Work Force Management: Business Impact

If you have been following the series of my articles on the business of running a successful business, then you have hopefully understood the power of the 'customer'. Confident that you have done so, I further take the poetic license of taking a cue from Abe Lincoln, believing that: "..the thought - business of the customers, by the customers, for the customers - shall never perish from your mind".

If you subscribe to the above tenet, then your Customer Interaction MUST be an integral part of your business, so much so that Customer Interactions must be core to your business.

What has Work Force Management (WFM) got to do with this belief? A great deal, as a matter of fact. Because you believe in making the customer your advocate, and you believe that customer is the key to your success, and you believe that Customer Interactions are core to your business, then you have definitely been putting resources to ensure the core of your business is delivering on, and exceeding, the expectations.

However, if the business of managing the resources is not done appropriately, then there is a risk you are running. Either the resources might be too many, or they might be too few. The latter indicates you are deviating from the Abe Lincoln tenet (under poetic license - of course..); while the former is a disservice to your investors - another key stakeholder community.

To make the matters more complex, your contact center managers have to keep striking this balance every half-hour of the day, for every day of the week, for every week of the month, for every month of the year.. And without the proper tools at their command, try hard as they might, they are constantly making errors in this balancing act, errors that keep swinging your business through the extremes of customer disservice and investor disservice.

WFM is that magic platform that you can implant beneath your wonderful customer interaction management team, to take their performance, and with it your business, to new heights.

Ever heard of the principle of "the power of one"? If your customer service level is down in the dumps, you can substantially improve it by just adding one more Agent/CSR/Phone Banking Officer/.... (For a related discussion on the underlying Erlang formula, refer Convincing an Erlang Non-Believer). Of course the customer interaction team cannot produce that 'one' resource - at the critical juncture - out of thin air. It has to be planned in advance.

That is the power that a good WFM suite will bring into your business equation. By accurately forecasting the interactions by half-hourly intervals (based on past data), and by accurately determining exactly how many Agents/CSRs/PBOs.. are required (not too many, not too little), WFM creates a schedule of the available resources, and later tracks how those resources adhere to their assigned schedule - so that you first achieve, and then systematically keep improving on this 'customer-investor' balancing act.

And WFM will be but a one time investment, with some incremental additions basis future resource growth (a minor detail because WFM platforms are licensed on number of resources you have). But consider this investment against the constant unintentional errors your stressed and overworked customer interaction team is committing, and will keep on committing, unless you intervene with a suitable remedy.

Can you win any game whilst you continue to make unforced errors? Is it worth taking the risk of not having WFM? Think about WFM as your next business investment.

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What exactly is CRM?

I was in a seminar yesterday, and some offline discussions gravitated towards the subject of CRM. The general opinion was that CRM is a very costly software, and is generally overhyped to the point of being considered as a 'fashion statement' in the technology world.

One Vice President of Customer Services was particularly vociferous on the 'glamor' angle, as she had a firm belief that 'someone from IT' convinced the CEO to sign the budget saying 'our contact center MUST have CRM, because our major competitor does'.

She was disillusioned with the 'stuff' because it did not do a single thing to make her job any easier. In fact, she complained, the overly complicated screens, and the slowness of the system was actually impeding the agents' job, increasing their handle time, and generally running a havoc with customer satisfaction!

That was the cue for me to step in and try to bring some sense in the discussions. I asked them what did they mean by CRM? All the answers indicated in only one direction - CRM that is visible to us, CRM that is of the Siebel/Oracle/SAP variety, CRM that resides on the user desktop..

But I did not elicit many responses when I asked my next favorite question - Why do you require CRM? The top reason I left them looking at each other was this - they did not know what exactly is CRM.

As a matter of fact every business requires CRM. Why? All Businesses have customers, they also have relationships with their customers, and I believe they also want to manage those relationships. So by definition, they require a 'Customer Relationship Management'. But I haven't even told you yet what this 'Customer Relationship Management' IS. Which brings me to the core of the debate. Anything - a software, a technology, a tool, a method, an idea, a process - that helps the business to manage the customer relationships better, IS CRM. But then which software, technology or tool is CRM?

