By Sanjay Dakwale, Vice-President, Customer Service Delivery, Tata Teleservices Limited
A meaningful relationship with a customer ensures not just a happy customer, but long-term value for the business, translating into better returns. This relationship paradigm has become starkly apparent in the fiercely competitive world of mobile telephony, where consumers are tech-savvy and demand high quality service.
Walking away from an unsatisfactory situation is always an option for the customer. However, for the operator, there is a very small window of opportunity in this moment to create customer stickiness and add a personal touch. At Tata Teleservices, we have started to recognise these moments of magic. Real-time resolutions, a focus on customers’ real requirements and suggesting alternative ways to fulfil these form the core of our next-generation, customer-centric initiatives.
Let’s consider a real-life scenario. Incensed at poor data download speeds on a brand-new connection, a customer calls the operator’s helpline. The advanced device detection feature of the customer relationship management (CRM) platform ensures near-instant access to information and intelligence from this data. The service agent is able to quickly get to the root of the problem. It is the customer’s own device, an old feature phone (such handsets can be a bottleneck in sustaining and maintaining higher data download speeds). As the agent reveals details like the make, features and configuration of the device and the need to change it, the customer is pleasantly surprised at his knowledge and happy with the resolution. This marks the beginning of a meaningful relationship.
The 3 P’s of CRM
The evolution of CRM will be largely driven by three trends. These are shared ownership of customer relationships across the organisation, the need to convert dispersed and diverse data into simple, coherent, exact insights that are actionable in real time, and the increasing consumer demand for personalised products and services. The three P’s that will largely define customer relations are…
- Pervasiveness: What is true in life is even more so with customer relationships. Individuals are more likeable if they listen first and talk second. In the era of 24-hour news cycles and social media, this is hard. Companies need to have a structure in place to ensure that every team is locked in to generate outcomes from such insights. Too often, team efforts are concentrated on a particular subset because the people responsible for technology are tied to a single business function. CRM as a function has started to become more pervasive across enterprises with each employee having a role to play in establishing and sustaining customer relationships.
- Precision: As analytics invade the enterprise, specialists will look for patterns and predictions that are more precise and can be made available in real time. The use of advanced analytics will ensure that the enterprise functions as a cohesive entity with intuitive departmental collaboration driven by precise insights drawn from a multitude of data sources/types. The current tools require users to possess specialised skills to filter, assess and apply data insights. This is changing as the average business user is looking for capabilities that are more intuitive and user friendly in order to facilitate organic assistance in day-to-day decision-making. For instance, call centres will be able to automatically route calls to the agent best equipped to handle a customer query by analysing the interaction history of a customer. The call centre agent will also be sent a script with all pertinent details to be able to resolve the query.
Such applications will become more mainstream as complex data analytics are embedded into the enterprise and its recommendations are made accessible to daily decision-makers. Analytics will also become more social and collaborative as business users are provided recommendations based on the interaction and decision history of other users. - Personalisation: Personalisation in customer communication is one of the most powerful marketing tools a business can implement to drive brand loyalty and success. According to research, nearly three-quarters of consumers desire personalised products and services, and personalisation is the most influential factor in determining value for money. Personalisation is the future; consumers and clients want it, particularly millennial/post-millennial audiences. Applied correctly, this power to personalise can actually be a brand asset and help to drive brand value and loyalty. Recent academic research found that companies that have incorporated data and analytics into their operations show productivity rates 5 to 6 per cent higher than that of their peers.
An effective mix of employee engagement and technology will define the future of CRM in organisations. The need of the hour is to aggressively implement a more inclusive and agile approach that allows every employee to be educated, trained and empowered to take decisions that have a direct bearing on a customer’s relationship with the brand. Technology has a critical role to play here as a key enabler of service innovation.
