Getting ROI from CRM

Continued

Cognos can attest to this fact. Once the company realized that its legacy CRM program wasn't doing what it needed to do, it underwent an 11-month implementation process to bring Oracle's Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 7.8 up and running. The system went live in November 2007. One of the first things the company put in place was advanced call center routing, so it could route customers based on their problem and which customer service agent was best suited to help them, says Dave Sheppard, Cognos' director of worldwide business solutions. "If you're a French-speaking customer with a Cognos 8 issue, we're going to find the best analyst by looking at the data we've got within Siebel and routing that call automatically," he says. "So response time to the most qualified agent has definitely improved. We've all been in queues where you get moved from agent to agent, and have to re-describe your problem to multiple people. That just takes energy and time from a customer point of view. And it's quite a frustrating experience."

Information from every customer can be logged and documented, so agents can stay attentive to customer needs and situations. According to Sheppard, that information is used down the road to help create better products and provide better service. "This information gets passed on to R&D, but it also gets put into the self-service realm, making end-user support more efficient and satisfying for users," says Sheppard. "We put in advanced search and some upgraded capabilities in our knowledgebase as well, to help customers get to their answer more quickly without having to interact with an agent."

And now everyone within the company—from assistants to customer service agents to salespeople—can have an impact on the way the business is run based on their own interactions with the Siebel CRM program, says Silvestri.

"We call them 'change champions,'" Silvestri says. "They were involved in helping to define some of the customer service processes. There were always a lot of great ideas in the field about how customer service agents could help their support organization, but there was an inability to put them into effect. Now they have that ability, and there is a lot of positive energy and letting those ideas flow into the design of the product and service."

An Easy Sell

If you can't sell effectively, then all of the above abilities are moot, which is why leading-edge CRM users have taken their programs and further empowered their salespeople and sales engineers, says Beagle Research Group's Pombriant.

"One of the biggest changes is embedding analytics at the line-of-business level—the average user level. When analytics were first introduced, they were too complex so only a few people in the organization could use them," Pombriant says. "But now tools such as dashboards give salespeople a good understanding of key data in real or almost real time." And once you have that kind of data, you can change the way you're interacting with prospects.