Customer Lifecycle Management: Finding Value from Visibility into Your Customers
In a daily ritual known to thousands of sales and service professionals in a wide range of industries, corporations lock themselves into a time warp by using traditional solutions in the hope of providing superior customer communications while facing a tidal wave of requests. Corporate America’s lack of visibility into customer information makes it virtually impossible to improve service and enhance customer relationships. The result is organizational inefficiencies and poor customer service that materially impacts businesses each year, anchoring them in the present. The lack of solutions that integrate pre- and post-sales customer interactions—Web self service, e-mail, chat, telephony integration and knowledge management—for cross-channel support services makes achieving a single 360-degree view of the customer virtually impossible.
The customer communications ritual for most participants is not a pretty sight. The participants—sales executives, telephone service representatives, technical support specialists, marketing organizations, finance staffs, department heads and virtually everyone with customer-facing responsibility—agree that there ought to be a better way of doing things, but there aren’t many clear-cut options. They also agree that offering customers easier and better communication channels is absolutely essential as it is the one universal mechanism for customer retention and long-term profitability. There has to be a better way.
For many organizations the enormity of the task is overwhelming. A persistent problem many organizations wrestle with every day is the inability to enable people at all levels of an organization to effectively collaborate and communicate on specific customer issues. While corporations are doing an increasingly effective job at transitioning sales and marketing processes to the Internet, there has been little effort to create an understanding of how peoples’ roles in the process affect others as well as impact the long-term strategy of the company.
In this current economic environment, improved service and support represent the greatest opportunity to enhance revenue at reduced costs. Every customer contact represents a potential opportunity to drive increased profits. Especially for profit-minded sales, marketing and customer-service organizations, today’s goal should be to maximize the value created per each and every customer interaction. An integrated and focused approach to increasing the value-per-contact can deliver significant revenue results in short timeframes.
Customer Lifecycle Management
The business problem is not going unnoticed by leading industry analysts. According to IDC Research, businesses will spend over $76 billion on e-customer service by 2005. The Gartner Group expects 70% of all call centers to have Internet integration by 2007 and Jupiter Media Metrix expects 67 million people to use chat for service in 2005. Considering that the vast majority of today’s business relationships are generally conducted via Web-driven interactions, the lack of oversight and inability to manage multi-channel interactions creates the potential for gaps in tracking all interactions with customers and prospects. Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions represent the greatest opportunity for organizations to significantly improve the visibility, accuracy and efficiency of customer relationships.
CLM solutions offer a compelling alternative to traditional sales and service point solutions. By integrating the power of e-mail marketing, chat, real-time collaboration and telephony applications with comprehensive analytics and a fully integrated system-wide knowledgebase, organizations can capture all customer interactions. This enables the up-selling and cross-selling of new and existing customers in a cost-efficient manner, significantly impacting bottom line profitability. Ultimately, a 360-degree view of all customer communications—regardless of channel—results in improved business performance through customer loyalty and increases profits via business processes that are well aligned with customer strategies.
CLM solutions provide robust functionality that addresses all aspects of the customer experience, including acquisition, interactions, retention and analysis.
Customer Acquisition
Sell more, faster. Sounds simple. But how do you identify, target and acquire customers while collapsing the sales cycle? Talisma’s approach is to enable sales and marketing organizations to identify, capture and maintain pertinent information about individual prospects, customers and corporate accounts. Multi-channel support across e-mail, phone, chat, Web self-service, fax, Web-conferencing, traditional mail and Web forms allows enterprises to open new channels of communication with their customers. The result is consistency in messages across all media channels.
Effective CLM systems provide targeted lead capture, contact and account management, customer profiling, product registration, sales forecasting and “return” authorization. Performance and forecasting analytics provide actionable analysis on customer profitability, key performance indicators and revenue opportunities.
Together, these features help turn prospects and customers into repeat buyers accelerating enterprise growth and profitability.
Customer Interaction
Today, customers and prospects “elect” their preferred method of communication. Some prefer traditional telephony-based interactions while others prefer Web-based interactions and self-service. To remain competitive in today’s market organizations need to deliver flexible interactions to drive state-of-the-art customer communications.
