Succeeding in the Customer-Driven Age: New Goals, New Tools Required
1 May, 2007
By: Mike BetzerAs the global economy has become more interconnected and “flat,” the pressure to increase performance has accelerated. The demands for new market share, new revenues, new levels of efficiency and new levels of accountability – already intense – have become an urgent reality in executive suites on every continent. Yet, for all of these demands, changing an organization to capitalize on new opportunities or respond to imminent threats has become more complicated than ever.
Competition has always been fierce, but now it comes from every corner of the globe, delivered to customers’ doorsteps in the form of highly accurate Web searches, overnight delivery and continuous access to help, advice and new ideas. Compliance requirements and regulations continue to increase the cost and complexity of operations, making it harder for organizations to be nimble. Talent is scattered across the globe and employees are more mobile than ever. Partnerships are built and deconstructed yearly or even quarterly as market dynamics change.
In the middle of this new business reality are customers. They have more information at their fingertips and more choices than ever before. Competitors have more access to their attention and greater ability to be ready at a moment’s notice to provide service from anywhere on the planet. Losing a customer’s loyalty takes only an instant. And, unfortunately, it happens more than most organizations would like to admit.
The result? Successfully running a large business, small business, university, utility or even government agency in today’s world requires making customers the central point of focus. Simply put – any strategy that does not put the customer at the center is likely to cost more than expected, produce fewer results and endanger the customer relationships that power growth.
The customer-driven age is upon us, and succeeding in this environment requires a new set of goals and a new set of tools.
From the Outside In – What Customers See
In the customer-driven age, there are no secrets. Compared with just 10 years ago, information is plentiful and easily accessible online, and customers can learn more about an organization or a product in one day than previously was possible in a year … both the positive and the negative.
Most organizations intend to put their best foot forward. They understand how important it is to present the very best the organization has to offer to their customers. And in many cases, this happens. However, when organizations fail to meet or exceed customer expectations, alternatives are only a Web search away. The ability for marketers to present offers has exploded with the advent of new channels and new media. Offers arrive on cell phones, are posted on street corners and airports, are interspersed within movies and television shows, presented on every Web search – and everything is sponsored. Media is pervasive and customers are immersed in opportunities to find new alternatives to products and services that don’t live up to expectations.
In the customer-driven age, however, even the best organizations can falter --- and the stakes are high. Customers can easily discern when a business engages in poor service behaviors, including:
• Inconsistency: When a customer receives different answers from different parts of the organization, it creates a red flag. This could be as innocuous as posting the wrong store hours on the Web. Or it could be more significant – health benefits told to be available from one regional call center that differ from another, resulting in a costly and potentially dangerous decision for a patient.
• “Spin”: With the wealth of information now available on the Web, customers are wary of being “sold.” Gone are the days when the lack of public knowledge about a product or service could mask design shortcomings. In today’s market, the proverbial “used car salesman” is a dying breed or is already a memory. In many cases, customers will know more than the salesperson. Before they even speak with the organization, they are likely to fully understand the product or service -- what options are available, what colors it comes in, whether it can be used in their neighborhood and coexist with their existing equipment, whether it can be upgraded, extended or traded in, and what price to expect.
• Poor memory: Customers expect to be remembered. No matter what an organization provides – whether it’s a mobile phone, a consulting service or even a government benefit – customers expect their information to be current and consistent across any access point. Information entered in their Web account will map to what a call center agent knows. When they inquire about additional products or services, their profile will be known – what they’ve purchased and when, how much they paid and what discount they received, how they prefer delivery and how they prefer to shop. Any one of a hundred pieces of information customers have provided will be expected to be immediately referenced, understood and used in their next transaction.
These factors, if ignored, can often be the trigger for poor customer satisfaction, resulting in low loyalty and high churn.
Building the Customer-Driven Enterprise
The key to solving these challenges is establishing a highly accurate, deeply knowledgeable and completely consistent dialog with customers over time – a concept that’s easy to understand, yet difficult to accomplish without the right tools.
Success in today’s business environment requires that answers to customers’ inquiries are consistent no matter where or when they contact an organization: Offers for products and services are relevant and targeted to the needs of customers, and perhaps most important, that buying history, profile information, project requirements and other critical information never needs to be repeated.
The difficulty in meeting these challenges rests less on the identification of the problem and more on the implementation. Without the right set of tools, organizations will struggle to make their customer experience more consistent, more information-rich and more relevant.
The key to building the customer-driven enterprise is to empower everyone in the organization to make the right decision and provide the right answers, and enable organizations to be more responsive – from end to end – when new opportunities appear, or when old conditions change.
The Emergence of Transformational CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) continues to play an integral role in the evolution of the customer-driven enterprise. Yet, to enable organizations to transform their customer relationships and markedly increase organizational performance, CRM must do more. To survive and thrive in today’s “flat,” media-rich, global business environment, CRM must provide new capabilities to the organization and ensure that CRM investments have the highest-possible return in the shortest possible time.
Empower Users
To transform an organization into a customer-drive enterprise, CRM users must come first.
