Customer care can be compared to a vehicle. If so then customer  relationship management is analogous to the engine, routing to the transmission, differential, and axles, and customer interaction management to the wheels. If customer care is to run smoothly all of these components must be integrated so that they work together automatically and in response to driver actions.
Unfortunately the vehicle has not been running as well as it can be. There is poor integration at the routing or infrastructure level between voice and multichannel agents and between the CIM and CRM , reports Johan Jacobs, Gartner CRM eServices analyst.
There is also a lack of connectivity between knowledge management systems and customer interaction histories for self-service and live agent service. This often results in customers receiving inaccurate and sometimes contradictory information and agents asking callers to explain what they did in self service.
The price for this lack of integration from existing solutions is steep. Longer and unnecessary agent calls drive up expenses while firms risk losing revenues from annoyed customers. Jacobs estimates that to achieve effective contact center multichannel deployment, firms must pay up to 45 percent extra in consulting and custom application costs on top of the hardware and software license and standard installation expenses.
Adding to the hassles each new product comes with their own CIM databases. You end up with multiple databases across the suite making analytics and interaction management extremely difficult.
"If we lift the screen on some of the CRM systems' multichannel functionality out there it is actually very poor," says Jacobs. "The same goes for some of infrastructure vendors, some of whom still do not have chat/co-browse products while others do not have consolidated messaging for multichannel. There are only a few products out there that have an integrated multichannel suite to enable a true 360-degree view of the customers."
Chris Mills, general manager of Servion, sees faint signs that this integration could happen. This is being driven by savvy, top-echelon enterprises who realize customers' behavior is affected by their interaction experiences and are investing in projects that show consumer behavior, drive higher loyalty, and increased wallet share.
"The enlightened practitioners are now beginning to understand and believe that the power of each is enhanced by the other," says Mills. "For the simple reason that the only way a consumer experiences a vendor organization's CRM practice at the touch points is through the CIM layer. Once this understanding proliferates and acquires urgency we will see more and more intensity and effort being put into the integration." (continued...)
© 2009 Customer Inter@ction Solutions under contract with MarketWatch. All rights reserved.
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