CRM II: This Time It's Personal

IN A WORLD WHERE CONVERGING SERVICES and networks threaten to overwhelm the OSS systems and the marketing engines of resellers everywhere, one technology has been there to quash the enemies of customer satisfaction: customer relationship management. The latest sequel in the CRM saga finds the technology taking a deep analytical dive into customer behavior, in order to segment customers and tailor how to treat subscribers when they call, write or log on. The tagline? This time, it’s personal.

Profitec allows resellers to get a full picture of the financial value of a customer with OmniView

Personalization represents a fundamental change in the CRM market, says Scott Kolman, director of industry segment solutions marketing for Amdocs Ltd. “The classic definition of CRM focuses on managing the customer relationship,” he notes. “However, if you look at the history of how CRM has been implemented, it is fair to say that the focus has been around cost savings and operational efficiency. In our view, this is no longer enough for service providers.” Now, he says, to compete and hang onto customers, resellers need to analyze all available customer data to deliver a tailored, unique interaction to each end user – improving the customer experience and giving providers much deeper insight into their bases.

In fact, the CRM market will grow to $1.3 billion in 2010 on the strength of this trend, according to Dan Baker, director of Dittberner Inc.’s OSS/BSS KnowledgeBase. “Most already own the desktop tools they need to efficiently capture and integrate customer behavioral and demographic data,” says Baker. “Where Dittberner sees future growth in CRM is in the analysis of these data. In effect, [providers] have merely scratched the surface of knowledge that can be leveraged from their daily interaction with customers, operations, services, networks and salespeople.”

A SUCCESSFUL SEQUEL

A new crop of CRM tools that does indeed leverage a full range of customer information is coming into wide release this season. This “CRM II” wave of tools uses analytics to improve and personalize call center interactions, customer feedback processes, and sales and marketing activities.

CRM vendor ClickFox Inc., for instance, recently released an advanced thresholding capability that helps resellers and others to be more responsive to subscribers’ individual needs. “We know from following behavior patterns what a good experience versus a bad experience is for customer support,” says ClickFox CEO Marco Pacelli. “And you can set a threshold, say for online bill pay. You may want the average experience to take three minutes and five steps, and you want a 90 percent success rate. The product monitors what happens daily, weekly, monthly and warns when thresholds are being exceeded so you can proactively take action by making changes before its too late – you can change the routing rules, intervene on a case-by-case basis, or transfer customers automatically to a live person via chat.”

Satisfactory call resolution is only one customer management area that’s getting personal. For some time, CRM tools have been used to capture customer feedback. However, data collected by existing CRM systems doesn’t necessarily give providers a full picture of the customer’s wants and needs. “Traditional methods of collecting and analyzing customer and employee feedback through surveys, comment cards or letters often produce incomplete, inaccurate and outdated information that may not result in any action by the company,” says Adam Edmunds, president and CEO at Allegiance Inc. To remedy the problem, the company has launched Version 4 of the Allegiance Active Listening System, available to resellers, which, as the name suggests, actually listens to real-time dialogues with customers, employees and partners. It also analyzes the aggregate of customer interaction over a period of time, and looks for patterns, and combines that with historical and purchase data. It then uses all that information to generate predictive indicators to deal with customer issues as they occur, and be more responsive.

Then there’s sales and marketing. While CRM has long enabled companies to do targeted upsell offers based on what the customer has purchased in the past, there’s an opportunity now to make that process even more personal and reactive through real-time decisioning. “This is essentially the next wave of CRM, a self-learning engine which can adapt to events that happen, take into account what previous customers have bought, and can shift with market forces, to make product recommendations accordingly,” says Steve Bamberger, vice president of communications and media at Oracle Corp., which offers a real-time decisioning functionality within its CRM suite.te.

The Oracle system also sees that, say, cross-sell offer B is being accepted more often than option A because of a competitor promotion, so offer B will float to the top of the offer cue for the customer service person. “So this completely shifts the CRM idea towards being genuinely responsive to customer needs, as opposed to doing what the marketing people think customer needs are,” Bamberger says.

Amdocs recently extended the idea of understanding each customer’s value to outbound collection activities “to enable a more complete picture of the customer situation and to help service providers act on that accordingly,” says Kolman. For instance, if a customer has fallen behind for the first time in several years and subscribes to several high-margin services, perhaps they don’t get treated as harshly as repeat offenders.

A BOX-OFFICE BLOCKBUSTER

All of this personalization is good news for customers, but it’s good for the marginconscious reseller, too. By knowing the customers, a provider can determine which are the most profitable, and can better understand and improve the overall fiscal health of its customer-facing activities.

For instance, resellers always are under the gun to improve margins, so knowing where to cut opex in customer service can help them do that while making sure good customers always are treated well.

“You can look at what the reseller is really making per account, and that may trigger a re-approach to the customer,” says Randy Minervino at Profitec Inc., which has a turnkey back-office solution for resellers that includes account-level margin analysis. “We assign a behavior summary score that is higher for customers that you have to chase down to pay the bills,” he says. “Those customers that pay on time, order high-margin services and hardly ever call – they get the lower numbers. From there, you can prioritize ACD groups when calls come in as to how they are handled. A high-value customer may get to go to a live body, while those in the middle may have a 30-second wait time. It’s driven off of profit, brand or even channel – if a high-performing agent’s account calls in, you may want to treat those customers like gold.”

This approach also can be used to provide a lower level of service to force “bad” customers away. “We segment clients and behavior by customer type, and grab the profile information,” says ClickFox’s Pacelli. “If the customer costs too much, maybe they’re only allowed to tap Web services, and if they don’t like it, you can let them go. Before this concept, companies made those decisions based on net sales, essentially, am I getting revenue from this? Now you can link the cost to service a customer to that sales figure, for the full cost picture.”

Click to Enlarge ClickFox applies advanced analysis to customer interaction to allow providers to respond in near-real time to customer service issues.

And speaking of costs and channels of interaction, resellers must consider the kinds of options it offers end users it wants to keep. While it may seem intuitive that a one-size-fits-all approach offers a good cost structure, a growing trend sees customers investigating new services over one channel, purchasing over another and receiving support on a third. Not allowing for this can create customer dissatisfaction that far outweighs the cost of offering multichannel service.

“For example, an MVNO who targets younger users may find that self-service is the preferred channel for virtually all communications,” says Amdocs’ Kolman. “Conversely, a provider targeting ‘silver surfers’ may need to support a mix of channels, including those that enable personal contact such as contact centers,” he says.

Thanks to CRM advancements, resellers are finding they can provide a multichannel, personalized approach without breaking the bank or losing customers, although even a single transaction might span multiple touchpoints before it is completed. “Customers need service through whatever channel is appropriate to the time, place and activity they are currently engaged in,” says Tom Chamberlain, director of business process marketing at Aspect Software Inc. “One way to address this is by utilizing a customer interaction platform that is designed to abstract these communication channels and apply a common service strategy across all channels.” Aspect offers such a platform in its contact center solutions.

Another way to tackle the problem is by taking a page from social networking. Pacelli says ClickFox has created a MySpace-type environment so that management of all channels is centralized and shares the same data, in an automated way. “So the system knows who you are, no matter where you access it, and it knows what you did last, and immediately asks if you want to save time and do the same thing you did last time,” he explains. “So if you usually come in by Web and then click to call, that will be pre-arranged on the view you see.”