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Operationalizing Customer Intelligence In The Contact Center : Page 5 of 6

Scripting And The CRM Desktop: Operational

With rare exceptions, the front-line CSRs working in the contact center are not professional salespeople. They will require specific training and desk aids to successfully convert CI into increased sales or customer satisfaction. The best approach to converting customer intelligence into an actionable script for the contact center CSRs is a team approach. The team should be made up of front-line CSRs, contact center analysts, customer intelligence analysts, and, later in the process, IT folks to execute the results.
This team needs to develop approaches to:

* Weak signal recognition
* Discovery triage/leading questions
* Offer mapping
* Benefits statement/value proposition
* Closing tools

Cellular carriers are masters of this. The minute a customer complains about a high bill, their CSRs roll out higher monthly commitment plans. The beauty of this is both the cell company and the customer wins. The cell company gets a higher monthly commitment that helps their planning and balance sheets. The customer gets a smaller bill.

While this is an obvious and not overly discrete example, it presents many of the objectives of operationalized CI. The CSR has a list of customer statements that trigger specific scripts (weak signals). The high bill-weak signal triggers a prescribed set of leading questions intended to triage the customer’s problem. Specific offers tailored to the customer’s unique situation are calculated and presented along with objective benefits statements. Finally, and most importantly, the CSR knows exactly how to capture the sale in their desktop.

Customers are very good at telling companies what they want. The problem is that companies haven’t taken the time to listen, and map offers to customer needs.

Taking this example one step further, a well-executed CI campaign will identify the customer, analyze their bill, identify the high-bill problem, and present the CSR with a tailored offer at the same time the call (or email or chat session) is delivered. In this scenario, the company has a tremendous opportunity to build customer loyalty. Maybe the customer has a question on how to use their phone. If the CSR presents an offer to lower their bill as part of the conversation, an unanticipated and greatly appreciated proactive service has been provided to the customer.

Scripting And The CRM Desktop: Technical

A key ingredient in the successful execution of a customer intelligence campaign in the contact center is a scripting engine, which will help CSRs react properly to subtle sales opportunities. The ability to walk a CSR through customer discovery and follow-on execution of a CI campaign requires such a scripting capability.

This can be difficult. Some CRM platforms are not easily or cheaply customizable to provide the robust scripting capabilities required to operationalize CI. Companies should do an honest evaluation of their CRM systems and compare the cost of adapting their desktops to accommodate scripting against buying an alternative tool.

An emerging segment in the agent desktop market are “wrappers” like Jacada, portals like BEA, and other approaches to automating customer sales and service functionality. These tools provide many additional benefits such as cross-platform reporting and simplified user interfaces including scripting.

Documenting Results: Operational

In addition to traditional contact center measures, managers should also report CI results up to senior management: number of customer database corrections, customer defection saves, survey work and, of course, sales. This reporting is enabled by the case management module of the CRM system and justifies the costs associated with operationalizing CI in the contact center.

So far this article has discussed the contact center in the context of supporting data integrity, CI execution in cross- and up-sell and proactive service, and as a source for CI. This effort requires training, tools and time interacting with the customer. In short, operationalizing CI in the contact center is not free. The contact center has to carry its own weight. If average handle time goes up and training activity increases, the contact center manager must be able to show incremental value to pay for it.

A baseline against which to calculate incremental AHT, training and other CI activity is needed. Center management should have a mechanism to track spikes in handle time, volume and other key metrics. Spikes due to legitimate customer service issues (e.g., wrong bills, defective products) should not be included in the incremental increases associated with CI. Interactions should be monitored, and time spent on CI activities accurately categorized. It should not be overly taxing for managers to track spikes and monitor calls to make sure CI activities are quantified. For CI activities that are not revenue related (e.g., data integrity validation), this quantification can provide senior management with the true cost of rectifying inaccurate customer data.

Management should include success metrics in every tool and process they build. Sales generated in the contact center need to be recognized as such. Customer defection saves should be tracked and the lifetime value of that customer included in the benefits generated by the operationalization of CI in the contact center.

This may all sound very ominous and risky, but in fact, most high-quality CI initiatives easily justify their operational costs and are very low risk. Most often they are very successful, but management cannot articulate that success objectively to senior executives. Therefore, reporting is a critical success factor.

Documenting Results: Technical

Optimally, contact center customer intelligence performance tracking should be an integrated part of the CRM tool. The sales module should be configured to characterize contact center CSRs as valid sales people, and appropriate screens made available to them to capture contact center sales. This is fairly straightforward in the service setting where any sale from the contact center is an incremental sale.

In an order-taking situation, CI up-sell and cross-sell scripts will map products and services that the customer originally requests to enhanced products and services that have higher margin or other corporate value. Before the sales initiative, a statistically solid understanding of sales patterns of the enhanced products or services can define the baseline, and incremental sales attributable to the contact center can be identified as a “high end” of the CI success rate.

The case management component of the CRM tool should be configured to capture other CI benefits such as customer defection saves and customer database corrections. The baseline exercise can be used to quantify intangible CI initiatives.

Finally, while in theory all of this reporting against AHT (volumes, sales, retention, etc.) should be automated, there is a lot of value that a good statistical analyst, positioned in the contact center, can bring to the table. Most contact centers have some statistical reporting function as part of their workforce management and quality teams. Expanding their roles and skills to include CI can leverage their knowledge of contact center data into CI reporting.