Contact Management

Technology that supports all contact management processes, customer relevant information and internal organizational aspects, is an important issue in this era of continuous informationflows.

To support customers technology should support all the common used electronic communication channels, like telephone, E-Mail, World Wide Web, Fax, Interactive Voice Response. It should also be prepared to support "new" electronic channels like WAP, SMS, Video, etc., and more important it should also provide employees who have personal contact with customer with proper tools.
But this is only one side of the technical picture.
Another important impact of the technology within the contact management concept is the use of applications that represents the business rules.

The main challenge within customer focussed technology is the integration of all communication channels with all applications, and the integration of all application with the existing back-end and legacy systems.

Technology that is designed around products and services (including billing systems or logistical / ERP systems) has to be redesigned toward a customer contact platform on the one hand side and an information-providing platform on the other hand side. In between applications can be implemented in which the business rules are adapted.

The applications used within an customer focussed architecture contain the following modules:
- Contact routing: this functionality makes sure customer request coming in via all possible communication channels are routed to the best possible communication partner within the organization. This can also be a computersystem. In case of external communication (outbound) the contact routing functionality also is in charge of the communication process, including the communication partner, time of communication and the use of the communication channel.
- Employee support: this functionality ensures a professional and efficient interaction with the customer by supporting the employees with the processflows for all types of requests (scripts). The required functionality consists of a user friendly screen lay-out, easy adaptible scripts with up- and cross-selling possibilities and workflow management to support ongoing activities and an agenda.
- Management information: this functionality collects all information within the customer contact and the entire customer interaction (cradle-to-grave). The information includes real-time information for operational management and escalation procedures, as well as historical information used for productivity figures, Service level agreements, marketing feedback and management purposes.
- Workforce management: because employees are the most valuable asset for an organization, the skills and know-how of those employees should be used in the best possible way. Of course the employee costs are the biggest cost-factor within a communication center, therefore proper planning of employees can reduce costs and provide a postive ROI for workforce management tools.
Campaign and event management: this functionality is part of the back office database marketing system. It includes campaign management functionality and provided personalized information about customers and specific customer events.

Products and suppliers of such tools and applications have been developing their solutions or bought specific technology to extend existing solutions. Depending on the requirements two main area's of technology are avialable on the market: the suite (all-in one) and the best-of-breed products. An overview of those products and suppliers is hard to maintain because of the speed of change within the market. Still we have tried to provide an overview of the most common tools and their origin... more:
About CRM Products and Suppliers ->
About Products and Suppliers regarding Access Channels ->

In an attempt to provide you with a roadmap for evaluation and selection of such a tool we developed the following method that after a couple of projects and adaptation can now be called a proven methodology.
How to proceed when evaluating and selecting a tool and its supplier ->

To overcome the challenges and solve the problems with integration of all components within a customer focused architecture, we use a functional model that provides an overview of the entire functional architecture and clearly positions the different components within the technology-architecture.
This model is based upon McKinsey's hub & spoke model, and is adapted especially for contact management architectures that uses excisting legacy systems.

Based on Gartners three tier model that involves the databases, applications and on top the presentation layer, the hub & spoke model integrates a front office hub and back office hub to connect the three "tiers".
The advantage of this model the possibility to extend the architecture geografically by extending the hubs. This provides all central based functionality to remote locations.

An interesting case of the use of this model within the transportation, as well as the insurance industry....more ->