May 2001

Extending CRM To Reach Out To Your Customers

BY KENNETH PAWLAK

Companies invest millions of dollars and thousands of developer hours over months, or even years, to deploy sales force automation (SFA), help desk, enterprise resource planning (ERP), call center, marketing automation, and Web platforms -- all in an effort to implement customer relationship management (CRM) strategies that build loyalty through intelligent and trusted communication with their customers. Expanding customer relationships to earn loyalty has never been a hotter topic. Using innovative technology to achieve this goal while containing costs is a fundamental challenge for every company that embraces CRM.

How can businesses maximize the effectiveness of their CRM systems to create more intimate, intelligent, and profitable customer relationships? One new approach is to give customers control over a subset of the information contained in CRM systems. By adding a new customer-directed layer to existing CRM systems, these systems can reach out to the customer with rich, account-specific information when, where, and for whatever reason the customer specifies. By reaching out on a one-to-one basis, this new layer can deliver actionable response options that are tuned precisely to a customer profile and mapped explicitly to a company's contact center infrastructure.

For example, during a sales order, a customer requests to be notified via phone when a backordered item is in stock. Three days later the customer's phone rings. "The two pairs of khaki pants you ordered shipped today. The blue pinstripe oxford shirt you requested, size large, is now in stock and ready to ship. Press one to order."

Extending CRM systems to provide proactive outbound customer service and relevant inbound response options can significantly reduce unnecessary inbound calls and simultaneously increase customer satisfaction and revenue -- without increasing staff.

WHY IS A TWO-WAY DIALOG IMPORTANT?
Customers Want It
Control over how you spend your time is one of the most highly valued commodities in this fast-paced world. Each time customers are forced to place a call or send an e-mail to a company about their account, they are most likely already somewhat dissatisfied (think about the hassle of finding the phone number, anticipating being put on hold, talking with someone who's not familiar with your situation, etc.).

When a company proactively, or preemptively, provides information that is relevant to and requested by an individual customer (for example, monthly account balance, shipping status, itinerary changes -- issues customers typically call a company about), the company solidifies a positive, helpful image in the customer psyche. History shows that consumers seek out companies that provide personalized attention and service.

More than ever before, customers are asking for extremely consistent, personal, and results-oriented communications. An independent survey conducted by TRD Frameworks of Seattle, WA, found that although less than 10 percent of the consumers polled had actually used alerts before, nearly 70 percent said they'd sign up to receive proactive alerts if companies made the service available.

Businesses Value It
A solution that bridges service, sales, and marketing initiatives enables businesses to realize faster problem resolution, increased sales, more effective customer acquisition, and greatly enhanced customer loyalty.

Benefits to the business are both operational and strategic. Operationally, preemptive alerting eliminates unnecessary, costly, non-revenue generating inbound customer contact. The results? Higher customer satisfaction, dramatic cost-per-call savings, call elimination, better service levels, and reduction in the number of agents needed.

On a strategic level, proactively giving customers the information they want drives an increase in customer satisfaction and gives companies a competitive advantage. In addition, offering alerts with intelligent response options enables companies to combine sales and service initiatives that increase revenue, generate highly qualified inbound traffic, and make the most efficient use of both customer and company time.

As everyone knows, satisfied customers tell their friends. The most powerful customer acquisition technique is word-of-mouth referral from a friend, colleague, or family member. Businesses can quantitatively harness word-of-mouth referrals when one of their customers adds personal comments to an alert and forwards it to others who may be interested in the information and/or opportunities the alert presents.

Reaching The Widest Market
To offer alert/response applications to the widest market, an alerting platform needs to support all media types: high-quality voice via telephones and cell phones, and properly formatted text and interactive applications for SMS, e-mail, pager, Internet, fax, and wireless devices. Companies need to communicate with customers through their existing preferred devices. Offering just one contact mode is not enough for today's media-diverse and mobile customer base.

Also, don't underestimate the power of the telephone. Voice alerts that are governed by detailed customer preferences are a must-have. While use of wireless text devices and e-mail is rapidly accelerating, voice is and will be the dominant communication channel for delivering timely alerts that require immediate response and interaction with the business.

