Once again Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is being posed as the way forward in this industry. However, I believe that the sad fact is that the market and suppliers in this country are beginning to give CRM a bad name. Everyone has a different opinion about CRM and as a result, they are confusing the customer as to exactly what CRM is. Almost everybody is saying that they are selling the ultimate and best CRM product or solution - the problem is - CRM is not a product. I would go as far as to say that I doubt that there is any single product anywhere in the world that can handle CRM fully.
I fear that there will be a backlash and we may not be able to refer to CRM any longer. One only has to open the latest journals and read about ECRM and ERM and a whole lot more acronyms that are really nonsense. The bottom line is that the content of CRM is really looking after one`s customers so that they remain loyal and profitable and, of course, being able to acquire new customers who will remain loyal and profitable.
However, a call centre solution is only one small part of CRM. The call centre is predominantly one`s telephone contact that may or may not go through an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) unit. Call centres are now beginning to handle other types of contact such as Email, Web, fax and telephone - with or without IVR. From a technology point of view, what we are talking about here is Unified Messaging which means that all these electronic forms of contact between a company and their customers can be integrated and serviced by the same group of people in the call centre. The trend therefore is, due to the technology being available, one can now have Unified Agents or Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) who are able to process other forms of contact instead of merely processing telephone calls.
I also believe that companies are finally realising the importance of having some sort of a contact management application in the contact centre to assist those customers service representatives to actually service a customer.
Virtual call centres and call centre agents working from home are also an up and coming trend in the industry. I believe that there are a number of companies who have already enabled their CSR`s to work from home. This puts a whole new perspective on one`s call centre if one`s agents can work from home. There is a very large pool of brain power and quality resources that are able or need to work from home. There are the married mothers who still have the intelligence and education to offer a superb level of service, the retired community who perhaps only want to work a couple of hours a day and then of course, the disabled community who are not able to move around easily.
So I believe that once one moves in the virtual direction, one has the ability to access a totally different pool of resources for one`s CSRs.
Companies, I believe, are also finally realising the value of having a customer intelligence piece to support all their customer contacts. This is one area that NDS are specifically focussing upon. As a matter of fact, we spoke about this trend almost four years ago when we established our call centre division. At the time, we spoke about the value of a data warehouse, but we soon realised that it was too early to deliver this sort of message to the market. Fortunately customers have now realised that this is the only way to access and make use of the knowledge that they have of their customers. So from a call centre trend point of view, the awareness of the value of having a data warehouse to store customer intelligence, that, firstly the call centre feeds into and secondly, provides the call centre with proactive direction on how to treat a customer, is vitally important.
The measures in the call centre have moved and are moving very quickly away from quantitative to qualitative. Agents are no longer being measured only on the number of calls that they have processed in a day, they are now being measured more on the value of the call, not necessarily the financial value, but how happy was the customer and was their query resolved.
WAP technologies, that I believe are already present in their infant stages in call centres, will also soon become a norm in the call centre industry.
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