Metagroup has put a structure around CRM software, by categorizing CRM into broadly three areas - Collaborative, Operational, and Analytical.

Collaborative CRM is meant to deal with all the interactions you have with your customers. Customers call you through phone, send you an email, send you a fax, launch webchat sessions by clicking the 'live help' on your website, and increasingly they also use SMS (Short Message Service). Systems that allow you to manage these interactions and collaborate with your customers, are 'Collaborative CRM'. Some of the Collaborative CRM providers are - Avaya, Genesys, Nortel etc. However, people in general (and surprisingly, even experts) consider these excellent companies as 'mere' Contact Center providers. In fact, the core foundation of your CRM strategy actually begins with Collaborative CRM. No one agrees with me more vehemently than the above VP of Customer Services.

Operational CRM - the visible CRM that I referred to earlier - helps you deal with customer transactions. Agents create requests on customers' behalf (when they contact through - you guessed right - Collaborative CRM), these requests are passed through workflows so that other departments in the organization fulfill those requests, and appropriately update the system.
If you notice, the Operational CRM does NOT contain (nor tell you) everything about the customer relationship. If a customer contacts the contact center, but this contact does not result in a transaction created in the Operational CRM, then the SAP/Oracle/Siebel/.... does not know anything about this contact, this interaction, because it does not track it, and the agent did not work on it. Example of such a situation:

• Assume that I call in to my Bank's contact center and get my savings account balance - either through their IVR, or an agent looks it up (maybe from the Operational CRM screen in front of her that automatically populated through CRM-CTI integration, when my call was delivered to her). Then the Collaborative CRM plugs this interaction in its database (Rajas called again today), whereas the Operational CRM does not track this interaction - this facet of the relationship.

Analytical CRM is genearlly and carelessly labeled 'MIS' by most people. Actually this is the CRM that generates the business intelligence for you. It may be part of your Operational CRM package, or the Collaborative CRM platform, or it may be a separate Business Intelligence software suite altogether. It all depends on why do you want to do analytics, what is the information you are looking out for, and what are the actions you will take once you get the information. For example:-

• If you have SAP as Operational CRM, and wish to generate reports & trends on transactional data captured therein, you would choose SAP Business Warehouse (Analytics as a part of Operational CRM).
• If you have Avaya Collaborative CRM solution, and need to know details on Customer Interactions and analyze KPIs like Service Level, Agent statistics etc. then your money should go in Avaya Call Management System or Avaya Operational Analyst (Analytics as a part of Collaborative CRM).
• When you want a more powerful solution that should combine data from multiple sources, generate multi-dimension analysis to understand complexities viz., which Customers are most likely to Churn, then you must know about their transaction details, as well as their interaction details and then do predictive analytics using Business rules that you set - and consequently you will invest in solutions like Cognos, Business Objects etc.

And lastly, but most importantly, CRM is a Strategy, and CRM software just an enabler. The three categories of CRM solutions (as above) in any combination will only help if the Strategy is right. Which means you must know WHY do you need those solutions in the first place. I have seen very efficient and effective businesses, working with minimal 'CRM' (in its popular sense). Sure, these effective businesses can further improve their Customers' Experience multi-fold as they evolve in their CRM journey, by deploying the Operational and Analytical CRM pieces, with full awareness as to WHY they are doing what they are doing.

But a good Customer Experience is NOT guaranteed by merely purchasing the CRM elements. Ask the VP of Customer Service, if you think otherwise.

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This article appeared on the CRM - Customer Relationship Management site - A repository of the latest CRM news, articles and resources.

Proactively manage Customer Churn - in Real Time

They say Change is the only constant in life. Having been reduced to a cliche (being quoted by every other guy), it is still an eternal truth. Hence, it is but natural that all businesses should expect their Customers to also look for change, and consequently, Customer Churn should be an equally prevalent truth that you cannot wish away.

