Context of E-CRM II

There are four major tenets of keeping context within a customer conversation:
Customer conversations must be channel independent. For example, if a company wishes to survey its customers to better understand their needs and preferences, this survey should be delivered individually to each customer via either their preferred channel or their next channel of interaction. So, Customer A may get surveyed on the Web, while Customer B may get surveyed in the call centre. In addition, once the customer has been surveyed on one channel, they should not be surveyed again if they immediately interact through a different channel.

Customer conversations must be departmentally independent. For example, if a customer calls in to an inbound customer service centre for questions about their account, the call centre representative needs to be empowered to put on their sales hat and provide offers for new services that may be of interest to the customer.

Customer conversations must be continuous across channels and departments. For example, if the customer service centre uncovers insight into a customer's next most likely purchase, the Web site should use that information to provide dynamic offers that are relevant to that customer the next time he/she logs into their account.

Customer conversations should be managed based on customer needs, preferences and value. For example, high value customers should be immediately routed to highly experienced, live customer service representatives when they use inbound, live-channels. However, low-value customers seeking help or information that is easily administered in a self-service environment should be routed to an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system or the Web.

Building a eCRM infrastructure The key to maintaining context within a customer conversation lies in a company's eCRM technology infrastructure. Companies who adhere to the basic tenets of a "context-based" environment will achieve the following:

They will successfully achieve separation of their rules engine from their touch point applications.

They will develop a customer object model.

They will leverage best of breed CRM tools at all touch points.

Separating rules engines from touch point applications: Each touch point uniquely manages customer interactions and requires highly specialised tools to facilitate customer dialogues. Each touch point specific tool leverages an application-specific database and (in most cases) a rules engine. Having separate rules engines at each touch point increases the risk of delivering redundant or conflicting messaging when a customer interacts over more than one channel.