Call centers are hot these days as corporates are reverting to the tried and
tested mode of customer service—‘Customer is the King’. The first step was
setting up call centers with sweet voices intoning ‘May I Help You Sir.’
Amrish Rau relied on a sweet voice while trying to activate his wife’s SIM
card.
On the first call, he gave the sweet voice the necessary details about the
purchase of the card and asked it to activate the card. Nothing happened. On his
second call when he mentioned that he was yet to get the card activated, he was
forced to give all the details again. Three calls later and after chatting with
several sweet sounding call center personnel, Amrish whose own voice which by
now had lost all sweetness, was irritated with the customer service department
of the cellphone company. And he has good reasons for it too. Amrish is the
business manager (India) for Teradata, a division of NCR and a global firm
specializing in CRM and Business Intelligence (BI) solutions.
From his perspective, the first time he spoke to the call center voice, they
would have known of his recent purchase. In the Activation call, the data would
have been captured and forwarded to the concerned department for quick action
and escalation if necessary. From then on during all future calls they should
have known exactly what his requirements were, rather than getting him to repeat
everything again and again. Says Amrish, "it is all about understanding the
customer, and leveraging that understanding to serve the customer better."
CRM is not just about a sweet but fundamentally ineffective voice on the end of
the phone.
CRM — the new necessity
Times have changed and so have the marketing needs of companies. Gone are the
days of the product centric era where the company and its marketing team would
ask ‘We have the product, now how can we sell it to the customer’. Given the
competition, especially in the financial market, the focus in now on the
customers and the marketing team is now saying ‘Well this is the customer. Let’s
find out what products he wants." Comments Rau "This is a 360 degree
change in view of business."
Increasingly marketing managers are relying on the CIO to have a sound data
repository helping the marketing team get a good idea of customers. They can use
the same data not only to sell the products but also to cross sell other
products to the same customer. Comments L Sunderrajan, VP-Corporate Information
Tech, Birla Management Corporation, "If we can build up the customer
database across our various group companies, then we can check and match to see
if our mutual fund holder can also become our insurance product holder." An
easy task, considering the availability of customer insights a company can have
with the deployment of CRM tools.
The way out
Like the call center example, many companies are deploying call center based
CRM to take care of their customer requirements. But the real experience is
still missing and frustration like in the case of Amrish is not uncommon for
many of us. The big question is whether the front-end CRM solution is the way
out for any company, focussing and competing in an aggressive market. Not
likely!
While it is imperative to have a front-end solution like CRM, it is equally
important to have a back-end system binding the various components of the
front-end together. The first step in such situations is to have a data
warehouse in place. Today the company has many faces with which it interacts
with its customers. For example, in a typical banking or insurance company, the
customer can get in touch with the company via the sweet voice at the call
center, the ATM/Kiosks or simply by walking into any branch. Other interaction
points with the bank may be through the web or the bank agents. Any customer
contact at any point needs to be captured and updated to the central data
warehouse. ‘Knowledge is power’ though cliched, should be remembered once
the company starts collecting data from various sources. With BI tools, it
becomes possible to report, analyze and predict...
The company can get an insight into the low-key aspects of its business. With
business insight comes operational excellence. For example, if the company can
predict that during a particular festival, a particular section of the market
will be a heavy buyer of its financial product, it could mobilize additional
resources for that market. After pinning down the customer behavior, the company
can drive its customer intimacy initiatives for sustained competitive advantage.
This helps the company to focus on creating customer profiles and to devise
strategy accordingly. The company can draw up a customer management plan to
emphasise on the retention of the most profitable relationships and do away with
the unprofitable ones. Once this information is available the company can
communicate with the customer more effectively. Various parameters can be made
within the system to take care of the customers.
For example, if the profile is done on a particular customer who draws about
75K monthly, then the best time for communicating the need for a personal loan
would be at the end of the month and not at the beginning. Once the
communication strategy is in place, comes the most important part–actual
communication or interacting with the customer.
Remember the call center–that’s just one small component of the overall
customer interaction landscape. The communication should be driven by all the
channels to successfully execute and implement the strategy. And of course, any
feedback needs to be captured and new strategy devised accordingly.
Does all this help? The simple answer–YES.
In the case of Royal Bank Financial Group, the company could improve its
marketing cycle time by over 61% and had an above 40% increase in direct
marketing response rates. (See box). Apart from Teradata, other key players in
the market include database major Oracle and Siebel.
Yograj Varma In New Delhi
Customer is Really King...
To increase its customer focus and track the same, the National Australian
Bank deployed a CRM infrastructure including a business intelligence solution.
The company set out the basic parameters about the customers and deployed it
across all its channels. It so happened that one of its ‘good’ customers on
a particular month went to withdraw money from the ATM. As per the previous
profile, the customer seemed to have unpaid credit card bills apart from the
unusual poor savings balance. This skew in the customer’s pattern was captured
by the system parameters and after the cash withdrawal transaction at the ATM,
the screen flashed with the message ‘Do you want to discuss your finances with
us?’ The customer clicked on the ‘yes’ button. This updated profile was
captured by the data warehouse and forwarded to the call center agents. The call
center agent called to find the time of the appointment and the customer
informed that 3-6 PM at the residence would be the best time for the same. On
being asked to fix the appointment on a working weekday, the customer
acknowledged the same and was okay with the same time. Again the same message
was captured and sent to the nearest branch. The branch manager on analyzing the
data figured that calling on a weekday implied that the customer was either out
of his job or changing jobs or on long leave. The latter had lesser probability
given the current account balance and the customer’s willingness to discuss
his financial problems with the bank. So the branch manager just took two items
for the customer meeting— personal loan and entrepreneur’s loan material.
Indeed the customer had lost his job and was planning to go the entrepreneurial
way and obliged the bank with the entrepreneur’s loan. The bank added another
‘forever’ -loyal customers to its customer base, thanks to the sound CRM
deployment.