Retailers, get ready for the magic of CRM

“International giants entering India in a big way was an impending trend only waiting to happen.  If you haven’t prepared for the tussle yet, this is your chance. Indian retailers are set to impress customers and increase their bottom-line with the aid of the right CRM”

It’s ironic that while the retail sector in India is estimated at US$350 billion, organised retail is estimated barely at US$8 billion. The upside is the expected growth rate. By 2010, organised retail is expected to grow up to US$22 billion, an estimated 40 percent compounded annual growth of return over the next few years.

Numerous international retail giants from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States are entering the Indian market with enormous hope and investments. Retailers in India so far only prefer to increase the number of outlets within a city or to other regions as a part of their expansion drive. But they will now need to fight the burgeoning retail space with many new shopping centres and growing new markets like the kids’ retail revolution in apparel. To manage the tremendous volume of transactions and to beat international competition, Indian retailers have an immediate need for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools.

CRM will happen. It’s simply a question of how long it will take and in how many ways retailers will benefit. Customer Relationship Management is important, especially for your repeat customers and for them to feel camaraderie with the retailer. A good CRM will provide the right framework to retailers so that they can personalize merchandise purchases, services and responses across all communication channels for the customer’s satisfaction and for increased sales.

Low cost, high value

But before retailers embark on any CRM software, they need to ensure it comes at optimal cost, with minimal risk, high value, and a higher return on investment (ROI). It should install quickly, interface readily with existing systems, be easy to learn and to use, and deliver uncompromising performance.

Driven by changing lifestyles, strong income growth and favourable demographic patterns, the Indian retail market is growing at compounded annual rate of five percent and expected revenues of US$320 billion in 2007, according to a report by AT Kearney and the Confederation of Indian Industry. And big international and domestic retailers have realized this growth.

To sustain competition from the giants, Indian retailers must differentiate or brand their business. Customers expect retailers to do this is by personalizing products and services. And this is where a rightly implemented CRM comes into play.

Growing Communication Channels

India has more than 129 million mobile communication subscribers and the number is expected to go up to 300 million in 2008. This is a strong marketing channel retailers cannot afford to miss. “Truly loyal customers can’t imagine doing business with anyone else. They are your best means of advertising because they’ve become advocates for your company. They bore their friends with stories of how great you are,” write Shaun Smith and Joe Wheeler, authors of Managing the Customer Experience.

To implement the right CRM, retailers need to analyze customer preferences and trends, and then merge analysis with inbound and outbound calling via CRM technology so that customers can communicate with the retail chain by fax, phone, web, SMS and the like. The CRM framework links and integrates these channels to individualize the customer’s experience and ensure satisfaction.

Similarly, competition must be kept under a check. If a retailer offers volume discounts, its competitors must likewise offer comparable value to the customers. If a retailer has tools to reach more customers with personalized purchase offers, or to process orders faster, or with fewer errors, or more efficiently, other vendors must adapt or gradually surrender market share.

But unfortunately, only 30 percent of companies worldwide have actually implemented a commercial CRM software package. And most of these are only a year old. Of this minority, 54 percent have implemented just one part of CRM. With so much room for improvement in meeting customer demands, CRM can only help.

Contact centres form an integral part of CRM because they directly impact how customers feel about the retailer’s products, services and business. With an efficient system at the contact centre, retailers can help customers buy what they want and need. For instance, retailers are yet to utilize the opportunity of selling daily needs to a population that is using the latest technology to purchase almost everything.

If you are looking at moving to customer-centric marketing, this means that all customer functions are subject to CRM’s analytical processes. This helps retailers understand both how the customer base is presently segmented and, for the future, according to what retailing values. Other analyses identify new services, evaluate their ROI, shift focus from less to more profitable customers, etc. The outcome from CRM analytics is better service, improved planning and profitability, and more appropriate pricing.

Customer Analysis

CRM analysis can help retailers make a smooth shift to a customer-focused enterprise by allowing processes like differentiating customers into segments, discovering precise needs of customers and redesigning compensation and rewards to effect behavioural changes. This process establishes the context that stimulates the customer to shop and buy. Hardcore marketers make their own analytical understandings with the help of a CRM to evaluate what their customers need.

Improved Sales

Better services imply the customer’s improved ability to make purchases. They will make informed decisions and be happy with their purchase. Such efficient shopping will only mean a patronizing customer. For the retailers, this means higher transaction rate, increased revenues, and a wider profit margin.

