Managing the Contact Center for CRM
Most firms today profess to have a customer-centric strategy. Indeed, many have purchased expensive CRM systems to help attain this goal. However, very few firms have truly embraced the real meaning of CRM. As the failed CRM implementations of the 1990s and 2000s can attest, CRM is more than a technology or an elevator speech. Rather it is an enterprisewide strategy and philosophy of realigning and refocusing the business around the customer. Unfortunately, this is much more difficult than simply purchasing software or rewriting a mission statement. Examining how CRM applies to the traditional contact center illustrates the radical nature of CRM and why successful implementations have been so difficult to achieve.
The Contact Centers Role in CRM
The most valuable employees within any organization are the ones closest to the customer. From first-hand experiences of speaking and interacting with customers, these employees understand the customer experience. Employees who interact with customers directly not only learn what customers want or do not want, but also know how they feel about the company and its products and services. This emotional data is often difficult to capture and relay to others throughout the company.
The contact center is the front line of the organization and therefore contains the greatest potential for improving upon the customer experience. Contact agents, whose goal is to understand, interact and improve upon the customer experience, are at the heart of any CRM strategy. Ironically, they are often the lowest-paid employees at a company. Indeed, many firms consider these agents to be costs that should be minimized through outsourcing or automation.
The recognition that the most valuable employees within an organization are the contact center agents leads to profound changes within organizations. Some of these changes include:
Realigning the contact center in the organizational structure; n Redefining agent performance metrics; n Rethinking agent compensation plans; n Training issues; and n New agent-enabling technologies.
Realigning the Contact Center in the Organizational Structure
CRM is centered on identifying customer needs and satisfying (if not exceeding) expectations. How can an organization expect to achieve this noble goal if its departments are not in sync? The customer-centric organization realizes this and ensures that departments such as sales, marketing, systems, R&D and HR all have the common goal of improving the customer experience. In addition, such companies also recognize that integration and real-time sharing of data collected by the contact center are necessary for the successful implementation of a CRM strategy. Timely and efficient dissemination and retrieval of customer profiles, transactions, preferences and complaints allows the organization to quickly respond to (and ideally predict) customer needs. The closer the entire organization is able to stay to the front line, the more nimble and successful it will be.
Such a realignment also imposes a significant paradigm shift in the role of the contact center. No longer can the contact center be treated as a cost center; rather, it must transform itself into a revenue generator and source of competitive advantage. Every call, email and letter needs to be viewed as an opportunity to delight the customer either by resolving a problem, providing desired information or helping to satisfy a need (through crossand up-selling). Gone are the days of simply taking orders, setting up appointments and checking status. Todays contact center must meet a much higher standard.
This realignment is not just a new mind-set, but also a new way to organize corporate responsibilities. Forward-thinking firms understand this and have created new executive positions at headquarters such as the chief customer officer. However, unleashing the potential of the contact center personnel requires much more than this. It requires making the people at the contact center feel that they are at the heart of the firm and understand the crucial role they play. The senior manager at the contact center must have, at a minimum, a dotted line to all of upper management. Ideally, contact center managers would be part of the executive management team and have an active role in corporate strategic decision-making.
An important item to note is that integration and expansion of the role of the contact center is crucial no matter where the center is located. Whether down the hall, across the street, or half way around the world, the contact center is still the hub of propriety customer data and insight that must be shared and utilized across the company in order for the organization to fully implement and reap the benefits of a CRM strategy.
Redefining Agent Performance Metrics
If an organization is going to adopt the view of the contact center as a revenue generator and source of competitive advantage, it had better be ready to throw away traditional performance metrics such as call volume and average talk time. The inherent tradeoff between efficiency and effectiveness must be recognized and accepted, which is that if an organization decides to focus on reducing call times, it cannot expect to build relationships and proactively solve problems. On the flip side, if an organization chooses to focus on relationship development and proactive problem resolution (cross-selling and up-selling), it cannot demand reduced call times. One comes at the expense of the other the challenge is finding a happy medium. This is a major issue for contact centers and therefore it is critical that organizations quantify the costs of adding talk time (including additional staff and training costs) versus the upside potential of retained customers and additional sales. Changes in approach and methodology need to be initially tested on a small scale before any large-scale rollouts are performed.
