Can You Get a Good CRM Program From a Call Center?

Marshall
Member

Posted 09-Nov-2005 05:46 PM
Hi Jim. This may be a difficult question to answer bu here goes. One of our clients is a larger air conditioning service company. They have 130 centers across the country who historically have been operating under thier own name. My client is now trying to consolodate all of these centers under one corporate name. With this move they are moving from 130 different phone numbers to one 800 number and they are bringing a call center on line in 1Q. They have asked our opinion on whether the best strategy is to have the call center dump all data into a CRM application that the call center owns and manages or should the call center send data to a third party CRM application provider that is hosted elsewhere. Net, net, can call centers also be good CRM companies are should the two functions be seperate? Thanks.

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 11-Nov-2005 12:10 AM
Marshall

Your case reminds me of a consulting assignment I was involved in a few years ago for an international airline. There the challenge was to consoidate over 100 call centers around the world under a single point of contact (albeit not a single contact centre). And of another to consolidate a national Telco's regional contact centres into a single one. I will use the two assignments to attempt to develop an answer to your questions.

The description you provide of your client leaves a few important questions unanswered. For example, who operates the call centres today, who pays for them and why do they want to consolidate the call centres in the first place? My assumption is that the call centres are operated and paid for by independent distributors and your client wants to increase control over this important customer touchpoint. In other words your client is willing to pay to develop and operate the call centre in order to own this touchpoint with customers.

If the call centre really is seen as a strategic tool with which to influence customers in this way, it will have to build reliable interfaces, standardised working procedures and a collaborative working approach with a number of other parts of the business, particularly the distributed service centres, if the new call centre is to improve on what already exists.

It also has a huge customer education programme on its hands. Unless the 130 current call centres (the majority of which may actually be just a telephone) actually unplug their phones, many customers will continue to call a local number to seek local help (and to for example, schedule a service visit) rather than call a new national number.

All of this and your client's probable inexperience in operating a national call centre of this type suggests that it should initially set up a joint operation with the help of an experienced call centre operator (not a consultancy), so that it develop hands-on experience in using the call centre for business advantage. The emphasis should be on using the operator's experience to help setup and get the call centre operational quickly and then to learn about it's operation.

Once your client has gained experience jointly operating the call centre, it will be in a better position to understand how it needs to collaborate internally (to ensure that services are organised properly), the costs of operation (if it subsequently decides to host or outsource) and how the call centre can be used to provide additional business advantage (for example, through improved service-based selling).

This joint operations approach provides your client with a "real option" with which to develop a better understanding of call centre business. The real option can be called later if your client decides to insource the entire operation, use a hosted provider, or to outsource it entirely.

I hope this is useful for you. It is hard to provide potted advice with so little information about your client to go on.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant

Jim Barnes, CRMGuru Panelist
Advisory Board
Member
Picture of Jim Barnes, CRMGuru Panelist

Posted 11-Nov-2005 06:23 AM
Hello Marshall

I agree with my colleague, Graham Hill, in that it's exceedingly difficult (and potentially dangerous)to offer anything other than fairly general advice without knowing in some detail the specifics of the situation.

As I understand the situation, the company currently operates in 130 locations, not necessarily 130 call centers, under a variety of brand names. Given that it's a services company, it's important for them to retain customers. Having said that, I suspect their customers currently have relationships with a variety of different localized brand names. So, in addition to migrating to a centralized call center operation, you have the additional issue of how to migrate the relationship from the local brand to a national brand and from a local contact point to a potentially impersonal national center.

With respect to your specific question concerning how to handle data, I am not nearly as knowledgeable about the mechanics of this as Graham is. I tend to agree with him, however, that it sounds like the best solution is to partner with a company that will manage the CRM function on behalf of your client. In my experience, call centers can be and often are good CRM companies, but the key is to engage the best partner.

From my viewpoint, which is the customer's viewpoint, I'd also be very concerned about how the centralized call center handles customer calls. It's very important to manage this transition from localized brands to national brand. It must be handled in a way that is seamless and leaves their customers feeling that they are still dealing with "their" AC services company.

