Two-Way Dialog: Customer Input to CRM

How Can Companies Maximize the Effectiveness of CRM Systems?

Mar 29, 2009 Duane Sharp

A new approach to this marketing challenge gives customers control over a subset of information stored in CRM systems, enabling customers to provide input.

A customer-directed layer in an existing CRM system enables the system to provide the customer with important, account-specific information when, where, and for whatever reason the customer specifies.

This process further reinforces the development of one-to-one relationships with customers, a major objective of CRM. By adopting the one-to-one approach, the CRM system can deliver actionable response options tuned precisely to a customer profile and relating specifically to a company’s contact center infrastructure

Proactive Response

An additional benefit for the corporation in extending CRM systems to provide proactive outbound customer service and relevant inbound response options, is that unnecessary inbound calls will be reduced, customer satisfaction and revenue increased – without increasing staff.

When customers are forced to place a call or e-mail to a company about their account, they most likely have a problem with product or service. Providing an outbound CRM resource helps save customer’s time and effort, eliminating or reducing the voicemail syndrome that has become a facet of everyday life.

When a company proactively, or preemptively provides information that is relevant to and frequently requested by an individual customer, usually referred to as customer alerts -- monthly account balance, shipping status, itinerary changes, etc., – the company solidifies a positive, helpful image in the customer psyche. Customer surveys reflect the fact that consumers appreciate doing business with companies that provide personalized attention and service, particularly in a proactive mode.

In one independent survey of the alert process, the survey results found that although less than 10 percent of consumers polled had actually used alerts before, nearly 70 percent said they had signed up to receive proactive alerts if companies made the service available.

The Alert Platform

An alert platform is a concept to provide, as the name implies, an alerting mechanism for companies that enables customers to communicate with supplier companies about their products or services, for example, to place or change an order, to advise of problems, defects or other aspects of the supplier’s product or service. To provide adequate coverage of alert/response applications to the widest market, an alerting platform must support a broad range of communication media, including:

• High-quality voice via land-line telephone and cell phone
• Properly formatted text and interactive applications for e-mail, pager, Internet, fax, and wireless devices.

Proactive communications from companies to customers need to be through their existing preferred communication devices. Offering only one contact mode is not enough for the media-diverse and mobile customer base that is represented in today’s marketplace.

Varying Alert Formats

The power of the land-line telephone should not be neglected. Voice alerts that are governed by detailed customer preferences are a mandatory retirement. While use of wireless text devices and e-mail is rapidly accelerating, voice is and will be the dominant communications channel for delivering timely alerts that require immediate response and interactions with the business.

An alert formatted for voice delivery reaches the broadest audience and enables the business message to rise above the flood of e-mail. Voice formatting adds a human quality and time-sensitive value to a message. Voice alerts are also the most conducive to eliciting a customer response because of the familiarity and simplicity. Given the option, customers will select voice delivery for many of their alerts, and the responses associated with these alerts will be higher than any other media.

Although voice will serve the broadest customer base, many customers will insist on other media formats. With a platform that supports mixed media alert/response applications, a business may decide to include chat or call-me-now functionality as a feature of an outbound e-mail alert.

The business could decide that certain outbound voice alerts will offer the customer options linked to a variety of services. Some customers might prefer to communicate with the company via two-way messaging or wireless text messaging. An alert/response platform should fully support all of these scenarios and continue to evolve to support the latest consumer devices.

The copyright of the article Two-Way Dialog: Customer Input to CRM in Business Management is owned by Duane Sharp. Permission to republish Two-Way Dialog: Customer Input to CRM in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Two-way Customer Dialog

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