Are you feeling sick? Take a pill. Is your marriage falling apart? Buy a woman's magazine with a ten-step guide. Feeling down? Pack your credit cards and go shopping. Are you overweight? Buy some diet foods and, if legal, diet pills.
Are you losing your profitable customers? Buy CRM software, an audio call recording system, an IVR or CTI software. Feeling left behind with a proprietary or legacy PABX? Buy a PC-based or LAN-based telephone system. Can’t interface this supposedly open system to your mainframe-based applications? Throw them away and make do with the simple database this phone system offers. Are customers not using your IVR for self service? Buy a new IVR.
In each of the preceding scenarios, the supposed remedies are touted to fix the corresponding problem immediately after purchase and are thus presented as instant fixes. But just as instant fixes don’t work for one's personal life, they don’t work in business either. The key difference is that those business products touted as instant solutions are orders of magnitude more expensive than the supposed instant solutions for one's personal life – and the purchase price is only the start.
The claimed instant solutions don't fix problems because, to begin with, solving problems requires work. Just as obesity requires the obese person to consider what they eat, how much they eat, their exercise or lack thereof, their lifestyle in general and even regular visits to an obesity specialist, addressing business problems requires a thorough analysis of the root causes, usually by someone sufficiently removed from the business unit to see the problems – and often involving an external consultant. It requires an examination from a perspective different to that which led to the problem, from one who can see outside the well-known 9 dots. Only after the current environment and its shortcomings have been thoroughly analysed can solutions be considered.
However, as obvious as it might be to everyone else that solutions to business problems are not instant, it is something that many IT vendors, or at least those that write their advertising copy, cannot seem to understand. And the sphere of IT where this denial most regularly manifests itself is with technology used within call centres.
One such technology is customer relationship management software, or CRM.
Using the definition most widely accepted by the market at large, CRM is software offering a collection of capabilities including sales lead management, customer contact tracking, data mining and customer segmentation etc. CRM can be useful for some, perhaps many, businesses in both the B2B and B2C fields. However, it must be customised to the requirements of the using business, it must interface with the existing enterprise applications and, most importantly, it requires the business to have a customer relationship culture. Furthermore, not only are commercial CRM packages usually expensive – often very expensive – some enterprise-specific customer information systems actually have some, perhaps all, of the CRM functionality that the organisation needs.
Commercial CRM software can, of course, sometimes fix problems, but not without customisation to the enterprise, not without significant expenditure and never instantly.
Another call centre technology is audio call recording – a technology that usually does not cost much more to implement that it does to buy. However, if the buying enterprise does not have a suitable evaluation process to assess the recorded calls, and training programs to deal with the less than satisfactory evaluations, it will not be money well spent. Call recording can solve problems, but it, too, requires application implementation, has a cost and is not instant.
At least with IVR systems, most potential buyers recognise that an application must be developed and this development requires time and money. But it is equally true, if less recognised, that CTI software requires application development.
All accurately-classified CTI software is able to perform functions such as screen pop, screen transfer with call transfer and screen/keyboard dialling. But what screens are to be displayed and with what data are they to be populated? The pop in screen pop is an abbreviation of population – not pop-up. Ersatz screen pop, which displays a window with the phone number of an inbound call, costs a lot but delivers little. Real screen pop displays the appropriate enterprise computer application screen, populated with data about the caller. It costs more, but delivers much much more. Similarly, mouse dialling uses the mouse to click on an on-screen image of a handset, whereas real screen/keyboard dialling dials a number from a specified field of an enterprise computer application.
Ersatz screen pop and mouse dialling are what an enterprise gets if it attempts to buy instant fix CTI, whereas to get genuine CTI, one needs to analyse the current situation, articulate what the solution is to deliver, put this into a specification, acquire a package of product and application, and have the application implemented.
We live in a world in which we are constantly being promised instant fixes for all our problems. Supposed instant fixes don't solve our personal problems, and they certainly won't solve those of the enterprise.
Stephen Coates is the author of the reports
There have been no comments on this page. Why not be the first? To prevent spam, we ask that you register and log in to post a comment.Reader Comments