In Talisma’s case, interaction modules present an integrated, single-view of customer information and other relevant knowledge. Queuing, routing and workflow policies support optimum customer interactions and allow for personal and tailored communications. No matter which method of interaction the customer chooses, CLM systems should support highly interactive traditional phone conversations to expanded multimedia contact via the Web.
Customer Retention
It’s no secret it’s easier to sell an existing customer than find a new one, but it’s also MUCH less expensive. Studies indicate it can be 3-5 times more expensive for a new customer acquisition than selling to an existing customer. Traditional service offerings simply cannot scale to meet this challenge, neither in personnel nor costs. CLM systems help companies transition their traditional customer service into a strategic advantage for their organization with integrated multi-channel communications that reduce the overall costs of delivering superior service. Talisma, for instance, enables call centers, help desks and other support organizations to continually capture information from employees and customers and author, refine, share and use knowledge solutions as a natural part of the service and support workflow to provide rich, consistent and relevant customer response. As knowledge solutions are added to the knowledgebase, they become immediately available for shared-use across multiple channels, including phone, e-mail, chat and Web self-service throughout the enterprise and with customers and partners.
Today the value of effective knowledge capture and reuse is rapidly being viewed as a competitive advantage. Gartner, Inc. states knowledge management will be a key component of successful CRM, with more than two-thirds of all CRM projects incorporating advanced KM practices by 2005. Gartner also states that many service, sales and marketing processes clearly rely on knowledge resources including:
- Knowledge about customer behavior and knowledge of customers regarding product use or service quality
- Employee knowledge, such as sales practices and client-care insight
- Knowledge-based market intelligence and analytics, such as customer behavior and personal preferences
- Business partner knowledge, such as the complementary services and products of interest to customers
- Knowledge of and about business processes—how and why processes are designed and interact
- Knowledge of contracts or partner agreements
- Skills and competencies of employees
- Wants, needs and aspirations of employees
Source: Gartner, Inc.
The results of deploying knowledge solutions exceed productivity and quality goals of contact centers, help desks and Web self-service environments. With effective knowledge management companies can increase employee productivity, reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction and retention across traditional and electronic interaction channels.
Customer Analysis
Effective analysis of customer data should propel organizations to make faster, more informed business decisions.
Business intelligence capabilities enable organizations to monitor, report and interactively analyze their business operations. For example, companies can monitor agent productivity, analyze potential customer up-sell candidates, track current and historic service levels and interactively analyze trends on various business metrics such as First Time Resolution (FTR) rates.
Talisma’s CLM also helps companies develop best practices for tracking and analyzing customer and support center key performance indicators. This allows companies to identify emerging trends and react quickly to changing business conditions. Organizations should invest more time in cause and effect analysis and reduce time spent managing data. Well-designed CLM systems allow them to schedule reports to run automatically as either one-time-only or periodic actions. Companies can easily schedule reports for distribution, save reports in multiple formats (including Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or HTML pages) and monitor status of current reports. The business impact is real: service-wide analysis and reporting optimizes the responsiveness of your sales and marketing teams.
Optimize Revenue and Customer Value
The increasing sophistication of today’s customer management challenges is reflected in companies of all sizes, from small companies that use a simple commodity spreadsheet program to global giants that deploy huge dedicated resources. Many corporations are stifled by the sheer magnitude and complexity of the challenge, as today’s point solutions do not easily integrated into a single view of the customer. Yet customers are increasingly demanding—they expect fast, personalized and accurate answers to their product purchasing and service-related questions, whether they’re leveraging a Web site to send e-mail, execute self-service queries or are directly communicating with a service agent through chat, collaboration or via the phone. Successful companies understand that today’s customers have multiple interaction choices. They are responding with next generation Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions to better serve pre-sales and post-sales customers.
Talisma is a leading provider of Web-driven solutions that integrate the power of sales and e-marketing, e-mail, chat, real-time collaboration and telephony applications with a mature, robust multi-channel interaction management platform, comprehensive analytics and a fully integrated system-wide knowledgebase and customer database. Our customers enjoy a 360-degree view of all customer communications—regardless of channel—within an easy-to-use and configurable interface. The results are improved business performance through lowering the overall costs of service delivery while increasing customer satisfaction and retention. To learn more, go to Talisma