Siebel Takes Aim At Do Not Call Registry

In response to the national Do-Not-Call (DNC) registry, which goes into effect next month, Siebel Systems yesterday introduced its Siebel Contact Center Performance Solution and the Siebel Sales Performance Solution to help turn call centers into profit centers. The Do-Not-Call registry is making it harder for telemarketers and outbound sales organizations to sell to customers who wish not to be solicited. By Labor Day weekend 2003 , more than 48 million phone numbers were registered with the Do-Not-Call registry, of which, 6 million registered over the holiday weekend to beat the August 31 deadline, which requires telemarketers to stop calling after October 1. To make up for lost revenue opportunities associated with DNC compliance, Siebel is encouraging customers to capitalize on inbound service calls by turning them into sales calls. To do this Siebel executives maintain CSRs need the right tools. The tools of choice include scorecards and analytics capabilities to provide employees with a view of key performance indicators, communication and productivity tools to keep sales reps and CSRs abreast of the latest corporate strategy and processes, performance management and compensation management applications, training and competency management solutions to track and improve employee skills, and employee service capabilities to automate administrative tasks. "It's the next generation of call center and sales development that will make CRM successful," says Anthony Deighton, general manager of Siebel ERM. The impact of the DNC registry will be significant, Deighton says. "We're going to be restricted on how much outbound sales we can do. No longer can you rely on a call center to only provide inbound service." Agents, he adds, must start cross-selling and upselling to customers calling in to the contact center. Deighton says that FleetBoston Financial Corp. increased cross-sell revenue by 15 percent after it implemented Siebel Call Center and Sales Performance Solutions as a single information portal for customer-facing employees. In addition to cross-selling and upselling, the Siebel products also address another significant problem common in the call center industry--high agent-turnover rate. "One of the biggest challenge a call center faces is agent churn. What keeps a call center manager up at night is, How do I keep agents happy? How do I build an education plan that meets the needs of ever changing world of product education?" says Cory Wiegert, director of Siebel Contact Center. He adds the Siebel add-on solutions meet those challenges by putting together career plans, finding objectives to meet those plans, and putting key performance indicators in place for agents and mangers to balance scorecards. The Siebel applications, which grew out of Siebel ERM, are currently shipping and can be purchased as separately licensable products on top of Siebel CRM or another CRM suite.