Operationalization Of CI
Operationalizing customer intelligence occurs at many points in the corporation: The CEO needs it to make strategic decisions; product development needs it for new product design; marketing needs it for data mining and modeling; finance needs it to understand customer profitability; and IT needs it for data provisioning and report production.
Similarly, the contact center needs customer insights in order to present a customer interaction experience that is consistent with corporate marketing and communication messages and business revenue and profitability goals. So what does the contact center manager need to do to take advantage of corporate customer knowledge? Key activities are:
* Identify who is interacting with the corporation
* Get the interaction to the resource best able to handle it
* Execute specialized treatment on each individual interaction
* Capture the center’s results relating to increased sales and loyalty
* Leverage the contact center’s close connection with the customer to provide input into the CI analytical process
Who’s Calling?: Operational
The first issue is identifying who is calling, chatting, emailing or faxing. Before any special treatments can be applied, the contact center has to identify the customer. Optimally, the contact center wants to know the individual, and if applicable, the business/company they represent.
The point of customer identification is to begin applying segmented treatment by routing the interaction to the most appropriate resource the first time. For example, a catalog shopping contact center identifies customers with known credit risk and sends them to credit and collections before they can order new products. The success a company has in identifying its customers is only as good as the accuracy of its customer databases.
If there are data integrity questions, the contact center can add significant value by offering contact information validation services. Most people are familiar with a customer service representative (CSR) reviewing name, address and phone number information before proceeding with the interaction. What they are doing is improving the accuracy of their customer database. Operationally, these front-line employees should be empowered to make changes in the customer record that facilitates identification. CSRs should have administrative rights to make changes, and average handle time expectations need to be adjusted to accommodate the increased time required to support the contact information validation process.
Customer Identification: Technical
From a technical view, most contact centers use automated attendant technology (e.g., a drop-down box in a chat session or formatted email) to identify customer need. For example, operating system questions go to one group and application questions go to another. Sales goes to one group and service to another.
The technical difference between need-based routing and customer identification routing is the intelligence of the routing engine. Need-based routing uses a simple automated attendant (for voice) or drop-down boxes (for email or chat) with no connectivity to systems outside the routing environment. Customer identification routing requires interactive routing devices that can interact with host databases in a sophisticated, rules-based manner.
In the contact center, customer identification is most often accomplished via:
* Automatic Number Identification (ANI)—which provides the phone number the customer is calling from.
* Caller Entered Digits (CED)—Asking for identifying information in the interactive voice response (IVR) unit, formatted email or chat session.
* From: e-mail address—The originating address in an e-mail.
Most contact centers use all of these tools to accurately identify who is interacting with them. Some industries and business transactions can successfully identify a majority of their customers using ANI. Many cannot because customers may call from their office or cell phones not listed in their customer record. Using an IVR to request that the customer enter account or other identifying information via touch tone or speech recognition (or similarly requesting identification information in a chat session or email) significantly improves the recognition rate.
These customer recognition techniques require computer-telephony integration (CTI) technology, which will allow the customer information collected via the IVR/chat/email to be mapped to customer databases and then returned to the routing platform for intelligent handling. It is strongly recommended that any contact center anticipating CI initiatives have CTI in place. CTI services can be used for many other applications, such as coordinating the quality monitoring sessions of a QMS system or tracking of phone time in a workforce management system (WFM), so the investment in CTI is worthwhile even outside the CI requirements.