Ideally, organizations will develop and embrace new performance metrics like return on customer and customer influence rate (CIR). Return on customer measures how the contact agent impacts the customers lifetime value. While difficult to calculate, this one metric has the potential to perfectly align contact agents with the firms CRM vision. By including emotional and psychological metrics that measure changes in customer loyalty and customer satisfaction, firms can begin to recognize agent contributions beyond current transactional data.
The customer influence rate is a second metric that can help measure agent impact on customers. By tracking customer behavior immediately after an interaction, this metric identifies which agents have the greatest impact on the customer. For example, CIR can show which agents get the highest percentage of customers to perform a task like completing an online survey.
It is interesting to note that these metrics are often long-term measures, and firms must align agent performance metrics with financial reporting. Although an agent may positively impact a customers experience today, thereby increasing that customers value to the firm, this investment may not pay dividends immediately. Firms need to include financial metrics that capture this change in customer value on financial statements. CRM thought leaders have already begun to contact the financial community to get these changes incorporated into FASB and other accounting standards.
Rethinking Agent Compensation Plans
New customer-focused metrics will only encourage the contact center staff to embrace and adopt customer-centric strategies if they are compensated based on them. Its simple human nature we prefer things that offer us recognition and rewards.
Most commonly, contact agents receive a flat hourly wage plus incentive bonuses. Such bonuses have traditionally been based on call volume and quality. However, because quality is significantly more difficult to measure and quantify, it has frequently been left out of the compensation equation. This is one area the customer-centric organization cannot afford to ignore. It is imperative that organizations develop quality-based incentive plans that are simple, strategically aligned with company goals and derived from contact center staff and first level management input. In addition, such plans must provide a readily accessible mechanism for reviewing the status of individual performance and payments.
Training Issues
Forward-thinking firms invest heavily in training contact agents to become customer advocates. If the goal of CRM is to improve the customer experience, then agents must be empowered and equipped to listen and serve as the customers voice. It is not enough to answer questions correctly and be polite.
Firms must recognize that investing in training contact agents will often reduce the need to invest elsewhere within an organization. Properly trained contact agents engage and delight customers and, in so doing, gain customer insights, which firms can use to modify or improve products or services. The best agents are those that leave the customer with a feeling that they are heard, cared about and matter.
When developing a training program for a customer-centric contact center, organizations need to:
1. Train agents to be customer-focused.
Not only do agents need to understand the value of the customer to the organization, they must also recognize the importance of their role within the firm. It is crucial that they understand that some customers are more valuable than others and modify their approach accordingly. Yet this does not mean that agents should be discouraged from interacting with low-value customers. Rather, they should engage in a limited way with low-value customers, as they are still a source of valuable information. In addition, such customers may one day grow to be future high-value customers.
2. Organize training content around customer experience.
Firms must rethink how to organize and deliver content so that agents can better understand the customer experience. Training material needs to be organized around the customers experience, not around the companys produces or services. Too often, I see firms deliver training based on an incomplete body of knowledge. This knowledge contains detailed information about the companys products or services as well as common customer questions and answers. What it fails to include are descriptions of customers experiences with the product and service, feelings when issues are not resolved immediately and frustrations from being passed off or having to repeat information. In most cases, contact agents have not even seen the product or experienced the service. While this may be acceptable in the old world of answering technical questions and reducing costs, it is not acceptable in todays world of competing to provide the best customer experience.
