Are you really connecting with your customers?

For many organisations, the challenge of maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction while seeking out new revenue opportunities can be a problem to every level of management.

Customers are increasingly savvy about what levels of service they should expect, and are prone to changing suppliers based on the promise of better service or improved access.

Over the past decade businesses have made massive technology investments in order to maximise efficiencies and reduce operational costs. They have also increased call throughput to ensure that any incoming call is dealt with, and every possible customer is contacted in order to promote a new product or service. Consequentially, IP telephony is seen as a key element of any technology strategy designed to meet the continuing needs of the business.

But is IP telephony on its own the solution to the problems faced by businesses, be they enterprise, SMB, or sell commoditised product or highly sophisticated investment solutions?

And are businesses looking at the key element of customer management in addition to operational efficiencies and cost reduction as a way to impact the bottom line?

A recent survey carried out by FrontRange Solutions would suggest not.

The survey, undertaken at the recent Call Centre Expo 2006 exhibition showed that 25 percent of participants had, or were likely to, invest in IP telephony to reduce costs and 18 percent would invest to converge voice and data technologies therefore reducing the number of supplier contracts that they have to deal with.

Additionally 12 percent considered “reduced admin costs” as a key factor in driving the investment and while all of the above are valid reasons for investing in technology none of them drive to the key issue…how do we improve our service and ensure that our customers continue to want to do business with us?

Only 20 percent considered that increased customer satisfaction and retention were considered during the evaluation of an IP telephony strategy yet it is a racing certainty that if you asked any executive outright if these were issues of concern then the answer would be a resounding yes!

So why aren’t more companies considering the positive impact on customer management when looking at the implementation of an IP contact centre, or the integration of their voice and data networks?

The answer could lie in the fact that many organisations still view telephony and customer management applications as two distinct domains managed by separate areas of the business.

Previously, this has - more often than not - been the case. But the advent of converged voice and data solutions has polarised responsibilities. The days of an uncoordinated approach by disparate telecoms and data departments are long gone. But there still appears to be a disconnection between the people who drive the communication strategy, and those who manage the customers.

At a time when the value of service is greater than ever, many businesses continue to struggle with basic service delivery while seeking a new level of premium service. New customer acquisition and customer retention rates are suffering. Market-leading organisations understand the importance of leverage in the business but progress toward this goal has been slow. The combination of poor organisational alignment and the wrong software applications has created a significant business challenge.

And this is an area where businesses can make a major impact on how they manage their customers and, more importantly, how their customers perceive them.

Traditional solutions consist of disparate tools that fail to meet the changing needs of service organisations. This has resulted in many failed projects, and these applications were only available to large customers with large budgets and large IT and telecom departments. Because these traditional solutions are complex, costly and consist of proprietary tools that are not designed to change with the business, adoption beyond the very large enterprise has been problematic. For example, common requirements including adding agents or new teams are costly and time consuming. In addition, these tools were not designed to work together (requiring integration of IVR, ACD, call recording products, data products, applications, etc), were difficult to maintain, and often did not deliver the value that customers demanded. Other challenges faced by traditional systems include:

• Point solutions, which are complex, proprietary and expensive to implement including the incumbent telephony provider. Point solutions may offer adequate functionality, but at higher cost, risk and without providing integration to the service desk.
• All traditional voice-enabled ‘screen pop’ applications are delivered through legacy switch connectors. This restricts the integration and imposes greater cost on the customer as switch components often required are expensive.

Add to this the fact that most customer management applications - CRM, service management & accounting packages – have focused on capturing information about isolated contacts relevant only to the department that entered the data. It is clear that any business which does not regard both their telephony platform and customer management application suite as a single powerful entity is missing a major opportunity: to positively impact the way that they interact with their customer and prospect base.

It is a fact that if customers are able to conduct business as they wish, when they wish, with an positive outcome, then they will not only continue to place repeat business but will also pass on the good news to other prospective customers.

Imagine how the customers’ perception of any organisation would improve if they suddenly found that they were able to conduct business in a manner which suited them by offering them multiple ways of accessing information, requesting service and even placing orders!

Most organisations have huge amounts of customer data that if properly utilised could provide the much-needed competitive edge that business must have today to succeed. Unfortunately this data is only used to either record transactions for retrospective audit purposes or, at best, used for reactive responses queries or complaints.

But consider how much more powerful a sales and marketing operation could be if it were able to do the following:

• Increase marketing campaign effectiveness by executing campaigns specific to a customer’s needs, based upon the data that exists within the organisation.
• Continually enhance campaigns based upon real time analysis and data segmentation, ensuring that budgets are not wasted on poorly targeted or badly messaged campaigns.
• Provide both web and voice self-service options that are fully integrated into the CRM solution and allow customers to view and - where appropriate - manage the data that is relevant to them at a time that is convenient.
• Utilise all of the fundamental benefits of a contact centre solution (auto call distribution, interactive voice response and skills based routing) and have them enhanced by the powerful tools that can be leveraged within a CRM solution and use the information held within the CRM database to drive the customer interaction strategy.

Then consider how a service organisation could be if it were able to do the following.

• Reduce call waiting time through deployment of an appropriate voice or web self-service application which allows customers to self heal certain issues (like password reset, how to..?) thereby ensuring that agents/analysts are able to spend more time dealing with more complex issues.
• Ensure that all calls were delivered to the appropriate resource based on the nature of the call, the profile of the caller and, in the context of service level management, the level of escalation to which the customer would be entitled.
• Analyse and adapt performance based on an integrated reporting solution which not only shows how many calls were logged but how, and by whom they were dealt with.
• Continually improve the level of service by monitoring performance and adapting strategies to meet the day-to-day needs of each customer.

Fortunately, such solutions exist today. The benefits of integrated approaches to customer interaction management are being recognised by more and more businesses. These are business that are looking at ways other than cost reduction and increased internal efficiencies to provide the difference between themselves and their competitors.

FrontRange Solutions have been providing world class CRM and service solutions for many years, and we have thousands of global customers using our software applications to manage business critical operations and they all ask the same question:

“How can we improve the service we provide to our customers to ensure that they keep coming back and how can we attract more new customers”

In today’s fast-paced, dynamic marketplace, competitive advantage lives in each interaction between a business and its customers.

Service is the ultimate differentiator.

Complex systems can become barriers to person-to-person interaction, as the simplicity of the internet is drawing people closer together. This enables service workers to apply the value of their knowledge directly to the customer experience. The benefits of interaction management are no longer a privilege available only to the largest enterprises with the deepest pockets. With their interaction management capabilities, FrontRange Solutions market-leading suite of products is making enterprise-class advantages available and affordable to all businesses of all sizes. These advantages include: such as integrated campaign management, screen pops, call routing by skills, and in-depth reporting on customer interactions. Our solutions are helping companies not only achieve objectives such as higher close rates, first-call resolution and greater ROI from marketing campaigns, but provides the ability to measure results as well - all at an unprecedented low total cost of ownership and rapid time to value.

The margin for error in managing customer expectations and experiences is decreasing all of the time. Those businesses that are able to adapt to the pace of change will always hold the competitive high ground. Convergence of telephony and customer management applications provides the platform for a successful customer interaction strategy that will ultimately bear positive results and ensure competitive superiority.

For more information, please visit http://www.frontrange.com/.