Context of E-CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM), in its purest sense, describes the processes and applications used to manage customer dialogues at various touch points, including the call centre, the Web and via sales force. The evolution of CRM to enterprise-wide customer relationship management (eCRM) has added a layer of complexity onto an already diverse discipline.

With the proliferation of the Internet and advancements in touch point technologies, all customer dialogues now have the potential to add value to the total customer relationship through targeted messaging, product up-sell and loyalty infusion.

In fact, every interaction with a customer should be viewed as an opportunity to instill loyalty, learn more about the individual customer, and present the customer with information, products, and services that leverage the information gained from each of these dialogues.

However, the complexity of managing customer dialogues across touch points has increased exponentially. Customers have many more channels over which to transact than ever before. In fact, it is not at all unusual for a customer to have multiple interactions taking place in parallel over different channels. They may be a subscriber to a daily e-mail newsletter, do their purchases online, and use the inbound call centre to handle customer service issues. In addition, many customers who begin a dialogue over one channel may wish to continue that dialogue on a different channel. For example, if a customer is doing research on wireless rate plans on the Web, they may want to change their current plan via live interaction with a customer service representative.

Today's eCRM technologies have been very effective at managing interactions at a specific touch point. Call centres leverage new data retrieval and call scripting technologies; Web sites utilise the latest in content delivery tools to fill "slots" on Web pages; e-mail Masters use the latest in personalisation and HTML to produce personalised e-mails; Sales force automation (SFA) tools can now connect disparate sales forces together via wireless and mobile client/server systems. Each system is built with a strong technology layer that utilizes databases, rules engines, and data capture mechanisms and is designed to manage interactions within their specific environment.

The evolution of these touch point-- specific technologies has led to the creation of "channel silos." Silos, independent departments and customer views, occur when companies organise around a specific facet of the business. For example, it is not uncommon for a large organisation to have separate marketing departments responsible for customer communications on the Web, e-mail, call centre, direct mail, etc. Since these silos exist, companies are unable to obtain a complete channel-view of the customer. The implications affect both the customer and the organisation:

The customer experience, which consists of all customer-to-business interactions, becomes inconsistent with regard to quality from one channel to another. In addition, disparate eCRM strategies at each channel leads to highly disjointed customer experiences, as dialogues or transactions that begin on one channel cannot be immediately continued on another.

For the organisation, the frustration lies in its inability to centralise its rules of customer engagement, to view the holistic customer relationship, and to deliver consistent, customer-centric communications across channels.

Managing context The loss of "context" in a customer conversation is a side effect of this channel-silo phenomenon. "Context" in the CRM space is defined as using all relevant facets of the historical customer relationship within the current customer interaction. For example, if a customer enters a retail outlet for the first time but is a frequent purchaser from the companies Web site, that customer should be treated as a high-value customer, not as a first time shopper. Keeping context within a conversation enables organisations to build on all past dialogues, thus preventing redundancy in messaging, increasing targeting efficiency for offers and messages, enabling a high-degree of dialog personalisation, and providing a strong basis for managing priority and experience on total customer value.