4 Ways Contact Centers are Supercharging Their CRMs

First question – what is a CRM?

First, the unavoidable clarification. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management.

It can refer to:

• The call center technology businesses use to manage data about customers, or
• A business practice to maintain or improve customer relationships

Today, we’re talking about the technology. (If you wanted to read about improving relationships, try this post on improving customer loyalty.)

What is CRM software for?

Businesses generally have a couple of goals for CRM software:

1. Keeping customer data manageable and consistent 
2. Getting maximum value from that data by winning sales or retaining customers

A really good CRM system helps you to streamline processes and handle communication more effectively. 

How do contact centers use CRM software?

There’s often a big difference between what businesses could do with your CRM and what businesses actually do with it. 

The first common mistake is using the CRM as a warehouse for data when there are big advantages to combining CRM with other call tools.

What makes your CRM so important?

That data in your CRM? That’s basically everything you know about your customers. 

If you don’t have a clear strategy for putting that data to use, you’re running blind. Most of your customer service is just guesswork. 

So what does a strong CRM strategy look like?

Here are two things you should focus on. 

1. Automation. There’s a lot of data there – and that’s a good thing – but that volume means you need to automate to process it all. 
2. Integration. You’ve heard the dreaded word ‘silo’. That’s what your CRM is if you don’t connect it to your other systems. 

Bear these in mind as we look at the fours ways businesses are supercharging their CRMs. 

#1 Personalized call routing 

That CRM data is all you need to personalize call routing for customers. 

Setting this up is probably simpler than you think. In reality, personalized call routing needn’t be more complicated than your existing routing methodology. It just needs to draw on more data. 

The starting point is each caller’s phone number. You can use that to identify them without any input from the customer. 

Once you know who’s calling, the next part is obvious. You determine whether they’re a VIP, or a flight risk customer. You determine whether you should route them straight to a specific team, or ask a certain set of questions in IVR?

Delta Air Lines have made great use of this: each time they automatically identify a customer, their conversational IVR system provides key info about that customer’s booking. 

Small changes like this save Delta around $5million per year. 

#2 Shorter calls

Is it a good idea to shorten your calls? Are we still having this conversation?

Here’s what it comes down to. Making a target of short calls tends to gut customer experience. Sure, it saves a little money in the short term but it also tends to gut the customer experience and destroy your FCR rate. (Both of which annihilate those savings.)

So is there any reasonable way to shorten calls? Absolutely. You can reduce AHT just need to remove the parts of the call which are unnecessary.  

The big offenders are identifying the customer (which we covered in part 1) and performing research on the customer’s case history. 

Around 70% of customers expect you to know who they are and what they’ve purchased previously right away. That’s not an unreasonable expectation either. Your CRM can easily, automatically deliver customer information to agents, ideally as a convenient screen pop. 

(Read more about how in this post: ‘Could you automate these contact center tasks?’)

#3 Higher uptake of self-service

There’s only one way to make customers use self-service more often.

Make it easier!

There’s a strong and growing preference for self-service among customers… but only when it’s seen as a reasonably easy option. 

So ask yourself this: can my customers update their account details with a self-service tool? Can they edit their order or make general enquiries?

If not, customers are obviously going to hold for an agent. You’re not giving them a choice! 

The solution is to integrate your CRM with your self-service tools, allowing them to access data just like agents. That small step drastically increases the usefulness of those tools. 

And the more useful your tools the more customers will use them. That’s especially true for modern solutions like conversational IVR systems which can handle far more complex customer queries. 

#4 Outbound customer retention

Let’s take this a step further. We’re moving past reactive service strategy and getting proactive.

Each customer journey has key identifiable moments that place a customer are the highest risk of churning. 

Identifying those moments isn’t hard. You probably know what they are already. They tend to include:

• When customers give negative feedback
• When customers make complaints
• When customers near the end of a subscription period

So those are your risky customers. What can you do with that info? First, a little bit of outreach goes a long way. A short call from a trained agent – addressing any issues, building up the relationship – is all it takes to foster serious customer loyalty.  

(This is an especially good use of blended contact centers!)

Why don’t more contact centers do this? 

It’s often down to a lack of integration. The useful data – say, the end of a subscription period – lives in the CRM. And that’s where it stays unless someone manually retrieves it. 

That is, unless your integration/automation strategy is a little more developed. 

Using basically the same process we’ve looked at in each example, you can integrate your call center CRM with autodial software. Then, you create a simple automation (ideally with fast, No-Code tools) that places outbound calls to the right customers. 

Trust me – doing all of that is easy. The one question you need to answer is: how much would customer retention need to increase to make this quick and easy automation project worthwhile?

I’m guessing that even a small increase would pay for itself many times over…