On Call

Your call center receives a phone call from a customer who wants to know about the status of an order placed two days ago. Now the customer needs 50 additional widgets, all with eight screws. Furthermore, the 80 widgets ordered previously should now have six screws instead of 12. Can the changes be added to the previous order? Is it possible to put the additional charges on the previous invoice so there is only one bill? Will the order still arrive on time? The customer needs to know right away.

The agent finds the record of the original order. But can the changes still be made? Or has the order already been packed and sent on to the shipping department? Are there any widgets with six or eight screws in the warehouse, or will they have to be ordered? Has the accounting department already processed the bill? Can the agent answer all these questions, or will the customer have to make several more calls to try to learn the answers?

This scenario is, unfortunately, not uncommon. Yes, the agent spoke with the customer almost immediately, but knew almost nothing about the customer. All the necessary information from different departments was not readily available to keep the customer happy and satisfied. Most likely, the company lost a sale. The frustrated customer went elsewhere for widgets.

To remedy the problem, managers often have the great idea of buying a customer relationship management (CRM) program and then telling call centers to install it. The result? Most times, failure. “Integrating CRM and call centers is a monumental task if you have a traditional organization,” warns Bill Brendler, president of Brendler Associates Inc., a CRM consulting firm in Wimberley, TX. When a company has a traditional organization – usually a vertical hierarchy – and individual departments operate independently, nothing is integrated. And, according to Brendler, having integrated software without integrating the people first is like having “a root canal without novocaine.”

Do It Right

Most attempts to successfully integrate CRM and call centers fail because people really don’t know what CRM is. Take this simple quiz: CRM is a) software, b) a performance tool, c) technology, d) an accounting tool used to cut costs, e) a combined mind-set, business strategy and customer-centric philosophy.

If you chose anything except e, you are going to have big problems integrating CRM into your call centers. According to Robert Van Voorhis Jr., a CRM and call center consultant in Cedar Falls, IA, one of the biggest mistakes companies make is believing that CRM is simply a software program to download. “Yes, you can do more with the software and make responses a little more personalized,” he says. “But there has to be more than that. Otherwise, changes will be merely cosmetic. A fundamental mind-set change has to take place. Managing the customer relationship, the customers’ expectations and desires, is number one.”

This is not to say companies don’t focus on their customers. “It would be a real stretch to find a company that says, ‘To hell with the customer,’ and then makes what it wants,” Van Voorhis admits. However, CRM defines how you do business. In fact, according to reports, the success rate of CRM doubled when companies view CRM as a strategic initiative rather than as a technology implementation.

Brendler notes that many times upper management does not think in an integrated way. Most managers have spent their careers in companies with strict hierarchies, and they continue to believe that these still work. For the most part, upper management is made up of people “who have climbed up the ladder through a single silo. They haven’t had to focus on anything else. Now, they are running the silo.”

A “silo” is a particular function – whether sales, marketing, manufacturing, technical support or whatever, Brendler explains. Staying within one silo may have worked in the past, but the marketplace is changing. Customers now expect to conduct business as quickly, effectively and profitably as possible. Customer relations now require being involved in a lot of different silos, notes Brendler, because customers need a little from each. There is no “front office” or “back office.”

“You have failure when you employ integrated software but the people aren’t integrated. The challenge is integrating people and integrating software,” Brendler says. “You can’t slam-dunk the technology first. To see the successful integration of call centers and CRM, look at such companies as USAA, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Mercedes-Benz, Saturn and others. The people there are smiling.”

First Line of Contact

Frequently, call centers serve as nothing more than receptacles for huge numbers of incoming calls. They then methodically, one by one, apply a standard procedure to treat all calls the same – with no prioritizing or selection. Call centers are often planned to maximize the greatest number of prospect and customer contacts, whether initiated or received by the company, and for minimizing the costs of handling these contacts.

Ed Schreyer, vice president of Strategic Marketing for CRM at PeopleSoft Inc., recently wrote in the January 2001 Business and Management Practices that “CRM is the meeting point of expectation and experience.” The same should apply to call centers. However, companies often mistakenly view call centers as merely their first line of defense. “A call center is not the first line of defense,” argues Brendler. “It is the first line of customer contact.”

In fact, call centers are actually contact centers or multichannel contact centers. As Van Voorhis explains, “Call centers are the point of contact. Companies are contacted from different channels – email, phone calls, the Web, chat, faxes, etc.”

