A nervous customer calls in to a Customer Service Center, only to be greeted by an IVR (Interactive Voice Response)/VRU (Voice Response Unit). Customer identifies painstakingly himself/herself going through the gyrations of the VRU. Press 1 if you want this, 44 if you want that… etc. Finally, the customer decides to speak to a live rep, and after little bit of wait, gets connected with a live customer service rep. Customer Service rep goes through the typical opening of the service call, Sir/Madam, please identify yourself, your account number, SSN, etc. Many of us were in this situation before; and if our memory serves right it’s not a surprise to see that the customer would be little furious and frustrated at this time. “I spent 20 minutes on this voice box identifying myself, etc. and now I have to start all over again?!”

Every business vows to provide the best customer experience possible for their customers. Yet, a few achieve it. Most CRM (Customer Relationship Management), CEM (Customer Experience Management) tools and custom applications focus on serving the customer in queue in what they intend to be most efficient way. Usually these efficiencies are defined and measured in terms of queue wait time, call handle time, success on selling additional revenue opportunities, etc.

There is nothing wrong with that thinking. Any Customer Service Manager wants to meet and beat these metrics, and challenges to serve more calls with the limited staff and greater quality. So, the customer rep is driven to quickly record why the customer has called, and how he/she resolved the issue. Seldom, this is done by noting the call with a reason code, and a resolution code. But, there are some inherent problems with this approach:

1. Lack of Comprehensive accounting of all transactions - Not all customer service calls will be recorded in the system. If no significant action is taken to answer the customer’s question, the rep might not take the pain to record each call he/she takes. It’s not unusual in a call center environment, the number of ACD/Switch transactions don’t correlate with the number of database recorded transactions in the CRM application.
2. Doesn’t account for all Customers touch points - The only customer interactions that touch a live service rep who records a significant action will be recorded. In other words, most systems don’t account for other mediums of interactions, ex: IVR, VRU, Web Self-help, and Live Chat.
3. One reason, one resolution - It’s assumed that the customer calls in for one single reason and one resolution is made to resolve the problem.
4. Transaction based, not experience based - The focus is mainly on the current transaction. Meaning, the customer’s situation is defined by what he/she tells the reps as the problem during that iteration. There is no continuity of the relationship, no linkage to the previous interactions with the customer, and no prediction of why the customer might be calling based on what events have happened in the customer life cycle so far.

Because of these fallacies and assumptions, CRM tools become more of a transaction-oriented, and cannot live up to the challenge of Customer Experience Management. There is major fundamental difference between CRM and CEM. CRM tends to be more of transaction oriented (what can I do for you today? err… in this call?) and CEM is about linking all previous transactions for the customer, open issues, and evaluating the effects of other events in the business universe in the context of the customer and providing an overall experience for the customer.

As discussed earlier, most of the CRM frameworks are built under these fallacies. To begin with, we need a better framework that can support the unison of all the customer touch points, account for every transaction that occurred with the customer, and accommodate the entire history of what’s done for a customer. Once you have such framework, the system can be turned into Customer Experience mode by implementing few paradigms such as Call Prediction (look for my next post on this!).

For those CRM enthusiasts come movie buffs out there, here is where you start to see the relevance of the title of this post. It’s said that a good movie script (which should translate into a fine movie) will have the following format: BEGINNING (introduces characters, location, mood, relationship, etc), MIDDLE (the body – action and humor), and END (the climax, resolution). Of course, not necessarily in the same order … ala Pulp Fiction (for its spell-binding non-linear narration)!

Now, think of a customer visit (call-in, web visit) as the BEGINNING of an interaction, exit/close as the END, and series of transactions that happen during the interaction as the MIDDLE. Sprinkle with context sensitive auto-notes, and rep generated notes, and the whole customer interaction and experience come to life. I like to correlate Notes to background music; it adds essence and detail to the situation that can’t always be expressed in database records.

Now you take this framework one step further, and aim to automate as many events as possible. All your widgets, screens that form the CRM toolset should be self-aware. In other words, we should eliminate the need for the rep to mark each transaction that happened during an interaction, and make the functionality itself record the event. It’s not as difficult as it sounds, let’s suppose the Customer had a question about his recent Bill Statement. When the rep pulls up the Bill in the CRM tool using a menu/click, the functionality that renders the bill should record that a bill preview was requested for the customer. This directly solves the problem #3 identified above, accounting for more than one transaction, and more than one resolution for a customer interaction, and eliminating the need for marking the interaction with a specific category. It also solves the accountability of all the customer interactions (problem #1) as the CRM functionality is built with self-aware.

Now let’s turn our attention to the problem of isolated and non-uniform customer touch points as discussed in problem #2. I have to bring up the most over-used and under-utilized paradigm of recent times, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). If all your customer touch points (web self-help, call center, IVR, live chat, etc) are based on the same core platform, and enabled by SOA services, you have achieved the unison of all the customer touch points and uniformity in customer experience. Hybrid touch point interactions can be handled seamlessly with a platform based SOA approach systems. Example: Customer dropping out of IVR, or Web session and calling in to the Call Center, CRM can detect the abandoned interaction, and resume from where it was abandoned at the other touch point. Again, this is not a difficult thing to implement either. It’s just that in majority of enterprises, these touch points are seen differently, built with different technologies, mindsets and frameworks making them isolated. If you look at it, at the end of the day you are serving the same customer base, same functionality using all these touch points. Only the navigation and presentation change between the touch points due to the nature of the audience, drivers, and underlying medium. For example, on the Web, customer is serving himself/herself, where as in a call center environment, a customer service rep is doing it for the customer. So, the skins change, view points (called perspectives in movie world, if you want to draw an analogy…) change, but the functionality achieved is the same, so should be the underlying framework and the core set of services that power all these touch points.

Before we wrap up, let’s touch on the combination of self-aware functionality in CRM that auto-records the transactions, and the notes (both auto-generated and rep generated) and some exciting possibilities. This could lead CRM toolset into Enterprise 2.0. Anyone thinking Tag Clouds?! (Disclaimer: I am not defining Tag Clouds as the only principle of Enterprise 2.0). Imagine you build a neat widget that aggregates several transactions from the customer’s previous interactions, takes cues from notes on the customer, and comes up with a Tag Cloud.

early-adopter trouble delayed-shipment great-referrer on-time-payment nice bill-preview long-wait handle-with-care increased-revenue beta expanding upsell-potential FedEx next-day

Now, imagine customer calling in, and rather than the customer service rep research and view history of previous interactions, he is presented with the Tag Cloud above.

I will stop right there… you get the point! The possibilities are endless.

Tags: Call Prediction, CEM, CRM, Customer Experience, customer service, customer touch point, enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, framework, interaction, movie theory, platform, self-aware, SOA

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 6:04 pm and is filed under CRM, CEM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.