Datacentre is a term that has been much misunderstood over the years. Is it the Comm’s Room or Server Room? Is it a purpose built building or, as technology providers now refer to the concept of “Virtual Datacentres”, is it the hardware appliance real estate i.e. servers, network & storage?

Prioritising CRM Mechanics

Businesses have realised that efficiently managing existing customer relationships is a low-cost input for cost-effective growth. Clearly, the closer the company is to its own customers, the better it is for the company to stay afloat in a down economy.

What tends to happen in a near recession market is competitive firms get more competitive (i.e. manage their customer relationships more aggressively) and the least competitive ones phase out.

As a result, there is a shakeout that throws up a pool of 'unserviced' or poorly serviced/unattended customers who are most likely to be 'switchers.' This presents an enormous opportunity for companies who have the necessary wherewithal and the operational scalability to efficiently manage these 'floating' customers.

These companies then have to make the right investment related decisions on CRM applications and packages while positioning themselves accordingly in the marketplace.

Market barometers indicate that, even as companies are downscaling their overall capital expenditure, most firms are still very keen to allocate funds to CRM related activities.

What has changed is

• the priority and phased incremental spending on CRM related applications and
• the added pressure on CRM return on investment.

This has been largely due to the increased maturity level of clients and the prevalent economic scenario. Expectedly, in a downturn, the focus of capital spending is generally in areas that are measurable in the short-term and ensures core revenue streams.

Therefore, it becomes important for companies to realise that, in contrast to other management tools and applications that have an implicit linkage to business process and systems, CRM tools have a direct and an incremental effect on businesses with short-term measurable parameters and long-term payoffs.

It is often observed that the companies that invest in CRM programs know what they want because they tend to understand that business has to continue as usual and accordingly realign their processes and systems to the changed scenario.

The emerging trends in CRM indicate that CRM applications are straddling across business functions to

• retain,
• capture and
• capitalise on customer data

Core to this is integrating all aspects of business processes and systems by keeping the customer as the core.

According to an IDC report, CRM projects are no longer viewed as stand-alone implementations but are now being increasingly pursued in context of larger business objectives and core strategic agendas.

Corporations that realise the true value of their customers in a downturn are the ones that will be better equipped to tide over the slump and jump start, consolidate and thrive again.

On the CRM side, anything that builds your business intelligence database for clients with whom you expect to have a long-term relationship will have great returns.

It will allow you to:

• build history into future calls,
• identify the best times to reach certain consumers,
• gauge appetites for cross-sells and
• help you integrate a full multimedia campaign.

To summarise, since about 55 to 65 percent of a call center's cost is in operations, the first choice should be to make sure you are utilising operating resources as efficiently as possible. Then, if you have a customer base with which you expect to have a long-term relationship, the real ROI comes from business intelligence and anything that helps you build lasting client connections.

Voice portals and self-service solutions.

Self-service tools, when implemented correctly, make the best use of agent resources by automating routine portions of an interaction, like providing account balances or confirming appointments, and seamlessly transferring the call to an agent for more complex portions.

Automating routine transactions is critical to efficiently handling more calls. Additionally, voice self-service is a valuable solution for customers that call regarding sensitive, private issues that they would not want to share with an agent, such as high debt information, credit card numbers, repossession or foreclosure status.

This technology is essential in a slow economy because it allows contact centers to do more with less. However, the key to the success of this technology is to ensure it is designed to give customers the information they need, not prevent them from talking to agents.

Predictive dialers.

Advanced outbound dialer technology is another way for contact centers to improve efficiency, which is particularly important for sales and collections contact centers during a slowing economy.

Solutions that offers campaign development tools, call table filters, predictive dialing, call blending, browser-based agent desktop, real-time statistics and historical and custom reporting can maximize the number of calls handled and ensure that agents reach customers at the right time to increase debt collection and to improve sales rates. This enables companies to increase revenue and reduce operating costs in the contact center.

Unified Communications.

More companies are seeing the value of a unified communications strategy that incorporates the contact center, and are realizing that UC offers a unique opportunity to help improve first-time call resolution and contact center efficiency.

By combining contact center applications with UC technologies contact center agents can shorten problem-resolution cycles, answer customer inquiries quickly and more effectively up-sell services and/or products to prospective customers because they're able to identify subject matter experts more quickly and easily.

Utilising standards-based and unified contact center solutions enables this easy interoperability with presence engines and other UC tools. This is another example of how contact centers can improve processes and efficiencies to save money and maximize agents' times and improve overall customer loyalty which is extremely important during a slow economy.

In a slowing economy, it is extremely critical for a company to be able to retain its existing customers. But in order to meet the needs and expectations of your customers, you must have a means of first understanding what those needs and expectations are.

This is where speech analytics, and more specifically multichannel interaction analysis, can be of utmost benefit to the entire business, not just in the contact center. By automatically mining the conceptual and contextual meaning of recorded and in-progress customer interactions, the business can uncover customer insight to customer service via a variety of touch points - from sales and marketing to customer support and business operations. Only when this information is known can the business truly understand its customers and ensure they stay loyal.