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BR>inquiry. Providing this type of service not only increases customer satisfaction, but
also lowers a company’s customer support costs.
Second, companies need to ensure a seamless experience for customers across all
channels. For instance, if a customer is trying to place an order online and
encounters difficulties, the customer should be able to call a customer service
representative and pick up the transaction where it was left off on the Web. A
customer-centric organization will have this capability, while an organization that is
not customer-centric might ask the customer to begin the transaction over again
with the phone representative, wasting the customer’s time and the company’s
money.
Why CRM? The Business Case for Customer Relationship Management Page 8
Well-Defined Business Processes
Automating an ill-defined or inefficient business process will only accelerate the
pace at which an organization achieves poor results. A CRM strategy, therefore,
must focus on redesigning customer-facing processes based on the perspectives
and needs of the customer. Figure 2 lists several processes that should be examined
when developing CRM strategy:
Figure 2: Several processes should be examined when developing a CRM strategy.
Each of these processes needs to be examined—not in isolation, but in terms of
the way they are linked to other processes. Consider just three processes that are
often poorly defined in the development of a CRM strategy: lead management, call
routing, and service-ticket tracking.
Lead Management
Lead management is the process of generating and or identifying a lead, qualifying
that lead, and converting the lead into a sale. Within a multichannel system, leads
may come into an organization from any number of sources: field sales, the call
center, field service, a partner organization, or the Web. Given this complexity,
organizations must clearly determine which person or department is ultimately
responsible for closing leads, because this determines how leads should be routed.
The organization also needs to determine how to define a qualified lead. Without a
clear definition, leads of poor quality will be routed to the people responsible for
closing them, resulting in frustration and lost sales productivity.
Call Routing
Many businesses—especially those organized by line of business—have not defined
routing processes that can readily direct inbound callers to the most appropriate
response person. The negative results include delays, frustrated customers, and
abandoned calls. Therefore, before implementing CRM technology, organizations
need to define optimal routing processes. Ultimately, a customer should be able to
call into any point in the organization—from the front desk and the call center to
the technical services department—and be routed to the appropriate person
without being disconnected.
Why CRM? The Business Case for Customer Relationship Management Page 9
Service-Ticket Tracking
It is imperative that companies have clear business rules for managing inbound
service requests. These rules should define exactly how resources will be dispatched
to fix a customer’s problem and how status updates will be shared as the issue is
being addressed. In many organizations, call center representatives are unable to
track the progress of work being done by field technicians. This makes