The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

Developing your future customer interaction strategies will require thought and planning, but once you have developed the vision, you will have the foundation for developing the optimum CRM solution in terms of the technology, people and supporting processes.

It will always be a balancing act to increase customer service targets whilst managing the expectations from your customers, meeting the demands of your employees, as well as achieving objectives for operational efficiency.

Therefore developing a future orientated Customer Relationship Management strategy will help you to target each of these groups and address their key issues. The CRM market is full of a bewildering range of new media, technologies, products and new terminology; web chat and call-back, self-help, personalisation, virtual groups, unified interaction history….

Kathryn Howe
Marketing Manager
Siemens

So where do you start ? Siemens CRM architecture has been designed to provide the building blocks on which to develop your technology strategy. It helps you build on your existing experiences, processes and infrastructure and provide customers with more flexible, differentiated and available services.

• Make each interaction relevant

• Make each interactive effective

• Learn from each interaction

The way forward…
Some important guidelines when developing a CRM solution are;

• Treat new media channels as both an opportunity and a threat − Capitalise on opportunities each channel presents for cost savings and revenue opportunities BUT don't disappoint the customer …

• Customers dictate how they want to communicate with a business − Customers use different channels for different purposes at different times of day

• Customers expect self-service facilities that are relevant to their needs (i.e. if they place an order, they expect to be able to track it's delivery)

• Customers experiences and expectations will dictate the usage and success rates for such services and ultimately their loyalty to an organisation

• Be wary of alienating customers by removing or blocking channels of communication (i.e the IVR trap). Poor on-line service provision will drive customers back to the telephone resulting in higher call volumes, not a reduction.

• The loyalty and motivation of staff and management is key to delivering the highest levels of customer service

Depending on the nature of interactions with customers, the value attached to each interaction, the processes needed to fulfil them and the lifetime relationship each customer has with an organisation, the blend of technologies needed to deliver the optimum CRM solution will vary. To help facilitate this process, Siemens focuses on a number of key areas in order to identify and quantify the potential benefits of each CRM technology. The 10 golden rules of CRM will help you understand the issues for your business.

1. Help customers to help themselves
"75% of enterprises with annual revenues of $100m or more will have had experiences with web services. By mid 2003 it estimates that half of those enterprises with less than $100m in revenue will have connected to web service periodically" - Gartner

Self-service is not a new concept, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solutions have been providing automated access to information for over a decade. So what is new ?

The speed and interactive nature of Internet has increased customer expectations for immediate access to information. The web does provide a powerful tool for enabling customers to access a wider range of services and integrating web self service into your overall communications mix provides customers with a more flexible mechanism for answering enquiries and performing transactions.

Organisations are using the Internet in differing ways, some only to deliver elements of their customer interaction, others are encompassing it more broadly to deliver end-to-end customer service, covering all aspects of their interaction with prospects and customers:

• providing access to the information, e.g. datasheets containing product information

• forms for performing and tracking specific transactions or enquiries such as ordering, account enquiries, etc.

• managing after sales service enquiries

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ's) is a powerful way to proactively respond to customer activity. FAQ's provide instant answers to the most commonly asked questions and allow customers to submit and receive answers to new questions. The knowledge base automatically updates and prioritises the questions so everyone can access the stored information.

• Self-service improves customer service and resource utilisation

• Providing quick and efficient answer to the questions which customers are really asking

• Offer more relevant services and share knowledge base

• Enable customers to track and follow-up on any unresolved enquiries

• Learn from customer actions to build a stronger relationship

• Enhance employee utilisation

• Provide more effective management of internet and e-mail channels

Delivering high self-service usage and success rates is about effective access to information and empowering your customers to find instant answers to questions. However should they require live assistance it's vital that they can contact your organisation using the most appropriate means possible.

2. Provide the RIGHT assistance for on-line services
"78% of Internet transactions are abandoned" Datamonitor

Statistics show that customers will often invest time on the web but will not always complete a transaction. If the customer is unable to find a vital piece of information easily you need to provide them with a mechanism for asking the relevant question.

It is universally agreed that online assistance plays a crucial role in providing Internet customers with a live connection to your organisation. The varying options for on-line assistance will mean that you will have to make important decisions, which will have a fundamental impact on your contact centre resourcing and customer service levels.

E-mail responses to FAQ's has already been covered as one of the options available for answering enquiries, however live assistance delivers both real time and follow-up responses e.g. text chat, shared browsing, conferencing, web forms, immediate connection to live assistance, call back.

Your customer expectations and service delivery capabilities will be strong considerations in the type of assistance services that you choose to implement. Real time, immediate connection services will place instant demands on resources, which may be difficult to manage. Callback services may be easier to manage but may conflict with customer demands for an instant or quick response.