Smart retailers are looking up new and critical CRM tools like the unified agent desktop that allows customer service agents to respond faster and with greater accuracy and consistency every time a customer picks up the phone, accesses e-mails or chats. The unified agent desktop brings the customer into focus at the desktop and turns the agent’s screen into a hub that can access all enterprise applications and databases necessary to respond rapidly to the customer.

The result is increased quality and decreased operating costs, leading to one of the most handsome ROIs in the industry. It also eliminates data redundancy like repeating customers with the same requests or relying on agents to recall the correct systems to enter a new customer record or service request.

Questions to ask about any CRM Framework:

• Does it allow the supervisor or manager to access and process analytical data online? Preferably through a web portal?
• Does it use just one screen to manage all customer channels – e-mail, voice, chat, fax, web self service – so that agents stay productive and don’t get lost in the transaction?
• Does it offer a universal view of your retail CRM data on a single screen – contact information, history of recent activity, knowledge base, workflow interaction, resource management?
• Does it make efficient use of your and the customer’s time by minimizing clicks so that managers and agents don’t have to toggle to other screens or other applications while the customer waits impatiently?

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What to Look for When Selecting a Hosted Contact Center Solution

According to Datamonitor, by 2008, the global market for managed and hosted contact center services will have more than doubled, reaching a value of more than $5 billion. So the odds are good that if you haven’t already implemented a hosted solution in your contact center, that you will soon.

But once you make the decision to implement a hosted solution, finding the right service provider is critical. What should you look for? Here are five areas to investigate:

1. Experience and capabilities

The vendor’s ability to provide a complete solution is as important as its ability to execute the solution.

• A service provider offering a hosted solution should deliver a full, robust suite designed for the hosting environment. It should include advanced analytics that track and measure all elements of the contact center at both an operational and business level, interaction channels with universal queue, and an agent desktop that provides a universal view of the customer.

• Companies can gain insight into the capabilities and support the company provides by checking customer and partner references.

• Most importantly, companies must understand the hosting infrastructure.

2. Functionality and security

As the demand for hosted solutions rises, traditional vendors have begun to retrofit their premise solutions to offer them as a service. The buyer should be cautious of these solutions, as they may not have the same benefits as a solution that was built to be both hosted and on-premise. Understanding the functionality of a hosted solution is key to understanding the vendor’s ability to customize, integrate, and provide security for your existing resources.

• A multi-tenant architecture can improve the operation of a hosted solution. It is an inexpensive and comprehensive method of providing a shared architecture down to the last table. With a multi-tenant architecture, multiple clients with distinct needs, tools, processes, customizations, and workflow can all reside in the same infrastructure – each with its own completely separate, completely unique set of processes.

• A Net-Native Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) solution can eliminate the need for client/server applications on user desktops. Additionally, it utilizes the internet as a global delivery system for maximum uptime and flexibility while ensuring full security.

• Integration should use a common platform based on open standards. This easy-to-program, goes-anywhere framework can summarize data from any system (transactions, interactions) and transmit it to agents using a single, web-based interface.

• Secure data transmission is also very important. Solutions should provide best-of-breed hardware, redundant firewalls, restrictive internet protocols, good authentication, and secure virtual private network (VPN) lines between the client and the service provider. With the multi-tenant architecture, core tenants of the security framework for hosting keep everything separate.

3. Scalability and flexibility

Having a hosted solution that can grow with your business is critical to long-range success and a long-term partnership with the service provider.

• The solution needs to be flexible and customizable to your business. The ability to configure and adjust communication channels, workflows, processes, knowledge and application access, desktop presentation, and configurations are all critical.

• A hosted solution should also offer a variety of deployment and financing options. Purchase a license and let the service provider manage the logistics and infrastructure for you, or start with a hosted version and confirm that it works for your business before investing in a licensed version. Or stay with the hosted model indefinitely.

4. Processing speed and availability

As hosted solutions physically reside outside the user’s network, companies should ensure that the service provider is able to meet processing-speed and availability requirements.

• The service provider should have a commitment to meet service-level agreements and the solution architecture and infrastructure to do so.

• To ensure redundancy, the service provider should have multiple data carriers.

• The internet service provider must provide adequate bandwidth, as well as meet latency and reliability requirements.

5. Feedback and measurement

Business intelligence functionality provides the insight necessary for managers to make informed business decisions. Thus, analytical functionality has transitioned from being a luxury to being a necessity for decision-makers in the enterprise.

• The hosted solution should provide real-time or near-real-time reporting that provides managers with immediate access to logical and intuitive reports based on the company’s operations.

