ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008 - (Page 40)

EXPERT’S ANGLE Becoming Strategic: Using Customer Contact Analytics to Empower the Contact Center’s Role BY GREG BORTON How to leverage the strategic role of your customer Customer contact analytics — capturing a wide range of valuable data through customer contacts — provides contact centers with a foundation to continue aggressively growing and evolving their corporate role by establishing binding relationships with other major departments. Not only that, if incorporated thoroughly into day-to-day business processes, productivity gains will more than justify the required investment and operating costs. Contact center management teams should examine the value of contact analytics, not just in terms of narrowly focused productivity gains, but as an important component in evolving the strategic value of their corporate role. This is not an opportunity to be lost. Twenty years ago, contact centers barely existed — then, they were many small islands scattered around a company, basically each department answering its own customer calls. Few companies knew how many of these islands there were. Some had 800 numbers, many didn’t. Almost none had automatic call distribution systems. Thankfully, we are no longer using the customer service model that came out in the late 1980s — giving customers lists of 40 or more 800 numbers so they could reach different departments. Companies eventually settled on a revolutionary strategy: Provide customers with a single 800 number and a few types of multiskilled agents. What we now take for granticmi’s insight contact center by supporting key areas with high value marketing and operations information. ed — one service center infrastructure handling all customer contact responsibilities — grew quickly in the ‘90s, encompassing sales, support and churn management. It has required immense investment, effort and cultural change to accomplish these simple-sounding goals. Throughout this evolution, contact centers have become more important to their corporations and increasingly involved in their financial success. The extremes are companies that have been designed and founded to take advantage of contact centers as the core of their entire business. They use the Web, B2B or B2C marketing, TV and/or radio advertisements to drive prospects to their centers. The agents handle all the sales, customer support and churn management. Sixty percent to 70 percent of their personnel are agents. The CEO is often on the floor. These companies are exemplified, for instance, by retail, mortgage, some credit card and other specialized financial service companies. In many traditional industries, companies have developed a loose relationship between their direct salesforce — consisting of various combinations of retail stores, branch offices or a face-to-face direct salesforce — and the contact center for acquiring new customers. The typical model is that, after the initial sale, the contact centers handle some of the customer support and churn issues. For walkin support issues, representatives at branch offices refer customers to the contact center or call the contact center with the customer. Alternately, the contact center can refer customers to the branch office or retail store. Upsell and cross-sell strategies may be scattered across the various functions. A previous article, “The Coming of Age of Customer Contact Analytics” (Customer Management Insight, November 2007), presented a vision of the future role of customer contact analytics. The article described leading-edge experi- Customer Contact Analytics refers to the practice of capturing a wide range of highly select data about operations, marketing research, competitive mention and customer opinions during customers’ contacts with a company across multimedia types and touchpoints. Using technologies such as speech and text analytics, customer contact analytics provides near-real-time views of a company’s market position and strength, competitive activities and customer behavior via dashboards and reports | JANUARY 2008 www.icmi.com 40 http://cmisight.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=102&Itemid=96 http://www.icmi.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008 Contents Customer Care Technologies Ad Index Editor's Page Contact Center Spotlight People: Prehire Tests In The Center Strategy: Video Contact Centers Show Preview Operations: Knowledge Management Industry Research Contact Centers Face Today's Realities: A Case for Consolidation 2.0 Is Your Agent Training Process Evolving with the Role? The Key to Innovation Is Maintaining Your Strengths Becoming Strategic: Using Customer Contact Analytics to Empower the Contact Center's Role

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008

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