Newsletters

Customer Support:   (972) 395-3225

Home

Articles, News, Announcements - click Main News Page
Previous Story       Next Story
    
Turning Your CRM Into Profitable Conversations

by Kael Kelly, Senior Director, Varolii - November 2, 2011

Turning Your CRM into Profitable Conversations
By Kael Kelly, Senior Director, Varolii

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems of all kinds represent a significant investment for growing your business. Chances are that you already have a breadth of customer data and a sophisticated infrastructure to achieve several objectives, such as improving the speed and quality of customer service, increasing customer payment rates and increasing program enrollment. But, where most organizations fall short on achieving these objectives is in the final piece of the equation: the conversation.

Traditional methods of communication, such as contact center agents and direct mail, play an important role in customer communication, but they are not capable of shouldering all your communications alone. With more than 90 percent of the U.S. population communicating via mobile phones and text messaging, companies need to adopt a communications strategy that makes use of all technology channels. For example, automated communication through voice, email and text not only compliments your existing resources, making them more efficient and profitable, but also provides you with a more cost effective way to engage your customers and solve several business problems, many of which you may not realize exist.

Consider what automated communications can solve:

Make CRM investments more customer-centric. Companies spend billions of dollars each year on CRM systems, contact center infrastructure, websites, analytics and much more to capture, store and analyze customer data for support and selling activities. Yet when it comes to customer service, too much of the burden is placed on the customer: they must comb through information and support from websites, call into your contact centers, wait on hold, navigate interactive voice response systems, and visit retail centers to find the information they need, get support and determine the appropriate course of action.

Whenever possible, companies should instead look to proactively engage customers over any channel before they contact you. A 2009 Harris Interactive survey showed that 96 percent of survey respondents said they’d welcome an automated phone call or message to confirm their doctor appointment, notify them a package is ready for pick up, or even remind them to pay their credit card bill. The benefit is two-fold: you can free up your agents to work on more complex issues that truly require human intervention; and, you can increase customer satisfaction by contacting them before they need help and cutting down on the time they have to waste looking for information.

And, with the data gleaned through your CRM system, you’re able to tailor your communications to the individual and deliver your messages using the customers’ explicit and implicit preferences. This not only ensures a positive customer experience but improves the rate at which your customers respond and take action.

Bridge information “silos” across your company. When businesses communicate, they often do so in silos. Each division may have independent initiatives running simultaneously which require customer outreach. In this instance, a company may call the same customer multiple times for different reasons: collect on a bill, update information, announce a new product or service, collect data for a survey and so on. In certain situations, a customer can open a trouble ticket or return a defective product at the same time that another part of the organization is trying to push an add-on sale or an extended warranty. This erodes efficiency and negatively impacts customer satisfaction because the outreach isn’t coordinated internally and doesn’t serve the customer’s best interests.

Organizations can provide a centralized view of the customer with the right technologies in place to capture information and break down silos. This creates the most effective communications strategy that best serves the customer and achieves the objectives across multiple divisions.

Take costs out of your business. While contact centers serve a vital function within your organization, they’re not always able to scale to customer volume or manage the volume of inbound calls. By offloading much of the communications your contact center routinely manages by using automation and proactive outreach, agents are freed up to work on high priority accounts. This ensures that more customers get served without flooding your contact center with inbound calls.

It’s more important than ever to enhance your communications efforts to retain your customers, yet you may have to work with a budget that is flat or decreasing. Using automated communications in your contact center will allow you to reach more customers and, affordably, while freeing-up agents to focus on other things. Because the information is proactively delivered to customers before they need it, they are more satisfied and less likely to overwhelm your call center with routine questions, since they already have the information they require.

###

About Kael Kelly
Kael Kelly, Senior Director for Varolii Corporation, brings more than 15 years of experience translating customer needs and market data into the company's overall marketing strategy. Prior to joining Varolii, Kelly held positions in the software and telecommunications industries in market research, product marketing and addressing customer relationship management needs. Kelly earned a master's degree in business administration from the University of Oregon.


 
Return to main news page