Why would contact center automation be terrible darkness without CRM?

CRM is, first of all, a system that stores and manages information about all your interactions with business clients. Based on this information and its processing, business and other decisions can be made.

How exactly does CRM work in practice? And why would automation not be possible without data quality management?

Contact Center Types


From a CRM perspective, we can talk about two types of call centers. The first are active , marketing contact centers. They are responsible for pre-sales: they trade, collect orders, conduct campaigns among potential customers. The second type of contact center is passive , supportive. They take care of after-sales service, thereby providing services to existing customers in relation to the goods they purchase. Customers can report a problem or complaint, process an order, find out delivery status, receive product assistance, etc.

CRM can greatly help both contact centers. PBXs and interconnected channels (chat bots, video calls, email campaigns, Facebook and other social networking sites, instant messaging) are closely integrated and work in the most efficient way for the operator.
This makes life easier for call center managers, campaign operators, and individual queue managers.

CRM and support services


For example, in the case of passive contact centers, the so-called help desks, CRM helps to find and combine the most common requests and support for each level.
When the first level of the contact center does not know, for example, the malfunction of the product, it switches to the second level or sends it in instead of technology, etc. When deciding how to deal with a specific customer due to its history, specific purchased products, their number, etc., it plays an irreplaceable role. Otherwise, it would be just a subjective special decision of the operator, not supported by data.
Similarly, CRM helps you customize the sequence of steps or queries . For example, a call center calls an operator. Then the operator’s requests follow, again based on specific customer information, product failure history, etc.

Another customer may be interested in where his order is located . In this case, the task of the CRM system is to provide the center operator with the maximum amount of information necessary to track the order, with a minimum of clicks and time spent.

It looks simple, but in practice, programming such things is pretty complicated.In addition, it is also necessary to take into account less standard cases when someone, for example, calls from his phone to report a problem with his grandmother. Thus, the operator cannot get a phone number, and it all starts with checking who is on the other side. Even more difficult in CRM is the correct programming of the transfer of requests between the individual "layers" of a given company.

CRM and marketing contact centers


With active ( marketing ) contact centers, everything is a little easier compared to support services. Someone in the field of marketing or commerce will offer a campaign such as CTP.
Key contacts will be prepared, then CRM provides a vital opportunity to check these contacts - do email addresses or phone numbers exist at all and are they assigned to some customers. The system also organizes the filtering of contacts for which the company does not have rights. Can I send a sale email to this person? Or just the so-called opt-in, a well-defined question, can I solve this problem through campaigns?
This is followed by the implementation of the campaign - via e-mail, SMS, phone calls, Facebook, etc. CRM provides a number of actions within this implementation, for example, by sending or collecting data for evaluation.
Automation of activities, including artificial intelligence, plays an important role in this. Although it would be more correct to talk about some kind of limited machine learning.

TV sale


An important role in marketing contact centers is also played by sellers, i.e. marketing traders . They do not sell anything to the buyer, but answer the basic questions. They call, for example, potential customers who, during the campaign, extracted information from various parts of the aggregated CRM information that they might be interested in the product, but who do not have enough information or ambiguities and doubts about this.

But today, only telemarketers can replace the chatbot. They are already relatively widespread, and many companies that do not yet use them are considering using them.
Chatbot looks at the question and answer map and, based on the answers, can use a script to correctly evaluate what to ask. But his biggest problem is that he still cannot recognize emotions. He evaluates the content, but not the tone of voice, irony, etc., So that the real intent of a potential client can be completely incorrectly evaluated in the chat chat. At the same time, telephone service providers are still indispensable.

Why automation would not be possible without data quality management?


Data Quality Management (DQM) is closely related to all of the above. This is a discipline related to providing the right data to the right people (working with data within the company) or, in the context of contact centers, transferring the wrong data to the wrong people, for example, a business proposal by e-mail that you cannot send for legal reasons.

DQM is at the very heart of automation because a call center will never work without the right data.

CRM as an invaluable call center assistant


From all the examples in the text, it is clear that CRM can help in the field of contact centers, whether it is help desks or marketing centers. Both of these groups should have very well-processed and refined data, and this would not have been possible without CRM. The CRM system provides a tool for identifying, correcting, combining and sharing data. It also helps you create summary data, for example, to find out that you need one additional statement. And it measures the success of the individual components.
We can say that contact center automation without CRM would be impossible. And that the success of individual centers largely depends on the quality of the CRM system and the correctness of its use.

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