January 26th, 2005
Customer integration points
Over the past five years, many CIOs have put significant effort into
deploying customer relationship management (CRM) systems. These systems
provide a single view of the customer for the sales organization and give
real IT support to activities that were previously handled in
spreadsheets, address books, and e-mail. Getting these systems integrated
into the business isn’t easy–just mentioning CRM is enough to make many
CIOs groan.
Given that history, the last thing most IT executives want to hear is that
the job isn’t finished. Even so, it’s clear that there’s still plenty of
work left to do. Think of all the places that your organization and customers
interact. Here’s a few:
- Customer service, including phone, chat, e-mail, & forums
- Pre-sales portals
- Sales support (traditional CRM)
- Warranty registrations
- Pro-active notifications such as recalls
Gartner has coined a term, “customer
interaction hub,” to describe the
integrated system that supports these customer touchpoints in a
coordinated way. I think “hub” is an unfortunate term because it brings
to mind a thing that you install. In fact, no one can sell you a customer
interaction hub. You can buy services and tools, but because every
company has unique interactions with its customers, its going to need to
integrate and coordinate those interactions in a custom way.
Last year, in a column I
wrote on CIH systems, I talked about this complexity:
In the past, companies have outsourced customer support for one simple
reason: cost. The goal is to provide a degree of customer support at the
cheapest price possible. The emergence of CIH and the integration of
pre-sales and post-sales customer portals, however, adds a new reason to
outsource customer interaction: complexity. Few companies want to develop
the competencies and hire the people required to create full-scale customer
interaction portals that also include live help agents who seamlessly
integrate into the support system.
Gartner doesn’t think that the CIH marketplace will fully develop until
2007. Part of the reason for this is that CIH systems are incredibly
sophisticated. They typically include corporate portal systems, document
management systems, content management systems, dynamic knowledge-bases
for intelligently presenting help to the user and the ability to integrate
with a variety of customer relationship management (CRM) systems such as
Siebel or Salesforce.com as well as call-center telephone systems. You
can’t simply buy these pieces and think they’ll all work together; they
have to be integrated.
Much of this integration will be built on top of an expanding set of Web
services interfaces that vendors of the various components in the CIH are
offering. Enterprise software is becoming more modular and that makes
the integration job possible, albeit still not easy. What makes it so
hard? The same thing that makes every enterprise project so hard: making
CIH work requires transforming the business.
You’re not going to build a customer interaction hub tomorrow, but you
can start planning and doing things now that lead to better integration of
your customer interaction systems. One thing almost every business can do
to make CIH systems a reality is pay attention to their digital identity
infrastructure. If you have more than one way to identity your customers,
figure out how to link those systems. You can’t have a common view of the
customer data if you can’t tell which records belong to the same customer.
Beyond that, pick something that the business-side is
telling you needs to be done. For example, the marketing department may
want better linkage between the CRM system, your
pre-sales portal, and customer service systems. Tell them the
possibilities, but make them justify the ROI. Make sure you build the
identity management work into the project because no one will give you the
money to do it on a stand-alone basis.
Phil Windley
Former Utah CIO
“Organizations Get the IT They Deserve.�
