Enabling CRM: Creating an Intelligent Enterprise Desktop

In a perfect world, every step in your company’s CRM-driven sales process flows smoothly from the moment your company reaches out to customers with a promotion, all the way through purchasing and receipt of the product and/or service, to any requests for after-sales support. Unfortunately, many CRM solutions have not lived up to the promise of providing a CRM-driven sales process with unified views of customers, improved productivity, higher customer satisfaction, and increased revenue.

In order to realize the benefits of CRM, businesses need to adopt an alternative approach that creates an intelligent enterprise desktop where the CRM technology is used – at the knowledge worker desktop.

Successfully implemented, the goal of CRM is to achieve a single view of the customer across the enterprise. This often requires significant investments in infrastructure, application software, middleware, CRM suites, portals, workstations and data stores that are capable of combining data and processes from many disparate points and consolidating them into a single logical entity that supports multiple purposes (e.g., views and workflows). What many enterprise CRM users are discovering is that their competitive position erodes substantially over the 3-5 years, or even longer, that it can take to design then deploy large CRM projects. All too often, CRM initiatives take so long to reach initial usability that business value is not created quickly enough to justify their cost.

After spending the time and money needed to implement CRM, those who have deployed it often discover that while a single view of the customer may have been achieved, the many workflows and people required to serve customers are not any more efficient than before. In addition, new technologies, applications and business acquisitions are not always integrated cleanly, if at all, into the existing CRM solution. Through process evolution, it becomes clear that simply implementing a CRM package may not effectively solve the underlying business problems facing the enterprise and their mission critical contact centers. The key issue is not just getting a single view of the customer, it is also about using an integrated, adaptable view of the customer/company relationship to improve sales and service, manage the business and cut costs.

Furthermore, the problem of delivering on the promise of CRM for everyone - integrated applications, automated business processes and a single view of customer information is too often an expensive five to ten year IT project. Add this to lengthy implementation times, budget overruns and increased business risk, your legacy management, operations and logistics applications, information portals and intranets, SFA and ERP suites and the integration challenges facing today's mission critical contact centers can seem insurmountable. Several research organizations such as Aberdeen, Gartner and others now advise businesses to consider application integration from a customer-centric perspective along with more traditional infrastructure, middle-tier portal and middleware approaches. The real benefits to this perspective include faster, more thorough application integration at lower cost, higher customer satisfaction (e.g.: customers want to know when you’ve shipped their order) and greater, faster alignment of key business, technology and operational objectives with the promised ROI of your IT initiatives. As contact centers are increasingly challenged to help retain valued customers, cut costs, increase productivity and contribute more directly to the enterprise’s bottom line, application integration from a customer-centric perspective at the point of contact is now considered by many industry analysts to be the best solution.

This is where targeted, integrated CRM comes into the picture. If you can make all your customer information available - not merely in one place, but in the right place, to the right employees and at the right time, and make it easy to incorporate that information into sales and service workflows, you have delivered on the promise of CRM. If you can achieve this objective in a stepwise, lower cost, incremental manner, you can reach ROI targets, reduce business risk and improve profit margins. There are a few approaches that have a successful track record of achieving this goal but point of contact integration is the most effective and lowest cost.

An Enterprise Desktop Solution: Integration at the Point of Contact
A better approach in enabling your CRM strategy is to integrate applications at the knowledge worker desktop. Desktop integration is a more effective approach to organizing the work environment, streamlining processes, and reducing the amount of time the knowledge workers spend to complete tasks. In addition, desktop integration is non-invasive and does not require any server-side integration thereby reducing integration costs and lowering CRM implementation time from months to weeks.

Desktop integration improves customer service by eliminating redundant data entry, streamlining processes, and organizing application screens logically. Fortune 500 companies that use desktop integration in their CRM strategy have also addressed major organizational and training issues related to mergers, acquisitions, and other changing business needs. In contact centers this type of integration has proven invaluable in reducing agent call times, allowing them to focus on cross-sell and up-sell opportunities with customers. Desktop integration also provides additional functionality of a CRM solution for enforcing rules related to compliance and business requirements, reducing call transfers, and increasing done-in-one calls. Finally, desktop integration allows companies to be agile in regards to how technology is implemented and used with CRM systems. New applications can easily be integrated with legacy systems and the CRM application while only exposing certain screens, data, and processes of those applications for the agent. Consequently, the knowledge worker desktop is organized in a task-oriented environment focused on providing a higher level of service.

Cicero’s desktop integration has a proven track record maximizing the use of technology, improving customer service, reducing costs, and improving revenue opportunities. Cicero delivers efficiencies to various verticals from contact centers to intelligence analysts. In one recent implementation, it was used to integrate 900 agents’ desktops in just seven weeks, reducing the average call times by approximately 40 seconds and allowing agents to spend more time with customers and handle more calls. At the same time, the contact center was able to roll out a new CRM application and Cicero was used to quickly integrate it into the unified desktop, minimizing both the training and operational impact to contact center. Due to improved agent productivity and shorter call times, the savings were over US$1 million in the first year with an ROI of approximately 6 months.

An Intelligent Enterprise Desktop Solution
When you integrate CRM technology with other business systems using desktop integration technology, you enable the CRM solution to share information with other systems, streamline processes, and enforce business rules. This allows organizations to create intelligent enterprise desktops where the integrated CRM desktop supports specific business requirements and knowledge worker workflows. Information is presented to the knowledge worker for specific business processes (e.g., a credit card order, changing residential telephone service, etc.) while other information is not presented reducing screen and data clutter. Creating intelligent views of customers also provides opportunities to enforce business rules between CRM application and other systems such as checking an inventory system for a product or a billing system to ensure a customer has good standing.

As businesses continue to search for technology solutions that provide integrated, unified views of customer information in addition to other sales tools that will allow them to improve customer service and expand sales opportunities, they will be faced with even more challenges by not examining the knowledge workers’ working environment. Oftentimes, new technologies such as CRM are installed on the desktop along with additional training in the hope that these tools will improve productivity and provide new revenue. These new CRM applications:

• Add to the complexity of the working environment
• Increase the training need for knowledge workers
• Are costly and take months to implement
• Are not fully integrated with existing legacy systems and across lines of business
• May not provide the flexibility to adjust to changes in the business
• Are oftentimes not rules-based to ensure compliance and ascertain that cross-sell and up-sell opportunities are fully exploited

Desktop integration eliminates these drawbacks by integrating and empowering CRM systems and other sales tools with the existing infrastructure. For example, at the optimum point during a customer interaction, screen-pops or other actions could force the agent to offer the customer a new product or service. Legacy data, IVR, real time, and other applications across channels and lines of business can also be integrated with the CRM or existing systems to reduce data entry, navigation, and processes. Finally, desktop integration reduces training by only providing the information, screens, and procedures necessary to provide customer service. Routines and other context-specific help can be integrated into the desktop to guide an agent through specific processes and screens.

Desktop integration takes advantage of each interaction with every customer by improving productivity and providing the information to sell new products and services where it has the greatest impact – at the point of contact. By creating an intelligent enterprise desktop that fully integrates CRM with the other systems, organizations will finally begin to realize the benefits of a CRM-driven sales process, higher customer satisfaction, improved productivity, and an increase in the enterprise’s bottom line.