Category — Thinking Differently

Back in 1999 CRM equalled call centre: wall to wall stands at every CRM exhibition exuded the relationship benefits of the channel. But, in reality call centres have not equalled better relationships and dealing with modern ‘contact centres’ is high on the list of stressful experiences. Many customers would prefer efficient self service to talking to a run of the mill call centre agent.

At CallNorthWest’s directors debate on ‘Automation and Strategic Planning for the Future’ recently, Director Tim Kirby reminded the call centre industry that hearing your child was going to be a city trader would be wonderful news, whereas being told they were going to work in a call centre would be disheartening, to say the least. Yet in both roles they would spend all day wearing headphones to engage with people on the telephone in order to build up assets.

As companies return from India a little wiser, how to lift the image of the industry in the UK is taxing minds. On the expert panel with me at the event were Directors from Vertex, O2, arvato services, and Dimension Data. In the audience senior managers from SME’s, international companies and government pooled ideas - even a Government minister has promised an appearance at the next event!

Distilling all the thoughts the answer to this question is not easy and has several strands:-

• Beak the habit of micro management and spending excessive amounts of time reporting facts irrelevant to good service such as wrap up time and calls per agent; call answering is a poor proxy for customer service. Analytics are needed but should reflect customer outcome priorities, not transaction costs.
• Promote your strategic value. How does what you do meet company goals other than cost reduction? Where do you engage customers over the ‘customer journey’? For example, are you key to the renewal of service contracts. Do you detect customer attrition, or warm customers for cross-sales? If you don’t know your value how will others?
• Where is the future for customer contact in your organization? The call centre of today will not be around in 10 years time, and the changes will be driven by technology - real-time marketing, social software, virtualisation. Do you have a pilot team in place with IT and customer experts to experiment you way into the future of conversational marketing?

Paper on the past and future of call centres - Your call is important to us - prove it!

“CRM is not about technology” was the popular mantra of 2000: so it is ironic that in 2008 CRM means ‘customer relationship management supported by technology’. Even Forrester has redefined it this way. However, to view CRM as secondary to customer relationship strategy – as some business managers do - is to be blind to the opportunities for innovation and value creation spilling out of the heads of IT professionals. For there, flows a wealth of ideas to realize the vision of sales through service, differentiating customer experience and conversational marketing.

With the escalating pace of IT change, and investment in CRM technology (licences and maintenance) set to reach $11bn by 2011 it is now a pre-requisite for strategic marketing managers to be IT literate and work in collaboration with IT colleagues to spot opportunity, innovate and set relevant business change in motion. Fortunately, new software delivery models such as open source and software as a service (SaaS) enable this transformation by increasing access to IT and lowering the cost of experimentation.

So here are some key technologies to look out for. Many are at long last able to meet the CRM vision we have had for so long; others promise to remove the ‘Berlin Wall’ between IT and business; some will revolutionise industries.

Enhancing the customer value proposition

• Real-time decision support (aka next best action)
• Social productivity platforms
• Mobile and location based services
• Mashups

Augmenting people - your most valuable asset

• Enterprise 2.0
• Voice recognition

Generating the adaptive business

• Model driven CRM applications
• Cloud computing

Behind the scenes

• Information security
• Service orientated application or architecture (SOA
• Bandwidth and memory storage
• Virtualisation

For more detail see “New Technologies every marketing manager should know about”.

Do you ask yourself any of the following:-

• How can I cut costs and give customers a better experience
• Is there climate change or isn’t there?
• How do I allocate my digital marketing spend?
• Do we give out plastic bags?
• Is there any benefit to us in Facebook?
• How can we compete with China on labour costs - should we use ’slave’ labour?
• Advertising isn’t working - what about word of mouth?
• How do I engage marketing with the call centre data - they are so busy with fluffy creative?

If so the answer is not a tactical one. It is a fundamental change in organization mindset from product marketing for mass consumption to conversational marketing to mass innovation. New ‘mutual’ marketing has three rules

• Join in the conversation
• The business of business is social
• Be ‘of service’ to stakeholders

Click here for presentation from IDMF

Many organizations ask customers what they want: that’s a mistake. How does the customer know? Errrrmmm I’d like that widget in pink and tuned into Radio Mars please.

Meanwhile, in HR the latest employee satisfaction survey (fashionably renamed engagement survey) shows that front line employees dislike the lack of two way communication, and a ‘them and us’ attitude by managers. Although job roles are clear, customer service is seen to have a high priority, and only 7% rate it a poor place to work.

Killing two birds with one stone

In the traditional, unconnected organization these issues might well remain unconnected. When the answer to both is the same – engage front line staff by asking them to be the voice of the customer, and involve them in product and service design. Set them free from the chains of transactional measures, and recognize their importance as insight workers. For not only do they understand what customers want – after all they deal with them day to day – but they also understand what the solutions are - because they know your business.

It may be very true that senior managers are out of touch with customer needs, but it is highly unlikely that your front line staff are!

When your service giving staff are used in this way, customer service moves from the end of the ‘make and sell’ process into the heart of the customer proposition design – and lo sales through service gets in the DNA.

(Extract from Engaging Employees the John Lewis Way more…..)