Perhaps the field is fertile ground for motifs: within sessions and conversations at DCI’s three-day Customer Relationship Management Conference several strategies emerged often.
Cutting-edge Internet marketers are incorporating live, real-time help into their customer-service options. A prominent PLEASE HELP button on a marketer’s site allows a live human being to offer assistance to a Web site browser, either through a series of instant messages, a telephone call or even directly through the computer, provided the user has both a microphone and speaker attachment. Several speakers noted that consumers frequently abandon online “shopping carts” before the final sale (estimates as to the exact quantity varied from session to session), often for want of a single question being answered.
A live operator can either answer questions, lead the browser through the Web site, or even push appropriate pages to the browser’s computer. Most advocating live intervention leaned toward the instant messaging option. Such systems allow an average-skilled operator to handle three or four conversations simultaneously, using down time while a browser is thinking about (or typing) a response to switch to another site visitor.
If a marketer has information gathered on a customer at its fingertips, the help offered can be further custom tailored. But while the concept of siloed views of a customer–in which information captured through, for instance, inbound fax, is not synchronized with that collected through telemarketing or response cards–should be familiar to most traditional direct marketers, it is not as widespread in e-commerce.
Marketers should note that customers increasingly expect to be treated as if all this information has been reconciled and updated instantaneously. With the advent of the instant reward culture bred by e-commerce, customers expect all potential touch points to be able to pick up a conversation, without having to backtrack and fill in information already volunteered.
Marketers are also realizing the value of customer satisfaction metrics, and suppliers are racing to meet their needs. But there is room for best practices to emerge, as some marketers wonder if the questions vendor products answer are the correct ones to ask. Once an incident–for example, a sale or a complaint or an inquiry–is resolved, online marketers are unsure of which metrics would be the most useful to analyze. The time or number of calls needed for resolution? Cross- or up-sell from the original request? Hallway interviews with marketers reveal frustration at not knowing which questions to ask, much less having answers.
Marketers also expressed frustration regarding the lack of standards between systems. Several keynote speakers during the past few days pointed out that no marketer has fully integrated all facets of CRM, and few are even close.
As such, there has been no demand for standards to jell. Some of the consultants on the floor of the exhibit hall don’t see this as a problem. Several said that marketers each define CRM differently. As such, consultants integrate the systems piecemeal, much in the same way their clients build them. As one disgruntled marketer said, “If they say `we can integrate [two systems],’ then why aren’t they together yet?”
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