The different channels incorporate more technology, and thus the one-size-fits-all unified messaging no longer applies. For example, a customer emails into the call center. Another customer calls in. Who waits? The phone is “real time” and thus more urgent. So, the email waits. Even Web chat may get a quicker response. Nevertheless, no matter how they contact the call center, all customers expect a response.

Will implementing CRM help with this? Keep in mind that CRM is not just a means for hearing from and dealing with customers, by any means. Call centers must be fully integrated into an organization for the CRM to work. As Brendler explains, companies must integrate all the functions, with teams made up of people from sales, manufacturing, marketing, technical support, etc. Furthermore, call centers must have direct access to those teams – or perhaps even be an actual part of the teams.

“Call centers are a part of CRM; CRM is not a part of call centers,” notes Van Voorhis. “In order to really implement that package, you have to make a change. CRM is the larger entity, while call centers are a way to deliver some of the CRM tasks. Call centers serve the CRM.”

Technology Helps Integrate CRM and Call Centers

With a company realigned around customers, and all departments integrated into serving those customers, the next step is finding the right technology to strengthen customer relationships.

Computer-telephony integration (CTI) is basically what the name suggests – the phone and computer systems are hooked up. According to Van Voorhis, CTI eliminates much of the manual or rote tasks, freeing customer service representatives (CSRs) to handle the customers rather than worrying about getting information.

CTI connects a cluster of information with a particular phone number. The technology allows an incoming call to trigger a real-time “screen pop” containing detailed information about the person or organization calling. Without CTI, CSRs must ask for a caller’s name, account number or other identifying information, then punch the data into a CRM database and wait to see what will turn up. CTI eliminates this procedural delay and allows any CSR to be primed and ready to deal with whatever issues a caller may present. In some cases, the CSR can even to start the ball rolling toward the next sale.

Intelligent routing makes treating all prospects and customers the same an obsolete procedure. No more blindly sending the next call to the next agent without much consideration or planning. Contacts from all channels – the Internet, faxes, email, phone calls – can be queued together, to help ensure that a company covers all its contact channels equally well.

Contact centers can treat individual customers differently on the basis of such factors as their known needs and desires, value to the company, past behavior and buying habits, tolerance for delay, preferred channel for contacting you, or even according to geography. For example, a call from Holland will go to a Dutch agent – a more intelligent approach to call routing.

With the right technology comes a better use of human resources. Some agents are better at fielding phone calls, while others excel at handling Web chat. Some are well versed in the intricacies of particular products or technical issues; others are better at mollifying irate customers or facilitating solutions to one-of-a-kind difficulties. New CRM programs permit differentiating among CSRs, not only on the basis of where they sit, but also on the basis of their skills, knowledge, personal strengths, preferences and experience. Each CSR can be evaluated and assigned to one or more specialized groups. One group handles only incoming phone calls; another handles only incoming chats or technical issues or outgoing calls to convey a certain message, etc. With each contact, the system arranges for the appropriate group to handle it.

Instead of one long queue of incoming contacts, requiring an initial contact and then passing the customer on to the appropriate person, there are many short queues instead. Customers contact only appropriately knowledgeable and skilled agents. Up-to-date contact centers can route each caller to the person best qualified to deliver a satisfying result.

In addition, incoming contact queues can be intelligently prioritized. “Intelligent priority handling” makes use of the databases, allowing the system to know who’s contacting the organization. For example, the system easily advances calls from your best customers to the front of the queue and to your best agents. Or during the rollout of a new software product, first-time customers calling for help with installation or initial set-up can receive a higher priority than established customers calling with minor problems. Perhaps you’re trying to change customer habits; then, people using email to make inquiries can receive a higher priority than people using the telephone.

Carry It Out

Traditional call centers tend to focus on answering every call on one of the first few rings but can do little to prevent the problems or issues that cause customers to call in the first place. The emphasis is on the efficient handling of call volumes.

With the proper CRM strategy, however, call centers are beginning to create more proactive contact capabilities. Contact center systems now can prompt CSRs to call prospects or customers with information to generate increased sales or head off some of the problems and sources of dissatisfaction that tend to reduce loyalty and additional buying.

Merging the customer-relations mission and philosophy of CRM with the power and communications capabilities of call centers creates wonderful economies and new opportunities to build and maintain more effective, comfortable, satisfying and profitable relationships with prospects and customers. Even suppliers can be brought into this new sphere of relationship management, producing important new synergies as well as cost savings.

Top management, however, is the key to making it work. In order for CRM to successfully merge with call centers, everyone in the organization – from the top down – must be integrated and committed to the process. “The CEO has to have the vision and the will to carry it out,” says Brendler.