histories include agents' notes on conversations with customers, tellers can learn what offers agents made to customers and which products and services customers are likely to be interested in.
Web-based CRM also enables agents to escalate calls to more experienced employees. For example, Oracle (Redwood City, CA) works with the US Navy's Department of Personnel, which opened a call center employing 20 agents who answer sailors' frequently-asked questions about their careers and benefits. When sailors ask more complex questions, agents route their calls to the Navy's human resources department. Agents use Oracle's CRM software to send information about each caller on-line to one of 800 human resources case managers.
Most CRM vendors have also expanded their software's analytics and reporting options to appeal to senior-level executives.
"Business managers are not going to stare at traditional call center reports and say, 'Isn't it interesting that you got 100,000 calls,'" says Lawrence Byrd, CRM strategist for Avaya (Basking Ridge, NJ). "If you're gathering information about customers across every location, the value is in using it to make better business decisions."
Analytics from CRM software help you to increase profitability by collecting statistics about customer demographics. If you collect data from a phone switch, you can determine agents' average speed of answer. With CRM software, you can determine who your most profitable customers are based on their purchase histories. The analytics tools can then enable you to generate reports detailing service times for your most profitable customers so you can find out if you're prioritizing their calls.
Don't expect an immediate ROI from CRM software. Christopher Hall, director of product management for Kana Communications (Menlo Park, CA), explains that CRM software's value derives less from its ability to generate a quick profit than in how it generates savings through increased customer loyalty.
