CRM in Call Centre and Customer Care

Call center customer relationship management (CRM) refers to a software tool that call center agents use to enhance the customer experience and increase efficiency. Call center CRM systems store records about customers, such as account information and contact history. Because they store history, they may be viewed as a case management tool. Agents use the information in CRM systems to personalize customer contacts and understand a customer’s history with the organization.

The call centre industry is a relatively new phenomenon. As many organisations are now providing customer service and support via call centres, due to the lower cost of operating, issues addressing the service quality are being raised. Call centres do not exist for the customer to physically interact with, apart from via the telephone, and are in effect virtual organizations. The nature of the service encounter between the call centre and customer is predominantly undertaken using enabling technology; the conventional speech telephone. Few organisations today really know who among their customers are the ones to focus on Customers are not created equal, yet the systems and services provided by many organisations seem to make exactly this assumption.

Call center CRM applications become more powerful in the contact center when integrated with call center technology. This allows, for example, a CRM screen to automatically pop up for the agent when a call is sent to them. This improves efficiency and allows the agent to focus less on data entry and more on helping customers with their issues. Other possible features of integration include automatically adding contact records (from multiple channels) to the CRM system and producing tie backs to call recordings so they can be listened to from within the call center CRM application.

The proliferation of cloud technology has made integration between call center CRM applications and call center software much easier than it was in the past. Companies such as SalesForce offer cloud-based CRM solutions that integrate seamlessly and painlessly with call center technology, such as NICE inContact CXone. Integration is key to driving customer experience success in the contact center.

Omnichannel Routing: routing and interaction management. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.

Automation & Artificial Intelligence (AI): Leading-edge, intuitive technology. It provides self-service, agent-assisted and fully automated alerts and actions.

Open Cloud Foundation: Enables rapid innovation with an extensible enterprise-grade platform that scales securely, deploys quickly and serves customers of all sizes globally. We guarantee an industry-best 99.99% availability and offer easy customization through RESTful APIs and DEVone developer program.

Providing a high quality of service to all customers is simply not economically logical, especially when you really don’t know the individuals value to your company. CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a worthwhile endeavor to ensure good returns on investment. In a CRM call center, customers communicate in multiple ways that include phone, e-mail, Web chat, personal sales representative, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and a host of others. This paper reviews the area in which CR functions could be outsourced, legal issues affecting enterprise customers for call center operations, new role of BPO and using BPO successfully in Customer Relationship Management.

CRM call centers help companies realign their entire organization around customers. And thus, is a strategic business initiative. Sales, Marketing and Service as well as other groups are connected and coordinated through the CRM applications. Before a call is made to the customer, all recent activity for that customer should reviewed to be informed of recent events. Then a sales strategy needs to plan based upon observed opportunities. The use of CRM software in the call center allows the assignment of a value to each customer if the culture supports that philosophy. With that feature, one can choose how to interact with that customer.

CRM helps the company identify most valuable customers and understanding their lifetime values. Using CRM, the call centers design the organization systems and service to best meet the needs of customers and maximize their value. CRM is intended for long-term relationship building. Besides capturing the different forms of customer interaction, CRM allows you to capture and store all available customer information in the central history database. This allows agents the ability to pull up a customer’s entire history while the two interact. Communication and service are more effective and efficient. Most CRM products also track trends in purchasing and customer feedback.

Outsourcing CRM Function

Call centers connect your enterprise, its goodwill and operations, to your prospects and customers and, if you wish, even influencers of consumer behavior. Any high-volume consumer industry can benefit by outsourcing call center functions. These might include, for example:

• Health care
• Automotive
• Retailing
• Services to the household, such as oil and gas deliveries, electrical utilities and telecom providers
• Consumer electronics
• Wireless communications
• Financial services, including banking and brokerage
• Insurance
• Travel and hospitality
• Media

Scope of Services

Since a call center can deliver any type of services that are capable of being done by telephone, enterprise customers need to classify the possible scope of services. This classification will suggest the key parameters for defining and achieving the intended goals of the call center. The following list is only an indication of some basic classes of outsourced call center services.

Customer Service and Support: This type of service can be as simple as advising your customer about the information he needs from your data base, such as account balance, unpaid amounts, deadlines and credit balances. Or customer service can involve a complex decision tree involving a script that you prepare to determine your customer’s needs, complete an application or request for change of information, and execute your customer’s orders.

Technical Support / Warranty: In helping your customers solve problems relating to your products or services, you want to be able to resolve all problems in the first call. Achieving high first-call resolution rates with lower per-call handle times can make a significant cost difference. To some degree, you remain responsible for success because of the way in which you plan the interaction based on manuals, scripts and decision trees. Technical support (or “telephone help desk”) can provide invaluable in retaining customer loyalty and avoiding costly product returns or service cancellations.

Sales, Bookings (travel reservations) and Customer Retention: Your telesales department needs to convert inquiries into sales, and to retain customers upon expiration of subscriptions or upon other termination events in your customer relationship. Telesales are useful both at the beginning and the end of your customer relationship life cycle. As a tool for proactive outreach, customer retention programs can help sustain your bottom line.

Marketing Surveys and Research: Outbound calling can identify potential customers, identify an existing customer’s interest in possible new products or services from your company and conduct inquiries about consumer preferences as to pricing and features of existing and new products. This can help your market positioning, promotional campaigns, product design, pricing and sales approaches. Outbound calling can also be used to clean up duplicates or stale information in your “old” databases, validate existing information, for “data base scrubbing.”