An alert formatted for voice delivery reaches the broadest audience and enables the business message to rise above the flood of e-mail. Voice formatting adds a human quality and time-sensitive value to a message. Voice alerts are also the most conducive to eliciting a customer response because of the familiarity and simplicity ("press one to speak with a customer service agent" or "press two to buy"). Given the option, customers will select voice delivery for many of their alerts, and the responses associated with those alerts will be higher than any other media.

It's important to note that, while voice will serve the broadest customer base, many valuable customers will insist on other media formats. With a platform that supports rich mixed media alert/response applications, a business may decide to include chat or call-me-now functionality as a feature of an outbound e-mail alert. The business could decide that certain outbound voice alerts will offer the customer the option to "press two to download your mortgage application" or "press three to send this alert to an e-mail address." Some customers might prefer to communicate with the company via two-way SMS messaging or wireless text messaging. An alert/response platform should fully support all of these scenarios and continue to evolve to support the latest consumer devices.

IMPLEMENTING ALERT/RESPONSE APPLICATIONS
Traditional eCRM, CRM, and call center hardware vendors can't easily "get there from here." Today's CRM systems don't enable companies to anticipate customer calls and reach out to customers with information tailored specifically to them before they call. A sophisticated alert/response platform is the perfect companion to a company's existing systems.

Most existing CRM systems are not designed with out-of-the-box alert/response solutions. If a CRM system does happen to be integrated with alerting technology, the alerts typically do not contain the customized, deep enterprise data that customers want. Rather, they only offer limited syndicated content that is individually addressed and blasted out (making the alerts, in essence, generic SPAM messages). Or, if the information is deep and customer-specific, the system typically only supports delivery via a single medium -- most likely e-mail.

Finally, businesses that do offer alerting services today rarely include an integrated approach to managing responses to alerts. There is a critical void when it comes to solutions that deliver customer-specific information in a variety of mediums, enable intelligent two-way interaction, or make the most of a company's existing data to better serve customers and successfully involve them in one-to-one outbound interactions.

INTEGRATING WITH EXISTING SYSTEMS
For customers to find alerts useful and welcome, they must be triggered on detailed, account-specific information and governed by the preferences of each customer. The data that triggers these alerts could be stored in a variety of different databases, or even in multiple databases within the same organization. XML-based technology enables seamless integration with many disparate back office and database systems, CTI, voice processing systems, collaboration, legacy, CRM, and Web systems. An XML-based extraction platform is a powerful, flexible way to trigger alerts.

A company should also be able to leverage their existing customer-facing systems in an alert/response program. With a touch of the key pad or a click of the mouse, customers must be able to easily connect back to the business to talk to a live agent, transfer to an automated transaction system for purchasing, or add personal comments and forward the alert to others who may be interested in the information.

Armed with their existing customer systems and the right outbound alert/response platform, companies can learn from their customer interactions in order to continuously offer a higher level of successful customer service.

FINE-TUNING THE ALERT/RESPONSE APPLICATION
Alert content must be dynamic, easy to create, easy to manage, and appealing to the alert recipient. To maximize the application and create the highest value for customers, administrators must be able to change alert content and create new alerts as business conditions change -- via a packaged management solution, not via custom development.

Contact center management and non-technical administrators need to be able to tune alert/response systems on an application-by-application basis. Administration elements should include prerecorded voice content, rules for conditional use of text-to-speech, retry frequency and logic, and linking alert behavior to call center hours and real-time load. Given these requirements, companies strapped for IT resources will look to vendors to provide graphical user interfaces that incorporate easy-to-use, drag-and-drop alert development and maintenance.

More and more, companies are recognizing that their contact centers are a vitally important part of their overall business strategies and operations. Customer service has become a competitive differentiator in many industries. By using an enterprise alert/response platform to leverage existing CRM, legacy, and Web investments, large businesses can now engage customers in an intimate, trusted, two-way dialog that creates measurably enhanced customer loyalty and profitability.

Ken Pawlak is the founder and senior vice president sales and marketing at Seattle-based PAR3 Communications, Inc. For more information, visit www.par3.com, or call 206-902-3900.

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