• Flexibility in the controls of data manipulation is also important. Not only should the vendor offer standard reports, but it should also give managers the capability of creating custom reports that meet specific needs. Companies should look for online analytical processing (OLAP) capabilities that allow business users to flexibly manipulate or “slice and dice” operational data, using familiar business terms, in order to provide analytical insight.

If you fully investigate these five areas, you should succeed in implementing a solid software solution for your unique customer service needs.

This article is an excerpt from the white paper “The Hosted Model: Simplifying Contact Center and Agent Desktop Solutions." To download the complete white paper, go to www.cincom.com/hostedmodel

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An Outlook - Call Centre Software Market

The market for call centre software is only expanding. This because companies realize that keeping in constant contact with customers will help them enjoy a steady growth. According to the Everest Research Institute, the market for contact centre outsourcing has grown rapidly to a US$55 billion opportunity. And if a Frost and Sullivan research is to be believed, the call centre outsourcing market is set to reach $27.5 billion in 2013, up from $20.7 billion in 2006. Business Insight opines that Indian Agents Positioning is projected to rise over the next five years, from just fewer than 180,000 in 2004 to nearly 365,000 by 2009.

Having mentioned such wonderful projections, the contact center projects are also likely to feel the impact of recent “temporary” recession. On the other hand, contact center technology remains the best lever for extracting more value from employees and make better use of customer data.

The need for innovation remains, and attempts are constantly on to extend the reach of customer contact and to make it more and more affordable. Few reports suggests that while service has been a key differentiator for a number of companies, how the organization manages and maintains its customer relationships will be of even more important if an organization is to remain solvent and competitive. Hence continuous and sustainable innovation would be required from technology provider.

The idea is not only to drive sales but also to evolve a lasting customer relationship that works for a longer duration with better results. It starts from getting the right calls to evolving the appropriate responses that are required to meet the client’s needs. It would be imperative for call centre to

• improve customer satisfaction levels, thus enabling companies to increase lifetime customer value;
• increase revenue generation by providing business users with the customer information necessary to make relevant offers to each customer; and
• enable companies to cut costs through advancements in operational efficiency.

Contact center and communications technology vendors are well placed to assist organizations in building the customer-centric enterprise. Traditional contact center outsourcing markets are maturing in their adoption of these services. However, newer industries like retail, manufacturing, power, etc appear poised to engage these technologies like never before. According to few reports the largest single emerging vertical investor in outsourcing services through 2012 will be the travel and hospitality sector with next largest portion to be energies and utilities. Hence there might be temporary slower rate of growth however I do see the future promising, provided organization can bring value to its customer and its customer’s customer.

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Gartner’s Seven Initiatives to Improve Customer Experience

According to a recent worldwide survey by Gartner Executive Programmes (EXP), Targeting, attracting, and retaining new customers remains a top priority for chief information officers (CIOs) in 2008.

To this cause, Gartner outlines seven types of organizational initiatives to boost customer loyalty and satisfaction:

1. Act on feedback, deploy changes and communicate actions to employees and customers - View every customer interaction as an opportunity to deliver brand values.  Standardize on one business feedback management tool across the organization, for all communication channels.
2. Design processes from the outside in - Most process redesign focuses on improving operational efficiencies rather than to improve the customer experience. Yet with every customer interaction, there is at least one "moment of truth" that can disproportionately positively or negatively affect the customer experience.  "Organizations must fix one problem at a time and shouldn’t try to fix all broken processes simultaneously. The best organizations just focus on the worst two or three," says Ed Thompson, research vice-president at Gartner.
3. Act as one organization to ensure consistency – Since customers often interact with many individuals throughout your company, it’s important to ensure that information captured in one interaction is not forgotten in the next channel.
4. Be open - Organizations that want to improve the customer experience often become more open. This could mean offering more channels or extending hours but it can mean much more.  For example, establishing an online community can be one of the most powerful and influential tools for marketing.  Gartner recommends that open organization should follow three tenets:
   • be transparent and clear
   • be open-minded
   • be inclusive
5. Personalize products and experiences - Some personalization options are simple, such as a web site that enables customers to monogram products, while others are more complex, such as tailoring and personal pricing.  However, companies need to consider additional complexity and costs when considering personalization.  Makes sure you evaluate these costs against the sales benefits and longer-term customer experience.
6. Alter attitudes and employee behavior - Employees’ actions are often the most powerful improvements in a customer’s experience. Executive mystery-shopper programs and hands-on manager involvement during peak-demand periods help to educate company leaders about what the average customer and employee are experiencing.  Gartner outlines three primary ways to alter employee behavior:
   • recruit the right types of employees
   • ensure standards such as policies, procedures and governance structures
   • create training programs and incentives that can modify employee behavior patterns
7. Design the complete customer experience - Many organizations have no plan or design for the customer experience.  The experience is experience is unplanned and accidental in its execution -- it “just happens”.  Companies with a focus on selling experiences, such as in the entertainment, education and travel industries, focus on designing experiences ... the brand is an expression of a product or company’s reputation built up over many years. Today, brands increasingly are used as part of marketing communications to create a high-level expectation or promise of a particular quality or customer experience.

