Breaking the Silver Bullet Stigma: CRM driven Call Centers

Dears,
Today’s multi-channel call centers are assuming a pivotal role not only in customer service, but also in marketing and sales strategies. This transformation from cost to profit center is knocking management for a loop. In this context, CRM systems are useful only if the entire company believes that using the systems will actually increase customer loyalty.
Call center—oh sorry, no doubt you prefer “contact center,” or “customer interaction center?” Maybe something more high-tech like “tele-center” or “communication center?” Pick one, any name will do—call center managers know that their domains are far more complex and challenging than an outsider might imagine. Sure they know the guy sitting next to them in the social gathering thinking “what’s so hard about picking up the phone and talking some @#$%?”
What’s so hard? IVR scripting, CTI implementation, Skills-based routing and queue management, Multi-channel contact tracking, workflow support and knowledge management. , Workforce management and reporting .

What’s hair-pulling frustrating is that companies are pouring millions of dollars into CRM systems, and ending up with:
· Supporting systems so poorly designed, integrated and maintained that agents refuse to use them; Supporting materials so cryptic, irrelevant or outdated that that they prevent agents from giving correct, timely answers;
· Augmentative technologies, such as Interactive Voice Response, implemented in a way more detrimental than helpful to customers;
· Web-based personalization perceived by customers as intrusive and downright offensive;
· E-mails remaining unopened as dual-tasking agents are reassigned to handle massive inbound call queues; and
· Customer care environments unable to gather, analyze, respond and react to useful business intelligence data.


Silver Bullet Stigma

Typically new, expensive technologies such as integrated E-business, CRM and ERP solutions are fobbed off as silver bullets to get companies to the cutting edge. This promise always fails. A company profits when systems are used as enablers, rather than replacements, for people and processes. When a company decides to use them to augment customer relationships, not avoid them. Regardless of how sophisticated these tools become, the measure of their success is always their contribution to the strategic goals of the organization. The proliferation of CRM systems on the market today just makes it harder for management to find the tools to help their organizations accomplish this. Evaluating vendors is a more arduous task since a proper evaluation considers not only cost, but integration, workflow, multi-channel contact support, commitment tracking, scalability, remote access capabilities, contact management, business intelligence tools, CTI, time tracking and so on.

But this isn’t your father’s call center we’re talking about anymore. Twenty years ago nobody dreamed of the ways the Internet now allows you to turn a necessary-evil “cost center” into a commercial vehicle. Customer interaction centers are moving from sweatshops to company flagships, handling everything from pre-sales inquiries to order processing to post-sale support. The support function is nothing new, but call centers’ status as points of contact for the Internet sales process gives the much-maligned customer service function new importance. It used to be that call center staff were hired to handle those nasty customer complaints about products and services, now they’re necessary for virtually every step of the supply chain.

THE CALL CENTER OF THE FUTURE
As we build the bright future then, what can we expect for customer service? The successful call-center-of-the-future organization won’t be treated as a poor second-cousin cost-center, it’ll be a strategic service offering that will include:
• Multi-channel access such as e-mail, Web chat, Web callback, voice-over net, voice-over IP, Web collaboration;
• Integrated knowledge management and contact management tools;
• Personalization of every customer interaction;
• More powerful off-the-shelf telephony integration;
• Genuine customer knowledge through superior business analytics and market intelligence;
• Front line employees who can deliver perfect service… but that’s another story.

Thirty years ago, when AT&T created the first centralized telemarketing facility, nobody dreamed it would become the first line of contact for so many global corporations—not just for customer support, but for Internet order processing and other multi-channel communications. Sure technology helped, but a company’s attitude towards the customer, not the technology it used, determined the project’s ultimate success or failure.
The call center is a microcosm of business practice, and when you add the New Economy challenges of end-to-end support, VoIP, e-mail, universal business applications, collaboration, chat, call through, call back and so on, well, you have a new animal. No longer is the call center just for pre- and post-sale support, but now it’s an integral link in the supply chain. Yet it’s easy to become obsessed with metrics which affect bottom line costs—average speed of answer, talk time, and abandonment rate. And yes, the tendency is to use quantitative, not qualitative metrics as yardsticks of call centers’ operational success.
Innovative companies are giving their call center agents the information and authority to make every profitable customer feel that the company cares about them personally, which helps establish all-important trust. This involves a multitude of processes and, depending on the size of the customer base, significant technological support. While it may never duplicate the personal service of the village store, done properly it gives you that crucial competitive edge.

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