Express Computer, April 23, 2007

Increasing competition coupled with customers clamoring for superior service has driven the growth of CIM in India.

A customer’s experience with an organisation only takes place in two ways – firstly when he uses the organisation’s product or service and secondly when he contacts the organisation. According to a study conducted in the US, 92 percent of customers switch to a competing brand due to a bad customer interaction experience. A similar trend has been observed in India where customers are demanding higher standards of service.

To stay competitive, enterprises are deploying customer management strategies that maximize the value of every customer interaction and drive superior corporate performance. One tool that is being employed is Customer Interaction Management (CIM).

CIM involves continuous customer feedback and quality management where every attempt is made to ensure quality of service and guaranteed satisfaction to the end customer. CIM has been buoyed by customers demanding superior interaction and exhibiting a marked preference to buy products of companies that provide this.

Sunny Rao, Managing Director in India of Genesys Telecommunication Labs believes that all companies need an interface to interact with customers as it helps to collect their feedback which in turn helps them understand their customers’ needs and requirements.

CRM vs. CIM

CIM provides a process and a mechanism for customer communication and is the fundamental building block to provide customer centricity to any Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. CIM solutions allow businesses to interact with consumers, capture conversations across all channels of communication, and convert these precious nuggets of information into meaningful customer knowledge – all in real time.

According to Shankaran Nair, President – Corporate Strategy, Servion Global Solutions, traditional CRM systems focus on implementing parts of the customer life cycle management applications such as Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Customer Support Helpdesk. While they achieve automation in some of these customer-facing processes, they fail to adopt a holistic customer-centric approach.

“CRM manages customer data and not interactions whereas CIM helps in managing live interactions with the customers. It allows the companies to maintain a repository of data and contact customers through various channels," says Akshay Aggarwal, Head – Systems Engineering, BEA Systems.

“Customer-centric companies need both: CRM manages relatively static data, whereas CIM is terrific for dynamic interactions. What has happened however, is that most companies have some from of CRM, so it has ceased to be much of a differentiator. But companies that adopt CIM have found that their customer experience scores soar and that’s the only sustainable competitive advantage for any business," comments Girish Krishnamurthy, Managing Director, Asia Pacific – Talisma.

The Software as a Service (SaaS) is available with CIM solutions. Rao adds, “Companies don’t want to spend capital buying software and want to pay for what they use and they don’t want to face the trouble of upgrading and hence a CIM solution is more effective when offered through a SaaS model.”

CIM Solutions are available in both licensed and hosted (SaaS) mode. “CIM SaaS relieves the burden of overworked IT staff and allows companies with no IT infrastructure to have online-hosted CIM services available 24x7," says Krishnamurthy.

 

Connecting Channels

In a CIM solution, channels such as telephony, IVR, e-mail, fax, Web and SMS are available for customers to interact with a company. These cannels talk to each other and it becomes easier for companies to understand their relationships with customers and use this knowledge to sell better. For instance, if a customer is looking for a personal loan on the company’s Web site then the company can approach the customer and explain the procedure for availing of the same. It’s easy and inexpensive for companies to add new channels to existing ones.

Also some customers don’t feel safe using certain channels like the Web for financial transactions and hence it’s important for the organisation to educate customers about different channels and their uses.

Bhavish Sood, Principal Analyst, Software Markets, Gartner adds, “Self service solutions will not work in India as people here prefer to interact with human beings to solve their problems. Hence proper initiatives and guidance about how to use services should be made by companies so that customers make use of different channels. Also customers should be educated that it’s safer to use different channels, for instance people don’t fell comfortable depositing money in an ATM."

“The self service model does not completely satisfy customer enquiries and in India most people don’t know how to access it," adds Anish Desai, President of Enterprise Management Tools and Service (EMTS), Tracmail.

According to Aggarwal, more organisation today are going with the self service approach where they provide multiple contact points – telephone IVR, Web based access or mobile for the customer to access the organisation’s database and systems.

Nair believes that self service has delivered cost benefits such as lower agent costs and speedier customer service over the past few years along with certain undesirable side effects namely silent customer attrition and agent skill misuse.

Hence it depends on the individual customer’s choice as to which channel he wants to use to interact with the organisation but customers want that the organisation should remember them so that they don’t have to explain the same thing over and over again during a series of interactions.

According to Rao, it's important to identify the customers but not through his contact no but through other means like voice as the customers could be using different numbers for contacting a company.

Banks and telcos have been the primary adopters of CIM solutions and processes, owing to the explosion in their consumer base and the increase in service offerings. With the consumer base exploding for practically all other verticals such as retail, utilities, insurance companies, hospitality, FMCG, government, and healthcare, the option to stay out of the race has ceased to exist. If the idea of the government using CIM sounds out of place consider the fact that the British Army uses Talisma to handle recruitment requests.

 

It outsourcing an option

Outsourcing the customer service operation is being widely adopted by organisations due to two factors. One is that they want to focus on creating a brand name in the market and market it. Secondly, they understand that customer service is not as easy as they initially thought it to be.

“External companies who have customer service as their prime focus and have standard methodologies and technically savvy systems can provide better customer service. A number of SLAs can be defined at various levels to ensure customer satisfaction, says Aggarwal.

Nair believes that if the organisation feels that it can reduce costs by outsourcing customer service, it has to be very careful about the trade offs. Outsourcing could leave the organisation with little or no control on the passion that an outsider would show while dealing with its customers and the quality of interaction may suffer. This could very easily lead to customer dissatisfaction and, in the long run, attrition.

“Outsourcing the call centre would delay solving customer problems as call centres cannot take instant decisions, lack data and this leads them to log the customer’s complaint rather than addressing it. To avoid this situation there is a need to provide training and empowerment to call centre employees," says Sood.

The significant trend in CIM has been the shift towards enabling multiple communication channels in the contact centre. As a unified solution it helps in reducing complexity in the contact centre by integrating disparate voice, e-mail, and Web, chat systems.