By Randy Saunders, Perfect CEM

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How to Be a Customer Experience Standout

It’s no coincidence that a number of the companies delivering an unmatched customer experience are among the newest. Relative newcomers such as Amazon and Prudential’s youth-leaning Egg brand in Britain have been able to start from ground zero with modern technology and no institutional legacies. These companies know very clearly who they are and who they are trying to serve, and clearly communicate that both to the marketplace and to their own employees.

“Building that brand platform means articulating a promise to customers that makes very evident what they can expect from you, and why they should come to you,” says customer experience expert Shaun Smith of Shaun Smith + co (www.shaunsmithco.com.) But building a customer experience around safe objectives or simply doing business the way it has always been done is unlikely to score points and create lasting value. Aggressive goals and unique offerings will differentiate you and create memorable experiences. Amazon nearly went bust trying to source one million titles – but Amazon wanted to be the place where you could get any book. It was a proposition that could be communicated to the marketplace, and it became a successful one.

In the contact center, that means doing more than simply meeting last year’s service levels or attaining an industry average. It means creating a distinctive experience the customer cannot duplicate anywhere else. “If your processes adopt a cookie-cutter approach and people are forced to adhere to a system, it takes away any of the personality and personalization there could be,” Smith says. That is where so many companies shortchange the customer experience by tying it to conventional wisdom “best practices,” which place too much emphasis on sameness and assumes customers want to be treated the same no matter where they may take their business. In fact, Smith believes that “in the absence of a clearly articulated strategy, copying other companies’ best practices is bad practice.”

Rather than focusing energy on devising rigid processes and procedures, Smith advocates spending the lion’s share of research time on determining who your best customers are and identifying ways to create a captivating experience for them. “That’s not what most companies do – most organizations have a very loose understanding of their customers and what they’re after, but they have very tight control over the processes,” he says. “The very best brands – the ones who have the most enthusiastic customers – are very tight about who their customers are, what they value, and most importantly, what the brand promises. They can then afford to be looser about procedures, giving employees more freedom to deliver that promise in the best way for that particular customer. If you make it so cookie-cutter that you reduce it to a mechanistic experience for customer and employee both, it leads to turnover – you create the problem you were trying to avoid.”

Customers take notice when they receive an experience that is clearly not delivered by the book. Smith cites a service interaction between smoothie-maker Innocent Drinks and a customer whose discarded bottle fermented in a trash can and exploded all over his office cubicle. Any responsible company could have simply sent him a free coupon. A curmudgeonly company could have simply cited that its drinks are meant to be kept cold and that fermentation is an obvious side effect. Innocent not only responded with a case of free drinks, but sent the customer a personalized message chastising his “very badly behaved smoothie for re-decorating his office,” putting a smile on a regrettable situation and creating a memorable customer experience. This raises another important issue and that is tone of voice. The best brands have a tone of voice that they use to communicate to customers in a way that is also differentiated. Google has one; so do Apple, The Geek Squad, and Southwest – and they are all different. Unless the call center reflects that tone of voice, you might just as well outsource it and trust the experience to luck.

Performance metrics can be used to determine which agents are best delivering your brand message. Coordinated desktop applications also make it possible for agents to take the best possible action to resolve each customer encounter, in a way that can be tracked and executed on by the rest of the organization. Put simply, there’s no point in having aggressive agents willing to do anything to get the job done if they cannot clearly record the results of a call or ensure that it is acted upon through immediate communication with all responsible parties throughout the entire organization.

Note that creating a sublime customer experience expressly does not mean that you must execute on each and every dimension at a higher service or satisfaction rating than your competitors. “If Southwest Airlines were to do a customer service survey, they might find that to improve Southwest, they should offer food and advance seating, and transfer baggage. But if they did all of that, they would go out of business or at the very least cease to create a great customer experience for their most profitable customers!” Smith says. “For Southwest customers, what’s of value to them are the speed, frequency, and low cost of service.” It is a powerful reminder that satisfaction ratings and customer experience are not necessarily directly correlated. A superior experience need not score a perfect 10 in all avenues of performance if those attributes are of lower importance to the target customers – but you had better be scoring 10 on those that are. The proper technology helps to identify and consistently measure the key customer-centric metrics.

