The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

I am sorry to break this to you, but Wireless CRM does not cure disease, stop all war, nor make the world safe for humanity. Someone had to tell you.

The commercials and advertisements do try to convince you otherwise. Futuristic images of a world made better through high-speed, real-time video, hand-held devices proliferate. By pushing the envelope of the imagination, vendors want to take you on a trip with wireless technologies beyond the cell phone to new products and services bordering on science fiction.

While impressive in their attempt, they often leave you wondering if they could do something for you today in the here and now. They can and you can benefit too.

Robert Tevis,
Group Product Manager, Siemens

Customer Relationship Management or CRM is based upon using your technology resources to improve your contact and the relationship you have with your customers. When wireless technologies are blended into the resources of your customer contact centers, you can expand your ability to support your customers and improve your efficiency of doing business with them.

CRM application vendors have developed products that use wireless technology to provide mobile access to users of their contact center products. For example, FrontRange Solutions, Inc. has announced their GoldMine Everywhere Server to extend the availability of their GoldMine sales and marketing application to remote users of PalmVII Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). As a contact center adds a new customer to the GoldMine database, field sales representatives can synchronize their PDAs wirelessly with system to have instant access to the new customer within their territory. The rep could pay a visit to a new customer without going to the office to get their list of new contacts.

Other vendors, such as the Remedy Corporation, offer similar functionality. Their product, Remedy Wireless 1.0, provides access to the Remedy Action Request system via Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) enabled telephones. Both products enable you to cut the tether to your office and enable your external sales and support resources to have instant, real-time access to the latest changes within your CRM applications databases.

Contact centers equipped with these products and fully integrated with them provide multi-media access for your customers into your business. You can support your customers no matter what method they want to use to contact you—phone, e-mail, or web access. Once they are within your contact center, you can add wireless technologies to figuratively push out the walls that currently limit your center's operations.

Although distances may be shorter, wireless technologies can also provide mobility to your internal contact center workers and enhance the operations of your communications applications. Contact center supervisors can be given PDAs or WAP-enabled phones to reduce their need to stay very close to the action.

Using these devices supervisors can monitor current, real-time statistics without needing to be at their desks all day. Emergency messages can be transmitted to them wherever they roam throughout your business. A ringing cell phone or a beeping PDA could alert them to needs ranging from higher call volumes to the needs for more personnel on the phones.

If more personnel are needed to cover customer contact stations within a business, they could even be alerted directly over their own PDAs or wireless phones. These alerts can be triggered programmatically using servers like those outlined above. To complete the circle, supervisors might not even know that the new personnel have logged in until they notice it on their current status displays on their PDAs.

Wireless CRM gives your contact center employees more freedom to get up from their desks and still remain ready to help the next customer. By adding teleworking capabilities, your agents can be freed from the atmosphere of most tethered customer contact centers. By providing greater freedom for your workers, you improve working conditions. Your agents can now present a better face to your customers and improve the image of your business.

Of course, these technologies only make sense if they make your workforce more efficient. Wireless technologies do this by providing the customer information that your employees need whenever they need it and wherever they are. Time and even insignificant travel is reduced so your people can maximize the time they spend with your customers. Isn't that what CRM is all about?

So give these practical uses a try in your business, and with the time and effort you save try working to make the world a better place. Maybe the ads are right after all.

About the Author
Robert E.Tevis has been a member of the technology community for more than 20 years. Since 1999, he has been part of the Siemens Customer Interaction Solutions group. His product management team is responsible for Siemens computer telephony integration products and the Siemens HiPath Ready program.

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.