A full customer relationship management (CRM) strategy takes into account the people, processes and technologies that need to change in order for an organisation to become customer-centric.
Sometimes organisations can rely too heavily on technology to be a catalyst for improvement, expecting the various software and hardware products on the market to solve their customer satisfaction issues. Technology in isolation cannot migrate your organisation to a customer-centric one, but it is vital to implement the right technologies to support your people and processes in the improvement of customer relationships.
Whether you are looking at a call centre to manage your customer relationships or not, the key to CRM is the single view of the customer.
Alison Wright, Columnist, ITWeb
A very basic overview of the technologies required in a CRM solution involve software and hardware products that enable a number of channels by which your customer can interact with your organisation.
These channels include the telephone or voice channel, fax, e-mail, Web and more advanced interactions like voice over IP.
The voice channel requires telephony technologies that range from the physical phone and head sets, to the PABX, to the more back-office telephony infrastructure that would typically be found in a call centre.
Call centre technologies associated with the voice channel include the likes of voice recognition and computer telephony integration.
The fax channel requires a fax machine, or a fax server with the associated software.
Interaction
If you want your customers to be able to interact with your organisation by e-mail, you may require an e-mail management software system that queues and manages inbound e-mail messages in the some way as it does inbound voice calls.
One of the highest growth areas of interaction is the Web, which means enabling your customers to interact with you in various ways via your Web site. This could include sending your organisation e-mail from the Web site, or initiating a Web chat session, or requesting that your agent "push" them a Web page that they are battling to find.
Web interactions can also be fulfilled via voice, using either a "Call Me" button or voice over IP (which is not yet legal under the current SA telecoms environment).
Other technologies which will be found more specifically in a call centre environment are the likes of interactive voice response which provides the customer with a menu to indicate the required area of service by touch dialling. Most call centres will have an ACD installed that distributes the incoming calls to the correct or next available agent. The ACD will also provide the required information on agent performance.
A single view
Whether you are looking at a call centre to manage your customer relationships or not, the key to CRM is the single view of the customer. This requires a strong front-end software program operating across the organisation`s business units which input data according to rules into a common database.
The key to making this mass of technology work is integration.
The front-end needs to be integrated into the call centre in order to ensure that all interactions with the customer are recorded in one place. The call centre and the front-end need to be integrated into the back-end or legacy systems to enable real-time interaction.
Today, the multiple channels need not create more work for the organisation. Technologies that provide unified messaging can present interactions from all channels in one place for the agent or employee, queuing and escalating inbound interactions according to priorities.
While technology is certainly not the only element that requires focus from the CRM team, it is certainly a vital component of a successful initiative.
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