True. But the question is - how much is tolerable? What can your organization do to slow down the churn rate? What is customer churn doing to your business? Are you even aware of exactly what is your Customer Churn rate?

Unfortunately, the above questions - though most critical from a business standpoint - go unanswered in most business situations. If you want to do something about retaining your customers, thereby augmenting your growth journey of acquiring new ones, then its time you took a hard look at the numbers applicable to your business.

Managing Churn traditionally:
Having said that, I still come across a few organizations who are doing precisely that. They have sophisticated systems, data warehouses and business intelligence tools that not only tell them broadly how are they doing on customer retention front; but also slice and dice the numbers and generate 'customers most likely to churn' report. This way the business leaders expect to take preventive steps and retain those 'high risk' customers.

Obviously this step comes at a much later stage in your business evolution - the earlier steps being customer identification, segmentation, customer need categorization, customer satisfaction indices, developing parameters & metrics to generate trends on satisfaction, and only then building the early warning systems that signal the 'likelihood' of customers at risk, should the appropriate trends show a deterioriating business relationship in one or more dimensions.

Managing Churn dynamically:
However, given the rapidity with which the scenarios are changing; focused activities by competitors to grab your share of the pie; and the quantum leap in the enormous number of customer transactions that take a phenomenal time if bulk processed for all customers; the frequency of generating the 'at risk' report usually lags behind and the opportunity to take structured preventive steps gives way to the 'fire fighting mode' of saving customer situations.

This is where the pioneers in their respective industries have begun to move towards 'real time predictive analytics'; solutions that allow most appropriate handling of customer interactions taking into consideration the 'propensity to churn factor' right there, in real time, for one interaction at a time.

Say I am a frequent flier of ABC Airlines, and have not flown with them for more than a month, but I have called in a couple of times in the period to enquire about schedules & fares, and I have still failed to make any bookings; then ABC Airlines MUST treat me a bit differently and innovatively when I call in the next time, in 'real time'. And they will be able to do so if they invest in the right analytical tools. Technically similar to the cross-sell / up-sell routine, the power of retaining me in real time will give significantly higher returns to the company's bottom line.

This will be much more powerful than sending out an email 'post haste', after two months, politely pointing out that of late they did not have the opportunity to welcome me aboard.

And if they are able to leverage the predictive analytics in real time, then they would have experienced the power of the change axiom - I would not be an 'at risk' customer, for a change !!

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Customers have choices

We live in the Information era. Information is power, Internet abounds, almost everybody knows what Google is (ever tried finding out in 1998 how many people had an inkling?).

From information emanate choices. You have choices, I have choices, businesses have choices and so do their customers. Yet whilst businesses are busy prioritizing their choices of technologies, suppliers, markets & strategies to create opportunities (which is good for them), they are being stingy when it comes to giving choices... choices to their customers.

Customers cannot choose whether they will call, email, webchat with, or SMS the business, its usually the jurisdiction of the business to define how they allow customers to contact them. There are many companies who do include many of the above channels in their access strategy, but all these interactions from "siloed channels" are treated "as if" they are from different entities, even when the same customer contacts through different channels. So businesses are taking away the choice of the customer to remain as "their customer" - an individual entity - instead they reduce her to a bunch of unrelated interactions.

Customers cannot dictate the amount or effectiveness of self-service they wish to have, it is the business that determines how much and how helpful those systems will be. Self-service should reduce wait time for the customer, and not test their patience level with shabby touch-tone menus full of "absurd choices". Worse still are those companies who want to reduce the cost of serving customers and hence "force" them in the IVR - leaving them to perish there - without any option to zero out to a live agent. (Refer http://gethuman.com/ - that is a great attempt at dealing with this "Mr. Hyde" facet of the IVR, though I know as a consultant that the IVR can be an excellent Dr. Jekyll, as long as you are willing to let it be so)

Businesses do not ask the customers "tell us what you want". Their customer surveys are self-centered, rarely checking whether their access strategy is right. And when they do get excellent scores from their customers on other "we think these are critical" items, rarely do they raise the bar and go after fixing their customer access strategy.