This article is an excerpt from the white paper “Customer Experience Happens in the Contact Center, With Insights From Shaun Smith." Go to www.cincom.com/shaunsmith to download the complete white paper or to view a webcast titled "See, Feel, Think, Do - Creating Breakthrough Ideas to Deliver the Perfect Customer Experience," in which Shaun Smith presents a lively discussion on how to build great customer experiences.

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Successful Customer Experience Really Does Happen in the Contact Center

Customer experience, and by extension the ongoing business relationship with any customer, lives and dies at the point of contact. All the glossy advertising in the world cannot compensate for a consistently weak experience. “Surveys find that only 26 percent of a purchase decision is influenced by advertising. By far the factors more frequently cited are personal experience and referrals,” says customer experience expert Shaun Smith of Shaun Smith + co, former Head of Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing Training for British Airways and more recently, VP of Customer Experience for the Forum Corporation.

Ideally, advertising serves to establish a promise and an expectation for a unique and appealing customer experience, which is then confirmed and reinforced every single time the customer touches the organization. That puts the contact center on the hook, yet uniquely placed, to sustain the customer experience regardless of changes elsewhere in the organization.

The best customer experiences are delivered by companies that have so deeply embedded their brand message and customer priorities in their DNA that each and every agent can present the best the company has to offer. They create self-sustaining customer communities that are so focused on their interaction with each other that they m

ay even forgive the occasional mishap, and see it as an opportunity to actively engage with the company and make improvements because they believe their patronage is truly valued.

No Barriers – Customer Experience Permeates

Achieving that goal requires a customer-service commitment that completely denies the existence of barriers. The customer experience will surely break down if the different communities that make up an organization do not understand the role they must play to build and maintain it. This means paying more than lip service to the concept of customer centricity – it requires aligning the internal organizations that provide the “care and feeding” of customers to achieve the same goal – building and maintaining the environment that provides the right service to the right customers and creates value for those customers they cannot get anywhere else. “Really strong brands have marketing, customer service, and human resources all working as one around a common agenda, which is the customer experience,” Smith says.

Marketing’s contribution is the articulation and refinement of the brand promise, using advertising and outreach to communicate the virtues of doing business with your company and setting it apart from competitors and pretenders. The customer service organization must be prepared, on a monthly, daily, weekly, and hourly basis, to deliver on that promise to customers, with the right training, systems, and most importantly, management support to make the right decisions by each and every caller.

Human Resource’s role in this process cannot be overlooked. Look at the global market for customer-service personnel as an opportunity, rather than a negative. HR should focus on bringing people into the organization that will be a natural fit for the customer experience, who can believe in the company’s brand mission, and who will use every tool and opportunity at their disposal to preserve that experience whenever possible.

Technology can help. A unified desktop that provides a 360-degree of the customer enables every person with the entire organization to share the same common view of all customer experiences. Marketing, Human Resources, Finance, the Executive Suite, and so on, can all share a common view and extract exactly the insight to help the organization support and deliver the promises made or requests extended.

Summary

The contact center’s role in a customer experience management strategy cannot be underestimated. Consumers perceive that a company’s ability to respond to a problem or request has a higher influence on an excellent experience than any other attribute, as shown in Figure 1. That puts the contact center ever-more front and center in creating that experience – consistently, intentionally, but in a manner that is differentiated and adds value.

Your customer experience can never be better than the people you place on the end of every telephone call, e-mail, or web chat, and the quality of the technology they rely on. Only they have the unique opportunity to strengthen your relationships every time a customer reaches out, and that can only happen if they are given the tools and trust to make every contact the right contact. “It is about having people who like people, who have personalities, and are willing to engage with customers and get beyond the form-filling,” Smith says. “You need a working environment where people are naturally curious and interested in doing business with your customers – not where they are driven by management to pick up the phone within three rings every time.”

This article is an excerpt from the white paper “Customer Experience Happens in the Contact Center, With Insights From Shaun Smith." Go to www.cincom.com/shaunsmith to download the complete white paper or to view a webcast titled "See, Feel, Think, Do - Creating Breakthrough Ideas to Deliver the Perfect Customer Experience," in which Shaun Smith presents a lively discussion on how to build great customer experiences.

Technorati Tags: Customer Experince,CRM,Contact Centre

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