Different services may be appropriate depending on the kind of transaction the customer is performing. So to weigh up the options it is important to fully understand the nature of the request for assistance, how quickly a response is required and which members of staff are able to deliver a response.

Live assistance is focussed on helping you to increase the number of completed internet and self-help transactions :

• Focus assistance on high value transactions

• Learn from live customer interactions to enhance self-help services

• Where appropriate provide customers with a more personal interaction experience.

• Reduce the amount of lost business opportunities

Successful online assistance services will utilise the optimum member of staff who is able to deal with the request as quickly and effectively as possible.

3. Treat e-mails as live interactions not electronic post
It is forecast that by 2003, 25% of all transactions with an organisation will be via e-mail, representing a significant change in the way you will be transacting with your customers.

When moving from call centre to contact centre you will be able to build on the strengths of your existing telephone routing processes and management principles and where possible apply them to web and e-mail contacts.

As volumes of e-mails increase it will be increasingly important to ensure that you have a fully integrated solution which not only routes e-mails to the right person first time but also gives you visibility of the impact on e-mail traffic on your business. Real time statistics will help you to understand how your business is coping with e-mail traffic e.g. the number of queued e-mails and the average response time. Historical reporting will let you assess the impact over time allowing you to analyse the number of e-mails received across different functions and also employee completion times.

For the organisation it is vital to put a process in place to quickly route the enquiry to the person who is most likely to be able to help, with as little manual intervention as possible. From the e-mail, header detail, content and sender information you will probably have more information to help route the e-mail, than you receive when a phone call is delivered into the contact centre. Skills based routing applications will help you to deliver e-mails more effectively to the optimum member of staff.

All organisations are looking for ways to adopt operational efficiencies, and to reduce the impact of e-mail volume on contact centre workload. A number of options can be adopted, from simple acknowledgement, to a semi or fully automated response, these last two options both require close integration of your business processes with supporting systems and knowledge bases. E-mails can take longer to respond to than similar voice calls so part or full population of the e-mail can result in significant time savings.

Effective e-mail handling will improve customer service and resource utilisation

• Meet customer service targets (SLA's) by efficiently distributing e-mails to the best person to reduce handling overheads

• Gain operational efficiencies by automatically delivering e-mails to the most appropriate person and employing automatic or semi automatic response mechanisms

• Effectively manage employee e-mail skills with skills based routing and improve employee retention

• Be an effective learning organisation, analyse the pattern of enquiries and ensure you update knowledge bases such as FAQ's and web self-service applications

Delivering an effective e-mail response will require you to handle e-mail in the same way as you would handle a live transaction. To balance customers expectations on speed of response, organisations will need to integrate intelligent routing and automated response technologies into their business processes.

4. Manage Service Provision across all media channels
"23% of managers believe that less than 1 hour is an acceptable response time to an enquiry and in addition to this a consistent quality of response is considered to be of significant importance."

48% of managers believe that response levels should vary from customer to customer." Siemens research in conjuction with the CCMA

Consistently managing the provision of customer service across a range of different media requires a routing solution that will queue and distribute contacts to employees in a unified manner. So whether your customers are contacting you by voice, web or e-mail you should use the same criteria for prioritising and handling their call, providing them with a consistent and high quality level of service.

Managing and setting customer expectations is a must, particularly if you are providing your customers with a variety of different contact mechanisms. Key performance indicators for new media are evolving and there are few industry standards and recommended services levels which organisations are committed to meeting. A common sense approach is required with service levels appropriate to the nature of the interaction and taking into account the relationship with the customer.

For your contact centre agents its important to provide a consistent workflow environment for handling the multi-media contacts. It is easy with a skills based routing application to add new media into an agents profile as appropriate, thus ensuring that multi-media is blended into the contact centre and doesn't lead to silo's of agent skills. To provide the agents with consistent workflow their phone will be 'busy' to telephone calls while they are working on an e-mail, enabling them to focus on the task in hand.

Consistent service levels can only be achieved by giving contact centre employees full visibility and control over all media channels. Although resource management will increase in complexity, a fully integrated contact routing platform will provide the management statistics covering all media, making it possible to assess the different growth patterns and issues associated with time of day routing etc.

Improve customer loyalty by ensuring that customers receive high quality and consistent service irrespective or which media they select.

• Ensure all contacts are handled accurately and effectively, with multi-media contact queuing and routing technologies

• Balancing employee skill levels in new media and optimise resourcing

• Provide full visibility and reporting across all media so that all interactions can be managed effectively

• Provide employees with consistent integrated workflow applications

• Visibility and reporting of all interactions

5. Utilise the right resource, whatever, whoever and wherever they are
Organisations must plan for extending CRM applications to mobile devices over the next 3-5 years (2000-2005) – Meta Group

In order to maximise the opportunity to resolve enquiries, communications need to be routed to the most appropriate resource, whether it is an automated service or an employee, regardless of their location. Whatever the case, the nature and requirements of the interaction need to be identified and matched against the skills, responsibilities and knowledge of all available resources.

