Make CRM Smarter

Or the technology could locate instances where customers, in the course of their conversations with agents, indicated problems finding information on their own through web self-service. Or it could flag repeat callers, which could mean that customers are not getting the right information the first time around.

Then, once speech analytics systems have identified the issues, companies can set up rules whereby the appropriate teams for action are automatically notified, Venket says.

Analytics plays another, equally important role. Speech analytics should be used alongside search analytics, which Petouhoff says “together are the key to improving the success of knowledge management.”

Analytics, she adds, can proactively identify content gaps, improve the relevance scores of the content, and recognize content consumption trends.

John Ragsdale, vice president and research director at the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), points to another benefit of analytics. The software, he says, can record which knowledge article was used to solve each case and thereby identify which content is used most often—a measurement that would be hard to make without analytics because employees would be required to manually link cases to knowledge base articles.

THE VALUE PROPOSITION

While it’s true that most companies have yet to even begin discussing CRM and KM integrations, for companies that have already done so, the benefits of coupling the two systems have been substantial. It means having information at the fingertips of their customer service agents more quickly, reducing the time it takes for them to resolve customer issues. Faster incident resolution, in turn, leads to shorter call handling and hold times, lower abandon rates, increased agent productivity, and higher first-contact resolution rates, all of which can lower costs and lead to happier customers and agents.

Since financial services provider Corptax integrated RightAnswers’ KM and web self-service into its NetSuite CRM system, it has improved agent satisfaction and retention, which Corptax says is now four times the industry average.

Integration can also reduce support costs by at least 25 percent, increase customer satisfaction scores by 12 percent, and reduce time to answer by anywhere from 20 percent to 80 percent, according to data collected by research firm Gartner.

Additionally, in the average call center, roughly 20 percent of all customer inquiries are escalated to more expensive tier-two support, but with a comprehensive CRM and KM integration, analysts at Gartner have estimated that such escalation can be reduced to 5 percent.

Other escalations can be prevented as well, as tightly integrated KM and CRM have the potential to keep customers in web self-service, thereby reducing calls to the contact center entirely. One of the biggest reasons customers pick up the phone is because they couldn’t find answers or resolve problems on company websites. CEB reported recently that 58 percent of callers in a survey of nearly 18,000 consumers had unsuccessfully tried self-service on company websites prior to reaching out to the contact center.

At Corptax, 85 percent of customer service requests are now received through the RightAnswers customer self-service portal, and customer satisfaction scores remain greater than 96 percent, according to Lloyd Howlett, the company’s vice president of support and customer operations.

The goal is for the customer to find answers on his own, but when he can’t and leaves self-service and moves to the phone channel, the agent who takes the call should know which articles he’s already seen and whether they were helpful. Integrated CRM and KM technologies can do that. “When a problem does occur and they call for help, you can see what sort of issues they have been searching online [so that you aren’t forcing] them through solutions they have already tried,” Ragsdale says.

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