Help yourself to CRM (page 1 of 2)

There's a prevailing trend in customer service in both on and offline environments towards self-service. Banking was probably the first industry to do this with the introduction of ATMs, hotels allow self-service check-in and check out, more recently airlines have introduced self-service check-in kiosks in a bid to cut through waiting times at airports. Even the retail sector has joined in with many supermarkets rolling out self-service price scanning and check-out facilities to remove the need to queue up at the till.

The drivers behind these move are varied. One reason is to attempt to eliminate bottlenecks. Currently the main point of customer interaction with an airline is at check- in, for example, while for a supermarket it is at the till. These are relatively unproductive interactions. Removing these bottlenecks theoretically enables resources to be reallocated for customer interaction at other touchpoints.

Self-service gives customers the immediate response they seek when attempting to process a request or resolve an issue. It also crucially reduces the operational costs associated with traditional face-to-face interaction.

Despite the best efforts of many companies, customers remain attached to telephone and face-to-face interaction, particularly when they have a complaint about a product or service. This adds significant costs to running any business. According to Forrester Research, telephone-based customer service is the most costly channel for customer service at over $30 per transaction; by contrast, e-mail costs around $10 per transaction while Web-based self-service costs just over $1 per transaction.

Care categories

For most companies, self-care customer service falls into three categories: routine account maintenance, revenue generation and data aggregation.

Routine self-care functions shift the responsibility of account maintenance, such as the ability to change mailing address or examine account history, on to the users. Customer self-service can also generate additional revenue. For example, alerting customers when credit cards are about to expire or when subscriptions are about to lapse can have a direct positive impact on recurring revenue.

Crucially, self-service can also boost data harvesting efforts, presenting requested information in the workflow for tasks the customer wants to complete. For example, the self-care system can harvest demographic information that can be channeled into marketing and sales activities.

Web self-service falls into a number of categories. Content-based services focus on inquiries that can be fulfilled with static information, such as the obligatory "frequently asked questions". More advanced self-service options will use case-based reasoning and track relationships between customer inquiries and the information needed to satisfy them. Transaction-based services can include services such as placing orders, filling out applications, updating customer information and making payments.

CRM integration

To conduct transactions and obtain customer-specific information, Web self-service systems must fully integrate with enterprise applications such as CRM and ERP. To that end, the larger CRM vendors have integrated their Web self-service modules with their CRM suites.