Employees working at remote locations or from home may be integrated seamlessly into the contact centre operations. Full real-time and historical management reporting is available to ensure that you have a complete understanding of how your employees and your entire business is performing. For many part-time staff home working may be a preferable option, providing the right balance with home and work life and removing the grind of commuting. For your business it will give you additional flexibility to respond quickly to peaks and troughs in call traffic and also will give you access to a wider pool of skills.

For organisations with a customer interaction strategy which encompasses both the contact centre environment and also field force employees then you need to develop a workflow that ensures that customer contacts are managed effectively. There may be some types of contact which are best handled by an account manager, field service engineer or support staff, which requires you to extend your CRM solutions to all employees enabling them to have access to consistent information resources about the particular customer history and current enquiry.

Improve the flexibility and quality of your service provision by extending customer interactions to employees at remote sites or home.

• Maximise the first time resolution of enquiries

• Access wider skills pools by employing remote employees

• Increase your flexibility where appropriate by utilising temporary staff

• Balance the peaks and troughs with networked and load balancing applications

• Provide your employees with an improved home/worklife balance

• Ensure all customer facing employees have access to CRM applications

6. Ensure that employees have visibility and control of all media channels
"92% of companies believe a single integrated view of the organisation is critical or very important" – Forrester Research

One of the biggest frustrations for callers to date was having their call routed to someone who had no visibility of a their previous contact history. Now that we are moving to a multi-media environment employees need to be provided with a unified interaction history and common workflow for managing customer communications.

So when a current customer phones up to check the progress of an existing transaction: "I am phoning regarding the e-mail I sent yesterday concerning the order placed on the web last week", the agent answering the phone needs to have full visibility of all the interactions to date to be able to answer the enquiry quickly and effectively.

Likewise, from web requests for assistance it is important that an agent has full visibility of all activities the customer may have been involved in prior to their request for assistance e.g. any web self-help or unsuccessful web transaction. These will help you route the contact to the most appropriate agent and also speed up their response to the enquiry.

Employees need to have visibility of all media activities and particularly their own personal work queues, so that their service levels can be monitored and maintained over time. This also helps them to control their own personal development and manage their own adoption of new media.

A unified interaction history will enable employees to provide consistent and quality customer service.

• Deliver a single view of customer interaction history

• Provide a real-time customer multi-media transaction history

• Develop future customer interaction based on customer history

• Exploit opportunities for increased sales and service

Maximise employee skills development and retention by providing them with the flexibility to work across all contact media

7. Empower users with streamlined business processes
" A business process approach to building new applications enables an organisation to unlock the potential of its existing applications, including legacy systems" – Butler Group

To date cumbersome existing business processes and unconnected back office legacy databases have restricted and complicated the adoption of e-business and m-business applications.

In many cases requests often require access to manual processes and multiple systems to carry out the various actions needed to deliver the end service. For instance, a simple change of contact details may require several different systems to be updated. From an employee of customer perspective this simple task is time-consuming and prone to error. Combining the multiple threads of such interactions and delivering a single end-to-end process with a common Internet 'form', represents a major benefit to employees, customers and the business.

Whether the user is an employee, a customer, a partner or a supplier, they should be empowered to fulfil whatever activity they require from placing an order, checking stock availability, logging a fault or arranging a delivery. The supporting processes to complete any of these tasks should be simple and efficient, so that anyone can perform the transaction with minimal training and knowledge

Streamlining the front-end data capture and information delivery services will enable you to provide personalised and effective service to your customer. This end-to-end transaction delivery can all be achieved by integrating your existing back office systems with a user friendly, consistent and customised front end.

Empower customers and employees to perform transactions easily and in real-time and reduce the cost of delivering customer service

• Provide all users with simple screens and prompts to perform secure transactions

• Give customers a personalised and relevant experience

• Automate and streamline paper based processes

• Deliver end-to-end processes

• Work with more accurate and up to date customer information

• More effective use of employees, leading to increased revenue opportunities

Make each interaction as effective as possible and remove the need for follow-up calls and repetitive and time wasting entry of information.

8. Learn from each interaction
In a study by Technical Assistance Research Programs Institute it was found that only 4% of dissatisfied customers complain and yet 8 out of 10 never buy from the vendor again.

Boston Consulting estimate that it costs $6.80 to market to repeat customers on the web as opposed to $34 to market to a new customer.

