The Benefits of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in Contact Center Analytics
The main features of CRM are contact management, track customer interactions, schedule tasks and set up reminders. When the functions are implemented well and the CRM used properly, the benefits of customer relationship management far outweigh their functional properties. Not only can businesses improve the quality and consistency of their relationships with customers, they can also increase revenue, manage sales pipeline, catch and nurture leads, send better marketing campaigns, manage teams, run customer service reports, and even analyze data.
Nearly all contact centers use some sort of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to manage customer information. The use of a centralized database to maintain valuable information on a customer’s activities throughout their journey with the business empowers contact center agents to better understand the customer and how to address their contact reasons.
As contact center analytics programs grow to include a greater number of data and interaction channels year over year, the CRM system can be both a significant data input for analysis as well as a powerful mechanism by which to take action against analytics insights.
The Benefits of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for Sales
Historically and into today, CRM systems satisfy a need for centralized information on customers in a sales cycle with a business. Making it possible to track customers by sales cycle phase or by past purchases, for example, helps sales personnel be more informed and targeted with their communications so they can close deals faster. It also makes the information available to anyone in the organization – for example, if a marketing campaign is launched for a particular product, communications can be prevented from going to customers who already own the product.
But just as managing prospect and customer sales relationships is critical, so is sustaining and maintaining their loyalty with service and customer experience excellence. It is far cheaper to put effort into keeping a client than to have to win an entirely new one. One particularly useful element with a CRM used by both the sales organization and the contact centers simultaneously is in mobilizing the contact center employees to act as sales representatives.
By tapping into a customer’s history and understanding past purchases, agents in the contact center can make suggestions for both cross-sell and up-sell even when a customer is making contact for an unrelated issue.
The Benefits of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for Customer Loyalty
As previously mentioned, having an integrated CRM system that reaches across the organization makes it far easier for contact center agents to have more personalized and relevant discussions for each customer interaction, which builds brand loyalty. What’s more, CRM systems have built in reminder systems to ensure critical follow-up communications such as appointment reminders or follow-up emails. This helps everyone in an organization maintain and grow the customer relationship over time.
Using CRM information as a data channel for an interaction analytics program is another great way to gain insights. These analytics solutions are tailored specifically for mining stored contact center interactions between customers and agents for insights, and have proven to be especially helpful for increasing customer loyalty. With interaction analytics, customer interactions can be analyzed any number of ways for any number of purposes, but when analyzing specifically for customer loyalty and tapping into CRM information, looking into historic data scenarios such as the following can be very helpful:
- How long they have been a customer
- When they last made a purchase
- Sentiment metrics on each interaction
- Reasons for contacting the business
This information can be made available directly to anyone accessing a customer account, but using analytics can help push the relationship to the next step by predicting the likelihood that the customer might be amenable to a new sales offer, or the likelihood that the customer might leave within the next 30-60 days.
In both cases, businesses can build workflows around these predictions. For a customer with a high likelihood to purchase score, a contact center agent can be prompted in real-time to make a sales offer, or that interaction can be automatically sent along a specialized workflow to a sales queue for proactive outreach to make the sales offer. On the other hand, if a customer exhibits a high likelihood to churn, that interaction can be sent along a workflow to a customer care queue for proactive outreach to repair the broken relationship.
By understanding these critical data points holistically and individually, meaningful insights can be gained that can help drive new revenue, sustained revenue (via increased customer loyalty), and cost savings with streamlined and targeted communications.
The Benefits of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with Omnichannel Analytics
The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database is an invaluable channel for providing data about customers and their journeys with the business. But what if you could ask each customer deeper questions such as:
- How do you feel about our brand?
- What communication channel do you prefer?
- Have you had positive or negative interactions with our business over time?
- What interactions have you had with our business, digitally or with a contact center?
Using omnichannel analytics can provide those answers, because in many cases the conversations these customers have with a business reveal exactly how they feel, what they prefer, and whether their experiences with the business have been positive or negative. Using omnichannel analytics can help close the gap between issues and opportunities arising, and businesses taking action against them quickly and decisively.
NICE Nexidia is a leader in the Customer Journey and Speech Analytics markets, providing a complete Customer Engagement Analytics Framework that includes Nexidia Analytics, ENLIGHTEN interpretive and predictive behavioral analytics, IVR Optimization, Predictive Behavioral Routing, and Quality Management. Built on a solid foundation of technology and architecture developed by in-house research and development teams, Nexidia Customer Engagement Analytics reaches above and beyond with unmatched secure cloud services and managed analytics services that have ensured clients’ success year in and year out, for over 15 years.