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Q:  Want More From Your Contact Center Investment?
 
Conventional wisdom dictates the return on investment for a call center application starts and ends with increased productivity of call-center agents and improved customer satisfaction. Yet, seldom are the benefits of the wealth of customer data in the call center application brought to bear for use in the organizations sales and marketing endeavors. Whether these endeavors are automated in some form or not, how much more effective could these functions be if they used additional data gathered in the contact center?
 
CRM applications are fraught with instances of silo implementations that have marginal impact outside of their own department or functional area. When these applications were emerging in the market and deployed as point projects the productivity gains overshadowed the stigma of a “silo” implementation. However, the co-mergence of suite-applications serving the front office has demanded and increased the focus on the enterprise. This has resulted in increased scrutiny of departmental solutions and their benefit to the enterprise and compounded by the current economic downturn and scaling back of large-scale application purchases. Hence the demand for increased utility of a departmental application in the contact center.
 
To meet this increased level of scrutiny organizations need to begin to leverage data gathered in one department for the betterment of the enterprise. The contact center can have the greatest impact on the organization due to the ongoing collection of a variety of customer data from technical support to billing and other customer satisfaction issues. Properly linked, today’s contact center data can be utilized by sales and marketing departments to prepare for sales calls and even influence the content of campaigns. Yet, rarely do organizations have the processes in place to mine data for these purposes. Some vendors like PeopleSoft promote enterprise business processes and leverage them as a remedy.
 
In a sales organization, how many times has a salesperson been ambushed by a support issue when arriving on site to present a new product or program? With effective processes and links these situations can become all but totally avoidable so that the savvy sales representative can turn such situations into a sales opportunity or arrive with a solution and not with a perplexed disposition.
 
The marketing organization can also benefit from data collected in the contact center by applying more effective customer segmentation to an upcoming marketing campaign. In a high technology company, data provided by order entry or directly from sales is not sufficient. The contact center can add more comprehensive and quality data reflecting product reliability or user behavior that could well be important drivers for system upgrades or cross-sells unique to a highly profitable customer segment (this is destined to be the role of Analytics yet many organizations are not ready to implement applications of this scale).
 
Fred Landis is the Director, Marketing Alliances for AIM Technology. His responsibilities include assisting strategic AIM partners with product marketing, messaging and business development functions for the AIM suite of contact center performance management software. With nearly 20 years experience in sales, marketing and customer service functions, Mr. Landis joined AIM Technology following five years as Director, Consulting for Gartner, Inc.