Missed CRM Opportunities Cost Millions

July 4, 2007: During a recent seminar in London, keynote speakers suggested that customer contact centres are failing to take advantage of CRM data when fielding customer calls, resulting in missed opportunities and losses stretching into the millions.

Held at the IoD City in London and hosted by Hosted Telephony Service provider NewVoiceMedia, the seminar pushed the merits of Individual Caller Treatment (ICT), a concept that the company claims is “the missing link” between contact centres and CRM.

Speaking to marketing and customer service representatives from the airline industry, finance institutions, retailers and utility sectors, speakers such as Ajaz Ahmed, the founder of Freeserve and David Beard of Sage CRM discussed ICT, pinning it as a key driver for personalised customer care.

“Whilst companies collected customer data and invested heavily on marketing campaigns to entice customers to make contact, many businesses fail to use the data they already have to use the contact centre to provide individualised customer care,” said Beard, adding that customers are at their most receptive when they call into a business. In this circumstance, he says that ICT helps to provide the same level of personalised and interactive customer service that consumers find online.

“Getting callers to hold for long periods of time or asking them to go through endless menus is not the best way to make a customer feel valued” said NewVoiceMedia CEO Jonathan Grant. “ICT which combines CRM with telephony, offers businesses an intelligent marketing tool that can cross and up sell services to clients.”

Grant claims that the system can increase revenues by at least 5% while simultaneously boosting caller satisfaction as ICT automatically fast-tracks customers to their dedicated agent, based on their previous call or based on the information a business might already have about them.

As a spinoff from this more personalised service, the company claims that customers can also be played relevant, targeted “PhoneAds” if there a delay in putting the call through.

“To be a business pioneer, it is important to do the obvious before everyone else thinks it's the obvious,” added Ahmed. “I feel that what Google did for advertising and what Amazon did for retailing, Individual Caller Treatment will do for the contact centre.”

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