Buzzwords CRM and omni-channel have been bouncing off the walls of contact centres long before the COVID-19 pandemic. But since live agents have been largely working from home, many businesses have been grappling with ways to optimise CRM from within that omni-channel environment and to do so in a more efficient way than ever. There are huge benefits to achieving this for any brand, business or organisation.
In this exclusive interview, CX Today welcomes Tvrtko Stosic, a consultant in Avaya’s international specialists group, to discuss just how to make the most of the link between omni-channel and CRM.
“Despite CRM being instrumental for Omnichannel, a true omni-channel experience cannot be achieved without a clear understanding of different CRM dimensions and their specific roles and responsibilities,” Stosic says.
“Common mistakes businesses make in their Omnichannel initiatives include the wrong delegation of tasks to various CRM types, most notably, assigning customer contact management roles to process oriented operational CRMs. Needless to say, such an approach results in suboptimal omni-channel environments.”
To break this down for better understanding, Stosic says there are three distinctive types of CRM – operational, such as Salesforce or Siebel for example, collaborative, such as Avaya, and Analytical. An example of this would be SAS.
Operational CRM gathers transactional, long-persistence information and is focused on running different processes like services, sales and marketing. Collaborative CRM, on the other hand, manages customers’ contacts and deals with transient contextual information from various channels and touchpoints. Companies can achieve optimal Omnichannel environment by proper integration of operational and collaborative CRM. This is key for the consolidation of an all-round customer view, services offered across touchpoints, internal processes and customer contacts.
Avaya adds that it is important to say that, due to the saturation of the operational CRM market, respective vendors have started to incorporate contact handling capabilities into their solutions. However, operational CRMs’ DNA is based on Business Process Management because they handle objects like cases, complaints, offers and orders. On the other hand, customer contacts are very different from the usual operational CRM objects, which drives the need for different management logic, different functionalities, and very specific monitoring, reporting and analytic abilities.
Consequently, operational CRMs have limited contact handling capabilities, far inferior compared to dedicated collaborative CRM solutions. Allowing each CRM solution to do what it is meant to do is the best guarantee of achieving an optimal Omnichannel environment.
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Stosic says a common error businesses make is that omni-channel is representative of the entire customer journey.
He explains: “The main mistake with respect to omni-channel is the common belief that it represents the end-state, that it will by itself, provide superb CX and deliver consequent financial returns to companies. The truth is that Omnichannel is only a building block, a step towards an environment that will ensure effortless, meaningful and memorable customer experiences,”
To explain this in more depth, after so many years of focusing on omni-channel, it is clear that numerous related initiatives and investments failed to achieve expectations with respect to reducing customer effort and improving CX in general. So it’s hardly surprising that companies, even recently, seem to be experiencing ‘omni-channel fatigue’. This is characterised by disenchantment with capabilities and the results of Omnichannel.
Different market research (for example, Forrester: https://go.forrester.com/press-newsroom/cx-index-2019-results) points in same direction. Despite all investment in achieving Omnichannel, during the last couple of years customer experience has not been improving. On the contrary, it lingers around the same, mostly mediocre, levels with excellent experiences being rare exceptions, not the norm.
Companies are now starting to understand that omni-channel is not enough for the delivery of superb CX. Also, that the integration of communication channels, touchpoints, customer data and business processes represent only infrastructure, which is necessary but will not, by itself, deliver superior CX.
So put it simply, something additional needs to be built on top of existing omni-channel infrastructures to achieve real success.
The Next Level
Stosic explains that the concept of a ‘channel-free’ customer journey is the key.
