Email UsIntroducing - Structured CRM
By Carl Adkins, Managing Director, Infinity CCS
In my experience, contact centres seem to get themselves caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to the agent desktop.
Some elect to utilise their legacy transactional based systems, however these systems were neither designed for use in the contact centre, nor were they designed to focus on customer relationships. They normally lack a unified view of the customer, holistic contact history, or a means of tracking any customer contact activity.
The other route that has been taken by a lot of the major organisations is to implement a high-end CRM solution. All too often I have seen the pendulum swing far too much the other way with this approach. The CRM solution is designed and structured to manage customers and customer contact and enables organisations to do this well, however, it is often to the detriment of being able to service the customer?s transaction efficiently with call durations and costs increasing.
There is however, an alternative to both of these approaches, a middle ground that actually provides the best of both worlds ? Structured CRM.
Structured CRM is the new agent desktop. It focuses on managing interactions with customers rather than transactions or purely customer information. It enables structure to be placed on calls but at the same time empowers the agent and it provides a full view of the customer without having to relocate all information into one single system.
A structured CRM system allows you to define a set of screens, call flows and where necessary, call scripts for your agents. It acts as a front end to your existing transaction based systems, pulling data from a variety of places to present a single view of the customer and doing so in a timely manner.
Given the dynamic nature of contact centres, Structured CRM provides a far more flexible solution than traditional CRM or transactional systems. Call flows can be defined by supervisors and managers. There is no need for IT involvement; data and transaction based functions are leveraged from existing systems so there are no changes required to back-end systems and most certainly, no reinventing of wheels.
So, is it worth the investment. There are two factors to consider: first, a structured CRM system does not have to cost the earth. With the majority of functionality delivered out of the box and systems available as a pay-as-you-go model, it can be delivered for around ?25 per agent per month. In terms of pay-back, such systems are proven to deliver a minimum of 20% productivity gains through reducing call durations, cutting repeat calls, improving conversion rates and dramatically improving customer service.
So is Structured CRM new? No; it has been around for a long-time. Across our customers, we have over 5,000 agents using Infinity Agent Desktop, our Structured CRM solution; this is why we know about the advantages it delivers and the value it can return.
To find out more about Structured CRM and the Infinity Agent Desktop click here