3. Train agents to impress customers.
Firms must teach agents that their role is not to satisfy or resolve a conflict, but to impress customers. Impressing customers does not mean to show off or brag about ones personal accomplishments. Instead, it means to leave the customer with a desire to continue doing business with the firm. This sort of customer influence is often determined not by what the agent says but how the information is delivered. The agents primary goal should be to improve the customers value at the end of the interaction.
4. Train agents to think outside the box.
Getting agents to understand that the firm is not in the business of providing a specific product or service but rather about delivering value to customers will help agents think outside the box and focus on listening to the customers voice. Agents should be encouraged to make suggestions (new products or services or modifications to existing ones) that deliver greater value to customers. Such suggestions need to be tied to incentive programs and disseminated real time to other departments within the firm to explore and develop the concepts further.
New Agent Enabling Technologies
While only 20 percent of CRM is about technology, todays leading firms must still identify cutting-edge technologies that will help them gain a competitive advantage by empowering customers to have a voice within their organization.
Traditional CRM technology claims to provide a 360 degree view of the customer; however, in reality it only covers, at best, a 180 degree view. Todays large CRM vendors do an excellent job at capturing, storing, retrieving and sharing customer information across different platforms and departments. However, all of this customer information is still not customer-focused it is not information that directly benefits the customer experience. Such systems are designed for firms to understand their customers, not vice versa. New technologies like reverse auctions and expanded use of RFID empower customers to make informed decisions and to improve their experience. At the contact center level, agent-enabling technologies help create an online collaborative environment where customers feel engaged and empowered.
Most conventional CRM platforms do an excellent job with the traditional call center functions (intelligent call routing, contingent and intelligent scripting, call reporting statistics, etc); however, few integrate front-office functions or provide the proper feedback mechanism necessary to promote the customer experience. While creating one central repository for customer information is a major step forward from the past, it is not enough in todays quickly adapting marketplace. Customer information should not reside in a warehouse and wait for data mining and analytics to be applied to it; rather, it should be incorporated real time into corporate communications among departments. But how do you do this with thousands or even millions of customer giving disparate feedback? Leading-edge companies are tackling these issues by applying artificial intelligence techniques to help organize and sort the information.
Todays best technologies are those that engage and unleash customers to improve their own experience. They create essentially an online collaborative environment. These technological improvements are not coming from the large CRM vendors, but rather small firms that have been nimble enough to sense the need in the marketplace and react quickly. One way to assess these technologies is to measure how they are able to attract customers to participate in a dialogue. While customer response rates for providing information have traditionally been very low, some of these new technologies are attaining response rates of 70 percent and more.
New technologies are also being developed that capture and integrate new metrics like the customer influence rate. These programs track customers behavior immediately after a contact center interaction and report back on which agents have had the greatest positive impact. These statistics are captured real time and included in online call center management statistics.
Another way to gauge effectiveness of new technologies is by examining the quality of the information provided. By focusing on technology that improves the customer experience, these small companies have been successful at getting customers to readily provide information that they would not normally want to give out. These companies even claim that increased customer loyalty is a direct result of being engaged in the system.
An interesting point to note is how most of todays new technology is focused on increasing adoptability. As the first generation of CRM implementations showed, the best systems do not drive ROI if they sit on the shelf or are ignored by the end users. Technology companies recognize that essentially they are in the people business. While in the past they looked at solutions that people could use to drive improvements, today they are looking to technology that people want to use. The key question in developing technology for a contact center is, what can we do so that customers and agents will want to participate in the online collaborative experience?
Finally, future technologies need to better integrate what is happening at the contact center with the rest of the organization. Agents and contact center managers must be empowered and encouraged to be proponents for change and improvement. While contact agents will never have the final say on corporate decisions, it is imperative that they feel that the organization listens to them. Future technologies will be two-way and will integrate the voice of the customer, the contact agent and their managers into a collaborative online community where everyone will feel heard and no one will be ignored. While technologies can improve performance and reduce costs, ultimately their greatest value is when they improve human interactions.
