CRM,
CIM, CTI, CLI, IVR, AVR Part 2: What to do with CRM
By Martin Ashfield
 So
you’ve spent a small fortune investing in the
latest Call Centre technology. This suits your business
enormously but, unfortunately, has the opposite effect
on customers who are now forced to work through innumerable
options before they can speak to a real person. Teleconomy
has had plentiful experience developing effective
Call Centre Initiatives with large corporate clients,
so here are some immediate solutions that spring to
mind:
Firstly, why did you give control of your CRM or
CIM or even your Customer Service Initiative (CSI
– the new acronym) to your IT Director? Move
on! Give it to your front line staff that deal with
the customer on a daily basis. All too often I find
myself listening to Directors tell me how the Senior
Management Team have defined and introduced a Customer
Service Initative based upon their own experiences
and beliefs, and not once discussing it with the people
who deliver it.
Secondly, stop spending money on technology and start
spending it on understanding your customer. Have you
ever considered trying to find out what your customer
really expects in terms of customer service? The successful
companies are the ones doing customer satisfaction
surveys and conduct mystery shopping calls to measure
service, and then they use that information to drive
a Customer Service Initiative.
You may argue at this point that you already know
what the customer is after, and you are probably saying
that all they want is for their query to be resolved
as fast and effectively as possible. And you would
be entirely correct. But the problem is you are lookinng
at the wrong part of the problem, as all the technology
focuses on is how many calls you can process in the
shortest period of time, not the quality of the service
provided.
At this point I must mention and commend NTL who
are now realising the error of their ways and putting
the customer first by investing in people with a target
of achieving ‘One Call Resolution’. In
other words the customer is dealt with straight away
instead of having to make repeated calls. However,
the mere fact that organisations are realigning themselves
to meet with customer needs by dealing with the customers
issue first time, does make me wonder what their initial
strategy was.
I suspect that your initial reaction though is ‘great
idea but what about the cost to deliver’. Well,
before you go into a state of shock at how much it
would cost to increase your staffing levels to achieve
this, try asking your customer how many times they
have had to contact you before they actually spoke
to someone and had their query resolved, how many
time have they called about the same complaint? Although
the concept maybe idealistic, the reality is that
if you can achieve true quality of service your call
volumes will come down, and therefore staffing levels
may not be as big an issue as first thought.
On a final note then I can assure you that if you
spend more time, energy and resource on understanding
who your customer is and what their expectations are,
and in turn changing your behaviours, you will see
a return on investment. Ultimately that is what we
are all trying to achieve… but perhaps some
of us are going about it the wrong way.
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