So, bottom line is that there's a lot more to this than how you handle the data.

Good luck

Jim Barnes

Jim Barnes specializes in Customer Strategy as a member of the CRMGuru Advisory Board. For more information, please visit Barnes Marketing Associates.

Marshall
Member

Posted 11-Nov-2005 07:08 AM
Gentlemen:
Many thanks for your thoughtful responses to my post. Jim hit it right on the head with his assumption of the current situation. We now have 130 mom and pop operations answering the phones across the country. These are not call centers, just the back office of Joe's Air Conditioning Repair. All managed and paid for my each center. My client (a top five national air conditioning OEM manufacturer) has bought all of these centers and is trying to build a national brand while still giving the individual centers their unique and well- established local presence e.g., one logo template that has 130 different versions. As we try to develop programs at the corporate level that we can pass down to the local center(s) we are beginning to realize that the local data we have is fragmented, inconsistent and even non-existent. Enter the national call center (NOVO1) with the ultimate objective of collecting and normalizing data so that we can develop better CRM programs. The question remains whether the CRM piece should be handled by NOVO1 (assuming that is a core competency) or should we hire or purchase a separate CRM company/application that NOVO1 could feed information into.

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 11-Nov-2005 07:25 AM
Marshall, Jim

I am guessing that your client may be Lennox International who announced the reorganisation of 130 Service Experts service centres (along with the divestment of 47 centres) in a press release in May 2004.

If it is, and let's assume that hypothetically it is, then we should revisit our advice.

Lennox International and Service Experts are two different companies, even though Service Experts is listed on the Lennox International site as a subsidiary and vice versa. That means Jim's suggestion that brand integration will be an issue is correct. Service Experts' residential and light commercial customers will have to be very carefully managed so that the local touch and feel of the 130 independent service centres who they currently call is not lost in the centralised call centre.

As far as the operational call centre goes, Service Experts appears to be developing a new business capability in the centralised call centre. There is no evidence of any significant call centre capability on the Service Experts or Lennox International websites. There may be a technical hot-line but that it is a far cry from a call centre consolidated from 130 independent service centres. With the limited information available, I would tend towards outsourcing to an established call centre operator with a dedicated Service Experts team to take customer calls and to live the Service Experts brand. If neither Lennox International nor Service Experts have significant experience operating a call centre on this scale, it is unlikely that they would want to develop it for themselves. It isn't one of their core competencies, nor should it be.

The call centre operator would normally host the data on their own systems rather than on Service Experts or others' systems. The call centre will have to provide extended hours of operation to cover the different time zones across North America and provide the usual operational back-up. It would also arrange interfaces with Service Experts' other operational and customer management (marketing and sales) systems as required, regular reporting and access to raw customer data for analysis purposes. Robust service level agreements with the operator would have to be drawn up to cover these interfaces.

If Service Experts wants to implement a common national customer management programme across all 130 service centres, it doesn't need to develop the call centre in-house to do that. It would be better off developing a simple analytical & marketing data mart by itself and getting a data feed from the call centre and any other data sources it thinks appropriate. There is a wide choice of best-in-class CRM systems which can be built in top of the data mart with which to manage customers, e.g. through national marketing campaigns or a common customer loyalty programme, and to provide the service centres with their own customer management programmes e.g. standardised service centre marketing communications. This is similar to how some other industries with independent distributors but national brands, e.g. automotive, support their distributors whilst managing customers at the same time.

And there are the tricky issues of what to do with customers who continue to call the old service centre numbers, particularly the 47 divested service centres. And customers will continue to call them, no matter how well Service Experts or the service centres advertise the changes.

Service Experts will probably need expert consultancy advice to ensure that the operator doesn't take advantage of their relative inexperience in call centres, to negotiate SLAs, and to manage the planning, setup and implementation of the new call centre.

This is a major undertaking. Service Experts will only get one opportunity to setup the call centre, to migrate customers to it and to provide the sort of "glocal" customer service that customers already expect.

The above is all hypothetically speaking of course.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant

PS. I have edited the above as Marshall's reply came in between reading Jim's response and writing the above!