Over time as your business evolves it will become increasingly necessary to learn from customer interaction and ensure that the information and services you provide are still relevant and add real value. To really make the most of each interaction you will then be able to enhance the information and services you provide in the future. Knowledge bases and FAQ's are two areas which have inherent learning capabilities and can significantly enhance your ability to provide customers with more relevant and real-time answers to their questions.

For many organisations however it is 20% of customers who account for 80% of sales, so by concentrating efforts on serving those who are already doing business with you, you could vastly increase the value of your business. Building and extending customer relationships will help you to get closer to your customers and provide them with more personalised and relevant services.

With your customers using new channels to contact your organisation, you will increasingly need to use consolidated tools to analyse customer behaviour trends and profitability, and proactively maximise each customer's value to the organisation.

Clickstream analysis and content management applications are cost effective and successful methods of personalising and building business with individual customers. These solutions will help you identify and perform trend analysis to maximise customer value and enhance business performance.

Industries with customer analytics in place – Survey from Networks

Develop your business strategy on customer retention. Strengthen customer loyalty and proactively increase customer value to the organisation.

• Increase profitability by tracking sales performance

• Identify profitable customers and optimise cross marketing opportunities

• Develop campaigns to target likeminded customers

• Create partnerships with customers

• Adapt instantly to new data or requirements, trends, and changing market conditions

9. Be Proactive
In order to build profitable relationships with customers you will need to be able to adapt to the conditions in today's business environment. Customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and the opportunities provided by the Internet mean that it's never been easier for a customer to leave and find products and services elsewhere.

In this information rich society your organisation will need to stand-out from the rest and provide customers with well targeted, personalised and relevant offers, so that you can build existing relationships and win new ones. Communications with customers will need to become more interactive with improved two way flows of information, communicating with the customer using their preferred media e.g. e-mail confirmation of an order delivery schedule or to update regarding progress on a fault fix.

Developing the customer relationship is also about being proactive and managing regular contact, so that customers are receiving personalised and relevant communications. Planned and focussed sales and service activities can be blended into the call schedules to ensure that consistent and regular contact with customers is maintained and give the customer a more proactive view of the service they receive from you.

For large-scale outbound activities campaign management applications will help you to make the most of customer interaction, balancing visits by field based account management and service teams with regular contact from their telephone account representatives.

Active campaigns to inform customers of new special offers will help you to drive cross-selling opportunities and stimulate new opportunities with like-minded customers. Whether you use automated dialling (preview, progressive, predictive) or e-mail solutions, real-time and historical performance reporting will provide you with the management statistics to drive future initiatives.

Some organisations are already embracing SMS messaging to contact mobile customers and in the future the importance of mobile dimension shouldn't be underestimated (see rule 10). "Location based services" will move you to an entirely different paradigm, for providing relevant and personalised offers to customers wherever they happen to be.

Provide customers with a valued and proactive service, make it relevant, personalised and profitable

• Always keep the customer informed

• Stimulate a positive attitude to doing business with your organisation

• Generate profitable lines of business

• Improve the quality of customer contact

• Learn from interactions for future profitability

10. Keep an eye on the future
"The ability to seamlessly integrate existing corporate applications would encourage 86% of organisations to mobile enable their business" – Ovum

Mobile Business to Employee applications are providing organisations with compelling business advantage, enhancing employee productivity, improving responsiveness to customers and reducing costs. To maximise the returns in eCRM investments, organisations need to focus on providing fully integrated access to CRM and business applications for all mobile employees. mCRM solutions will provide anytime, anywhere access for mobile employees, fully integrating them with your business processes and enabling them to obtain information – truly extending your corporate resources across the boundaries of the corporate network. Mobile sales and service professionals are the two largest segments of mobile workers whose roles are primarily focussed on client sites, yet many are still hampered by a lack of relevant and up to date information and out of date business processes. Siemens approach focuses on developing mobile business solutions to compliment your e-business infrastructure, process and culture.

"By 2004, 30%-50% of B2C e-commerce transactions in Europe will be initiated using a mobile device" Gartner Group

Just as the wired Internet has impacted on your business today, the wireless Internet is evolving at a rapid pace. Higher speed, broadband mobile technologies such as GPRS are going to deliver relevant and personalised content to mobile phones and PDA's. Mobile customers are naturally more impatient than their static counterparts, so providing efficient services using alternatives such as speech recognition will become crucial. Have you ever tried interacting with an IVR requiring you to push the buttons to select an option from a mobile phone?

One area which will see exponential growth in the future for the consumer is "location based services". Organisations will be able to extend the range and value of personalised services they provide to customers by providing enhanced information based on the customers current location e.g. details of the nearest filling station, favourite shop, pub or restaurant.

About the Company
Siemens Information and Communication Networks Inc. (ICN) is a provider of integrated voice and data networks and solutions for enterprises, carriers and service providers.