Henry Ford was credited with saying that customers could have his Model T in any color they wanted as long as it was black. That was in a different era, and businesses just cannot afford to try and replicate this attitude any more.

In today's "connected world", if you are not giving your customers the power to choose how and when will they contact you, then you are not in the business of giving choices. Consequently there are great chances that your customers will still go ahead and exercise their choice - the choice of abandoning the business relationship.

With increasing awareness and competition, exercising this last choice is not going to be very difficult any more.

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Computer Telephony Integration for the Business

If you are a Business Leader, and the last one to get embroiled in complex technical terms like Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), then you better read the rest of this article to get your EUREKA!! (or A-HA, whichever you prefer)

The three words in CTI look so formidable - reeking of techical aspects. What have you got to do with Computers, Telephony or Integration (of the two)? You have the task cut out for you - run a successful business, which is profitable, and keep it growing - isn't it?

Till I was a mere technologist, I too believed that CTI is a reserved domain for technology people - out of bounds for you business folks. What would you understand anyway?

But as my outlook matured, I started getting involved in Call Center Operations discussions; and through those, eventually tried to understand your business needs. I started thinking like a Technocrat.

The first revelation that came to me - as I moved up the maturity curve - was the eternal untruth contained in the popular notion "CTI = Screen Pop". Ask 100 people in the call center industry - "what is CTI", and you will hear 90 of them laboring under the above misconception (that is if you are lucky. I have heard of unfortunate inquirers encountering 110 confused people when they asked 100).

As a matter of fact Screen Pop is the least intelligent thing that CTI does. It is capable of adding far higher "business value" to your call center. But then its a bit too much to expect technical folks to know the business needs - whilst the business folks are avoiding CTI like plague - and that is where CTI finds much of its undoing.

CTI (in addition to Screen Pop.. alright you techies, I heard you...) can:-
- route calls more intelligently using customer segmentation information
- enable diverse information to be put together (e.g: How frequently the customer called you, as well as sent you emails)
- do context sensitive routing (e.g: if a customer sent an email on a subject and called up within a given time window, then route the call to subject matter expert)
- enable your cross-sell / up-sell initiatives triggered in appropriate context
- allow appropriate scripts to make the agents more effective
- and much more... imagination is usually the limit, and unfounded fear of deployment costs normally deters the decision makers

So let me walk you business folks through a scenario. It is customary for businesses to send out tremendous amount of print mail, which you like to call as Direct Mailers. I will bet you that most of this paper finds the waste-basket sooner than you can say 'Jack Nicholson'.
The busier I am, the less likely is that I will even open one of those glossy papers floating about on my desk. And on the other hand, you are spending umpteen thousand dollars to create the flashy pieces, employ people or agencies to wrap them up, look up databases & print labels, stick them on, and bear the postage charges to mail them across. ...whoosh..

And when the intended audience is calling you day-in and day-out; you don't even spend one moment to catch their attention to tell them what you want to tell them...whoosh again..
Whoosh again... even if you are blasting out emails.. Instead of consigning it to my waste-basket, I will bury it in the "Trash Folder" if you are lucky (I might mark it as Spam if you are not), faster than you can say, . .. whatever..

Do the math yourself - does it work out for the 2-3-4% kind of response rates on the hundreds of thousands of dollars you spend on the expensive missives? A good CTI solution doing ALL of the above tasks I mentioned (and some more) will still probably cost lower, will be yours forever, be far quicker to roll out and operationalize, and will generate far greater than 2-3-4% kind of response rates. After all, the customers called you themselves didn't they? So there should be no problem 'catching their attention', should there be?

The above unfrequented business process - the uncharted territory - will not be a cake walk. It will take some thinking through, some technology investment, and professional help to develop and deploy the innovative solutions. But thats what consultants are for, to help you understand and conquer these issues.

Think about it! Smarter business leaders have figured out the art and science of it all.
And they are enjoying the immense returns - by considering the Contact Center as an integral part of the Business, not just a dump where complaining customers land up.

When are you deciding to make your Contact Center (and CTI) a part of your business?

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