Frontline customer-facing employees – salespeople, business development, marketing, customer service and support, partner managers and even accounts receivable – need to have a flexible, role-based CRM application that maps to their individual needs. Their CRM tool must provide real-time insight at the moment of customer interaction. The user interface must be simple to learn and easy to use. Customer intelligence should be embedded at the users’ fingertips, woven into the fabric of each interaction. Finding information should be as easy using popular Web search engines. And most important, all business processes should be clearly and simply exposed to the user. It should be plainly evident what the organization expects from each customer transaction, and it should be easy for users to accomplish the task.
By providing the best-possible tools to the people who interact directly with customers, it is possible to unleash employees to do their best for their customers – and for the organization as a whole.
Enable Organizational Responsiveness
The core of a transformational CRM system is the ability to respond quickly. It is not enough for a CRM system to provide a platform for launching new customer initiatives. CRM must enable an organization to be agile and adaptable as market, competitive or regulatory conditions change.
The benefit of choosing a responsive CRM platform is that changes can be made quickly and also provide a net improvement in the customer experience. This includes both the ability to change business processes on the fly and to ensure that customer information is consistent across divisions and departments, even while processes, teams and customer segments are changing. Organizations need to ensure that the specific requirements of their industry – from government to telecommunications to oil and gas – are cost-effectively captured inside the CRM application as requirements change. And as technologies change, the organization can capitalize on new business models, such as Software as a Service (SaaS) and grid computing, to increase reaction times and provide new financial options.
Ensure Value
Transforming an organization into the customer-driven enterprise can’t be done alone. Ensuring success means ensuring value along the way. Transformational CRM is not only about the success of a vendor, but also about the success of an ecosystem. It is important to choose a vendor that has demonstrated success in the past and is committed to CRM success in the future – for new technologies, ongoing support and product enhancements. The heart of a valuable CRM ecosystem is the quality of the implementation partners to ensure that transformational CRM is well planned, well delivered and well managed over time.
Achieving Customer-Driven Success
The customer-driven age is upon us and succeeding in this environment requires a new set of goals and a new set of tools. As the global economy has become more interconnected and “flat,” the pressure to increase performance has accelerated. Any strategy that does not put the customer at the center is likely to cost more than expected, have fewer results and endanger the customer relationships that power growth. Transformational CRM is the catalyst to transform organizations, empower employees and capitalize on new market opportunities.
Putting Transformational CRM into Practice
When used to its full potential, CRM can transform the customer experience and deliver increased customer satisfaction. However, even businesses that have invested heavily in sophisticated CRM and knowledgebase systems often fail to bridge the gap between those applications and the initial point of customer contact. Today, callers expect companies they do business with to know who they are and why they’re calling. But very often, customers are asked to repeat information on the phone that your company should already know. This information gap is often what frustrates customers most.
Bridging the Gap
The integration of these systems, often referred to as CTI (computer telephony integration), used to be cost prohibitive. But with the rise of VoIP and hosted contact center systems, these barriers are steadily dropping. Hosted contact center offerings provide a cost-effective method of improving dialog with customers. For a low monthly fee, you can and bridge the gap between incoming calls, IVR and existing customer service applications.
With integrated telephony, you can understand who is calling from within the CRM application. Customers don’t need to re-enter their account number or repeat information. Agents are automatically provided with a complete customer history – so picking up where the customer left off in the last contact is the norm, not the exception.
Meeting the Challenge
To keep up with the pace of change and continually maintain customer satisfaction, companies are implementing business process automation tools that guide agents through the service delivery process.
Business processes help increase user efficiency, thereby improving customer satisfaction by reducing handling times. Their wizard-like user interface guides agents through service execution, allows navigation forward and backward, and allows tasks to be paused and resumed as needed. Users are provided with pertinent information along the way to expedite request handling.
Transformational CRM introduces a unique tool that organizes work into a series of tasks. When a new or better way of addressing a service issue is discovered, authorized users can quickly create a new or revised task and deploy it to their team, or across the entire organization – all without having to call IT. Agents are armed with the new information and can efficiently roll-out the solution, without requiring training on the new procedure.
Raising the Bar
Maintaining context is not enough. Great service means fast resolution. Customers expect their issue to be resolved quickly – ideally on the first call. Arming agents with the information needed to bring issues to resolution, without callbacks or complicated escalation procedures, is the next step in transforming customer service.
In the past, agents were often trained to be subject-matter experts. But at the rapid pace new products and services are brought to market today, it’s all but impossible to stay up to speed. Providing agents with a knowledgebase and guiding them through the steps to service customer issues eliminates the need to constantly train them. No matter when customers call, or where they call from, customer service is consistent, and consistently excellent.
Extending the Experience
Even when agents are armed with the best-available information, sometimes service issues cannot be resolved over the phone and require on-site service delivery. Customers want to be able to schedule a service appointment–without having to be transferred or to call another number. Continuing great service all the way through to on-site field service support ensures a consistent, positive customer experience.
Transformational CRM provides integrated field service solutions, enabling CRM functionality to extend to workers in the field. These field service solutions support closed-loop problem resolution with multi-channel customer service, mobile and wireless connectivity, scheduling, inventory management and invoicing functionality. By seamlessly integrating field service solutions with your existing systems, you can ensure consistent service is delivered outside the walls of the contact center.
