Smart CRM
A Game-Changing Investment for Tough Times

The role of customer service in an organization has probably never been more difficult—or more critical to an organization’s survival.

In recent months, most customer service organizations have seen operational budgets cut in the neighborhood of 20%. In addition, the customer is getting more dynamic and challenging to serve, with internal reorganizations, bankruptcies and mergers all taking place with unprecedented regularity. Plus, all the traditional challenges, such as ensuring consistency across global support organizations and handling increased complexity of products and customer environments, still remain.

In spite of these harsh realities, however, the customer service show must go on. Even in good times, delivering effective service and ensuring customer satisfaction is vital. Today, it’s quite simply a matter of survival.

So this is what it comes down to: delivering the same levels of service with fewer resources. Can it be done? Certainly not by applying the same technologies and operational approaches. I’d pose an even better question: what if your support organization could do more with less? What if in the coming months your support organization could deliver more advanced, responsive and effective services, while all your competitors are busy treading water? Read on and find out how.

Customer Service: It’s About Answers
A survey of companies in the US and UK conducted by Accenture¹ revealed a clear mandate for customer service organizations. Almost half of the survey’s respondents said that the most important aspect of a satisfying customer experience is a representative who can meet all of a customer’s needs—without having to forward inquiries to other representatives. Furthermore, more than 10% said the most important aspect is being able to discuss a problem with the service representative. The bottom line is that we as consumers want answers.

It’s clear that the old way of doing CRM hasn’t been working in terms of helping us provide those answers. In fact, in spite of increased CRM investments each year, customer satisfaction scores, first contact resolution rates, speed to answer and other key performance indicators continue to decline.
 
The original iteration of CRM falls short in delivering several key requirements that today’s customer service organizations require:

• Intelligence. CRM systems lack the centralized intelligence needed to deliver innovation and more consumer-driven interactions. As a result, support agents can’t learn, serve or collaborate as effectively as needed.
• Collaboration. CRM systems don’t enable customers to become more self-sufficient or foster a community that can generate its own answers, lacking such capabilities as concierge wizards, establishing social reputations, etc. that are needed to power effective forums, wikis and other social networks.
• Insight. CRM systems have fallen short in providing the analytical insights customer service organizations require to truly understand customer needs. As a result, it is difficult, if not impossible, to optimize the answers, and ultimately the experience, customers receive.

These limitations, already painful shortcomings, are becoming increasingly important in an economic climate in which we are being forced to try and do more with less.

Today’s organizations have a significant opportunity to not only weather recent budget cuts, but to overcome the limitations of traditional CRM solutions, improve service levels and help their organizations strengthen their competitive position. How? By harnessing the capabilities of "smart CRM"—an intelligent integration of CRM and knowledge management (KM).

With the addition of KM, organizations gain the centralized intelligence they need to deliver answers—fast, accurate, relevant answers. This centralized intelligence is the best way to foster the knowledge and confidence agents desire. Here are just a few of the ways smart CRM can benefit today’s support organizations:

• Enhance agent efficiency and effectiveness. After downsizing, customer service organizations may often lose some of their more experienced support agents. As a result, it is vital to move from a support model in which knowledge and expertise walks out the door when seasoned employees leave, to a more collaborative support model in which solutions are developed, managed and shared as part of the daily resolution process. This not only helps with overall morale and confidence but also empowers new agents to become more proficient in a shortened period of time. Smart CRM systems can provide answers in real time with minimal agent involvement. For example, as a service agent is working in their case resolution screen, an integrated KM solution can automatically leverage the context of the interaction, and provide immediate advice to assist with the resolution process.
• Minimize training time. In the wake of reorganizations, reductions in staff and turnover, both new and existing employees will need to be trained. Knowledge solutions coupled with CRM can have a dramatic impact on reducing employee training schedules. Instead of investing in training programs that result in agents not servicing customers, management can instead focus on developing the essential content required for basic problem resolution and knowledge retrieval. Ultimately, organizations are able to cut a lot of time out of training schedules. Plus, by making the knowledge management system accessible through the CRM interface on each agent’s desktop, agents can work with—and get the answers they need in—one single application.
• Minimize call resolution times. To reduce costs, many organizations have been forced to consolidate call centers or business units, which can lead to longer call times, increased escalations and decreased first call resolution rates. By arming agents with one-click access to better information, smart CRM can help organizations avoid these negative trends. By gaining access to knowledge through their existing CRM interface, problem resolution becomes faster and more seamless for the agent.
• Improve consistency. By having KM and CRM fully integrated, the playing field for agent competencies is leveled and every agent can more quickly and intuitively deliver consistent answers. Smart CRM can be fully leveraged in both agent-assisted channels as well as Web self-service. Powering smart CRM with a centralized knowledge platform means customers get the same, correct answers, regardless of the channel they use. Variety may be the spice of life, but it’s death in customer service.

Smart CRM Yields Breakthrough Gains
To meet today’s unprecedented challenges, support organizations can’t rely on their traditional technologies and approaches. In the past, when seeking to improve operational performance, support executives have employed the following types of efforts:

• Workforce optimization. This approach employs technologies to understand peak performance times, and optimize the scheduling of resources around those peaks;
• Skill-based routing. This entails adding more intelligence to interaction routing to ensure inquiries are directed to the best skilled agent or group to help optimize the experience; and
• Outsourcing. In this approach, a certain percentage of interactions are offloaded to external providers, such as service bureaus, during times of peak customer demand.

By relying on these traditional techniques and technologies, customer service operations are limited in terms of the improvements that can be realized. At a crucial time when we are all trying to do more with less, these same old strategies may yield a 2% to 5% improvement in efficiency. Fundamentally, this won’t help much if budgets have been slashed by 20% and your challenges are compounded by the need to consolidate staff or lines of business.