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Don't Get Me Restarted... Make CRM Your System of Engagement

It is time for contact centers to get rid of all the unnecessary annoyances during customer calls. Let's go through the experiences that annoy customers the most, and discuss how to fix the problem.

Annoyance #1 – Being Transferred
It is bad enough that customers use three channels on average, according to Ovum, to resolve issues. Once they get to the last resort of calling, transferring them is a slap in the face. Yet, 59% of customers experience just that, CEB data shows.

Annoyance #2 – Re-explaining Issues
To compound the customer annoyance of having to switch channels or being transferred, 59% of customers report having to re-explain issues, the CEB reported. This can be as simple as having to repeat name, account number, or password, or might require a lengthy reiteration of the reason for the call in the first place.

Annoyance #3 – Waiting
The icing on the annoyance cake is the waiting most customers endure on calls. Most of the waiting lies in the fact that agents use five different screens and systems on an interaction, on average -- which in turn leads to them spending 26% of their interaction time searching for the right data or executing workflows, according to Aberdeen Group.

What's At Stake?
Now, companies that fail to minimize these annoyances have a lot at stake; Oracle RightNow has found that 89% of customers stop doing business with a company after experiencing poor customers service. CEB got it right in its seminal study on customer effort, finding that "delighting customers doesn't build loyalty; reducing their effort -- the work they must do to get their problem solved -- does."

On top of reducing customer effort and increasing loyalty, we've found reducing these annoyances can shave 60+ seconds off average call time, which is easily worth $5 million or more in labor for a 1,000 seat contact center.

Why Do We Annoy Customers?
Before laying out the prescription, we first need to understand the root cause of the customer annoyance. And, the root cause is simply silos... silos of information, silos of applications, silos of workflows, and silos of teams. We unnaturally force customers to experience these silos intimately through their problem-resolution journeys by transferring them, making them re-explain issues, and waiting. And, frankly, over the past five years contact centers have proliferated their silos through the adoption of digital interaction channels such as email, chat, SMS, and social.

Contact centers have more complexity than ever. Most contact centers have their legacy telephony platforms that they've often poured millions of dollars into optimizing and that serve as the backbones of their operations, queuing, workforce management, quality, and reporting. Many have installed a CRM platform to create one view of the customer, manage customer information and workflows, and knowledge. And, to compound the infrastructure complexity, dozens of other systems, such as ERP, order management, ecommerce, returns, and so on, typically are in play, too.

So, where does a contact center start in trying to reverse the momentum of complexity and make the necessary U-turn toward dramatically simplifying the customer experience?

Continue to the next page for new approaches, how to turn CRM into a system of engagement, and more

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New Problems Need New Approaches
In working with many leading brands and their contact centers, the typical response to reducing the silos, complexity, and ultimately customer effort are massive rip and replace or CTI projects. The typical problem with rip and replace is the sheer complexity of existing business rules and infrastructure that has been optimized often over decades of fine-tuning. And, the issues with CTI include the massive expense, custom code, long development cycles, and the necessity of touching the code whenever anything changes.

Make the CRM Your System of Engagement
The first step for contact centers that are minimizing customer effort and silos is to establish the CRM as the "system of customer engagement." In doing so, the CRM agent experience becomes the center of telephony and digital interactions, as well as customer workflows and information.

Logically, establishing the CRM as the system of customer engagement makes sense, since the CRM is the current and future center for customer information and workflows. But, realistically, this is a very difficult decision for contact center leaders given the historical importance of the telephony platform.

Yet, the telephony platform is not customer centric, but transport and agent centric, focused on getting calls flowed to the right agents at the right times. So, if you want to drive down customer effort, the first silo to attack is the telephony and CRM silo, by integrating telephony applications directly into the CRM agent experience.

The elegance of this solution is that contact centers can leverage and keep intact their telephony, queuing, routing, workforce management, quality and reporting systems. By leveraging the right APIs, a sophisticated CRM-based media bar is simply a customer- and agent-centric abstracted front end to the existing telephony infrastructure.

The CRM Smartphone
Once our clients integrate the telephony platform directly into the CRM agent experience, they typically shave 30 seconds off the customer engagement. Utilizing a front-end media bar deeply integrated into their CRM, agents can take calls, post availability, transfer or conference calls, and place outbound calls directly from their CRM workspaces. They no longer have to toggle between the telephony and CRM platforms.

Furthermore, by passing ANI, IVR, and other telephony data directly to the CRM system, the right customer screen, information, and workflow can pop up on the agent's workspace as the customer call is routed to the agent. The agent can greet the customer by name, skip authentication processes, see open tickets or recent orders, and instantly begin solving the customer's issue.

We've even had an e-commerce client that has different return policies for the U.S. and Canada leverage the area code of a call to pop up an American or Canadian flag in the CRM workspace. The flag images makes agents instantly knowledgeable about whether they are talking to American or Canadian customers.

In essence, by integrating telephony applications, our clients make their CRM platforms into smartphones that help them personalize and speed up the customer experience.

The Contextual Transfer
Contact centers that establish the CRM as the system of customer engagement also make it easier to transfer the context of the customer interaction during call transfers. With an integrated media bar in the CRM, as customers are routed through the ACD, the new agent, once again, can have the right customer screen, information, and workflow pop up on his or her CRM workspace. This customer-centric integration allows for new agents to pick up right where the previous agent ended, negating the need for customers to repeat their customer information and issue background. And, beyond call-to-call transfers, this contextual transfer can also be enabled for chat-to-call, SMS-to-call, or any other type of channel transfer.

Automating Customer Workflow
The last part of establishing the CRM as the system of engagement is to integrate third-party applications, data, and workflows directly into the CRM. While typical integration necessitates custom code or utilizing complex or inefficient CRM APIs, new drag-and-drop visual tools integrate directly into CRM platforms. With these, non-developers can simply drag and drop information and workflows from third-party applications into CRM workflows. This will drive the dawn of a new era in quickly and efficiently optimizing customer experiences with payback in days and weeks and no need for IT involvement.

Finally, Let's Get Rid of Customer Annoyance
While there are many important topics on the contact center agenda, getting the basics right on driving down customer effort by driving out basic customer annoyances, such as transfers, waiting, and re-explaining issues, is at the top of the list. Take care of the basics before moving on to all of the whiz-bang cluttering the mindshare of contact center leaders.

Those contact centers that are establishing CRM as their system of customer engagement are having a much easier time minimizing customer effort, since it allows them to turn their CRMs into smartphones, execute contextual transfers, and automate customer workflow for a fraction of the price and time of traditional solutions.