Solving the puzzle of enterprisewide CRM

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Apr 2001 by Coleman, Joseph, Kirchner, Soren

To build loyalty and value, a company must be able to respond to its customers quickly, effectively and completely. While this goal may seem self-evident, achieving it is anything but. Many of the customer contact systems on the market today claim to offer all the features a company needs to deliver the highest level of customer service possible, but some lack the most critical piece of the puzzle - the ability to easily integrate with existing customer and business data systems to ensure that agents have access to all the information they need, when they need it.

To help agents quickly identify customers, understand their specific problems or questions, and anticipate their needs, companies require an integrated system. The system must allow all agents, regardless of where they are physically located, to access and exchange pertinent customer data and translate them into useful sales and support information. A truly integrated customer contact solution should extend to the entire enterprise, regardless of where the enterprise geographically exists, and should be able to launch and interface with a full range of customer and business data systems such as CRM, backoffice applications and client-server or legacy systems. Using this customer and business information allows the contact system to more intelligently prioritize and route customer calls. As customers are directed to appropriate agents, the information flows with the call to minimize information repetition and customer frustration. The end result is a higher level of agent productivity and customer satisfaction.

The Importance Of Integration In The Enterprise Today, an increasing number of companies are becoming aware of the importance of the customer relationship, particularly the customer who is a repeat buyer and a source of referral business. Accordingly, many companies are reorganizing themselves around their customers. In this new customer-centric business model, the contact center takes on critical importance, transforming from a tactical operation to a strategic function, the means by which enterprises can gather information about their customers and use it to establish stronger relationships with them. Achieving this customer-centric vision requires integration on several levels. On one level, it requires enterprises to integrate how they serve their customers across multiple communication channels. The historical call center becomes a contact center, where customers "enter" the enterprise by any medium they choose - phone, e-mail, Web or fax - and expect the same level of service. The contact center must incorporate these various contact channels alongside the phone, and allocate appropriate resources to ensure a uniform, positive customer experience.

It is critical that all customer contact functions be integrated. Customer expectations today demand the enterprise move away from disparate, standalone systems to comprehensive, all-in-one contact solutions that incorporate a full range of features and functions into a single system. These fully integrated solutions bring together traditional productivity-enhancing technologies such

as automat

ic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR) and call record

ing, using computer-telephony integration (CTI) to streamline the contact center environment, simplify operations and cut costs. Through this simplified integration, all customer interactions can be administered, managed and reported on through a single system. By establishing a single set of rules to route and queue multichannel interactions, the system can deliver a 360degree view of the customer, resulting in more productive agents and better customer service. In addition, by eliminating the need to purchase and deploy cost- and labor-intensive middleware to tie disparate systems together, the all-in-one system can save enterprises considerable upfront time and money and result in lower maintenance and service costs through the life cycle of the system.

A Seamless Link Is Critical The most critical integration of the contact center is providing a seamless link between the front- and back-office systems throughout the enterprise. Linking a company's touch points to its corporate knowledge bases ensures that agents have access to the information they need to service the customer. The ability to pull information from legacy front- and back-office systems, including mainframe-based applications, allows companies to lever

age the benefits of business and customer intelligence to deliver better customer experiences. This integration enables the contact system to achieve smarter routing and prioritization of customer interactions because

it can use current business data such account status, customer profile and t representative contact to process interactions. It also provides the enterprise with the ability to capture and leverage knowledge of every interaction it has with its customers across all enterprise functions, leading to improved decision-making abilities and enhanced customer relationship management. Selecting An Integrated, "Integrateable" Customer Contact Solution There are many theoretically integrated contact center solutions on the market that claim to have the ability to deliver superior customer service across multiple communications channels. Some of these solutions may only integrate certain functions within themselves and do not provide the ability to integrate with third-party databases and applications. These systems may require expensive integration services to develop tailored applications to implement call flows, build new interfaces to the corporate databases and write interfaces to thirdparty applications.