Extracting Value from CRM in the Contact Centre

Those three letters have a terrible reputation. Many contact centres have lost a lot of money on CRM packages that didn’t deliver what was promised. Yet, the software has evolved and is vastly different to what was on offer even two years ago.

Why does CRM have such a bad name?

CRM projects often end up with a bad name because too many of them have taken too long, went too far over budget and in the end failed to deliver on the goals they originally set out to achieve. Not surprisingly this has left many organisations feeling bruised by their CRM experience. However, just because there might have been project issues doesn’t mean that CRM itself is wrong. The concept of Customer Relationship Management, with its ability to track a customer’s history and different touch points with an organisation are an essential component of a successful multi-channel strategy.

It’s important to observe that day-to-day operations in a contact centre don’t always follow the prescribed model that many CRM systems need to work effectively. Things happen quickly in contact centres – new products and services are introduced and sold, customers call in with a wide range of different issues, and quite reasonably expect answers to their questions. Contact centres are complex and changing business environments, and it’s very difficult for organisations to evolve their IT and business applications to keep pace with this change.

That’s why organisations seem to spend so much time and effort customising their CRM implementation to keep up. And they’re left with the problem of trying to make off-the-shelf CRM packages fit their contact centre business, or of keeping their customer processes integrated with their back-end systems. Change control is a major issue for many businesses, with the CRM change control process backing up to a year or more in some worst-case scenarios.

CRM systems are also often implemented to provide a valuable customer/sales feed into an organisation’s core back-end applications. CRM processes are implemented to mirror the organisation’s own internal processes, and that makes them very difficult to use in the contact centre which has to spend all its time dealing with customers who are focused on their own concerns and not those of the business they’re calling.

What can contact centres use CRM for now?

It depends. Although CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, many CRM systems are bought and used as sales management tools and have very little to do with customers. Sales is only one part of a busy contact centre’s operations – customers may end up buying a product, but they also want service issues solving, complaints dealt with, bills sorted out and general enquiries answered. CRM doesn’t help at all with these calls.

CRM systems are also complicated – it can take agents anything up to 10 different CRM application screens to get to the information they need to solve a customer issue, and it’s highly unlikely that the contact centre agent will only have to deal with a single CRM application – the current UK contact centre average number of applications that agents work with regularly is six open at any one time.

So contact centre agents do end up needing the data stored in CRM systems, but they don’t always find that data easy to get at and use. Organisations also still like their contact centres to handle and store customer data in a very structured way – CRM systems allow data to be managed and processed correctly from a corporate perspective, but they don’t always add value to the customer experience.

What benefits can CRM produce?

Implemented successfully, CRM can deliver enormous value across a business and provide an essential source of customer records for the contact centre. Imagine a scenario where an agent could immediately access the corporate CRM system for a customer’s history, interactions across all channels, and relevant details of products and services that were appropriate for that customer. They would also be able to handle the call in line with their company’s correct process and reporting requirements.

CRM can and should deliver all these benefits, but in practice it’s rare for a contact centre CRM implementation to work this well.

How to pick a suitable CRM package?

There’s a growing move now away from highly-customised, expensive and lengthy CRM implementations back to ‘vanilla’ CRM systems that deliver standard out-of-the-box functionality. Organisations opting for this kind of approach are trying to keep it simple and aiming instead for a system that does the job rather than spending potentially years building a solution that exactly maps their own business processes, gives them precisely the level of customer/sales information they require, and all the right reports for their corporate back-office systems. Experience suggests that these bespoke CRM projects can grow and grow, and rarely deliver the desired value and flexibility originally hoped for.

When choosing a CRM approach, organisations need to understand which type of CRM implementation best matches their current and future business needs. For businesses happy with out-of-the-box functionality, then a hosted CRM solution might be the right approach if they’re happy with the rather inflexible business processes these solutions support.

How to use it effectively?

We believe that for CRM to be truly effective in the contact centre it has to be made more accessible – both for the agents that need to use the systems every day, and for the management who need to integrate their contact centre operations with their enterprise CRM programme.

How will CRM and contact centres develop in the foreseeable future?

Typical UK contact centres can require their agents to use anything up to ten different IT applications – either during or after a customer call – ranging from customer management systems, credit card payment and CRM applications to accounts, CTI, incident ticketing and complaints handling. This is in addition to standard desktop applications such as e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and web browsers.

That’s why at Sabio we’ve developed the Sabio Intelligent Desktop to help organisations streamline the number of different IT applications that their contact centre agents actually have to work with. This approach allows organisations to create composite, role-specific agent desktops that can easily be tuned to current contact centre requirements. Organisations can easily leverage their existing CRM applications – re-using their capabilities without invasive integration or complex development. We believe this kind of approach will enable the creation of agile contact centre applications without compromising a company’s existing business critical CRM applications investment.

According to Sabio’s Consultancy Director, Kenneth Hitchen: “it’s hardly surprising that so many organisations find it hard to get the customer experience right when they’re making it so difficult for their contact centre agents to do their job properly. By helping organisations to detox their desktops and then working with them to develop the processes and an intuitive user interface that will enable agents to be more effective, we can help deliver major productivity benefits for organisations. We’ve already seen how the optimisation of key contact centre systems and applications such as CTI and diallers have helped to provide incremental performance improvements. Now by optimising the desktop, we’re in a position to take contact centres to the next stage and deliver a step-change increase in contact centre and CRM productivity.”