Making the Transition to Service-Centric CRM:
Move Away from General-Purpose Enterprise Approach

It’s a Floor Wax!  It’s a Dessert Topping!
One of the highlights of the inaugural season of the TV comedy Saturday Night Live was a spoof advertisement for a miraculous new consumer product:  “New Shimmer is both a floor wax and a dessert topping!”  It’s funny because of the absurdity of trying to use the same product for such divergent and contradictory purposes.

It’s less funny when service and support organizations have to live with the consequences of one of these “floor wax / dessert topping” products: enterprise CRM.

Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
Enterprise CRM combined three unlikely applications:

• Marketing campaign management, a tool for managing lead-generation activities and outcomes
• Sales Force Automation (SFA), a tool for managing opportunities from lead identification through the sales process
• Customer service case management, a tool for managing post-sales customer inquiries and requests

In theory, a customer could be tracked seamlessly throughout the awareness-service-purchase lifecycle, and executives could get a “360° view” of the customer lifecycle. As a practical matter, however, marketing, sales, and service / support organizations all have very different needs for customer record-keeping. It’s the rare marketing executive who is interested in customer service cases, and it’s the rare support executive who chooses to track customers through the sales pipeline.

A Shift to Specialization
In fact, although the market—largely in the form of the technology analyst community—demanded that vendors produce unified CRM suites, the reality is that no vendor can be equally capable at providing support for all front-office business processes. Even the analyst community has bowed to the inevitable: for example, Gartner now produces its famous Magic Quadrant reports separately for CRM Multichannel Campaign Management, Sales Force Automation, and CRM Customer Service Contact Center applications.

Why Service is Special
CRM providers who built their names and reputation on sales force or marketing applications struggle to deliver the goods for customer service and support organizations. Missing pieces include:

• Customer-centric data model. Customers don’t think in terms of opportunities, leads and contacts, which is how most CRM systems are set up to support SFA and marketing. Customers think in terms of “me, my relationships and my activities with you.” So your database must mirror this expectation, and Consona’s data model is uniquely positioned around the “customer” record.
• Tightly-integrated knowledge management. KM isn’t very important for marketing or sales, but it’s crucial to delivering effective and loyalty-building customer service and support.
• Analytics with dashboards tailored for customer service and support executives. Often, one-size-fits-all CRM suites report on the basics (cases opened, cases closed, backlog) but provide no help in making sense of the customer experience.
• Defect management. For customer service and support, it’s not enough to solve customer problems: they must be eliminated from the customer experience. Defect tracking and enhancement request capabilities are required for supporting the entire customer experience lifecycle.
• Multichannel, multimode support. Customers may ask for support directly through the web site, the phone, e-mail, SMS, or a chat interface. Or they may use self-help, or ask their peers through support communities. Service-centric CRM must support all of these interaction touchpoints in a consistent, integrated way.
• Business rules and process controls that centrally manage the customer experience across all the channels listed above.

Service-Centric CRM
Consona has focused on the customer service and support area, providing its customers best-of-breed functionality and deep industry expertise. The Consona Knowledge Driven Support solution leverages the power of Consona Case Management to provide a comprehensive solution that adapts to the behavior of the customer, instead of the customer being asked to adapt to how the system behaves.