I’m Really Just One Person
Author: Roger Sumner
I have a cell phone, DSL service and long-distance telephone service. My cell phone company has merged with my long-distance provider, which now also owns my DSL company. Confused yet? I am too. Especially when I call my new, mega-telecommunications provider to talk about my long-distance service and the agent tries to sell me a DSL service that I already use.
This problem is not at all unique to the telecommunications industry. In fact, with the vast consolidation we have seen in recent years, companies in various industries are running into this same issue. In general, they are having difficulty merging back-end database systems — such as CRM, order management, or billing — that contain customer information from legacy companies. Unfortunately, this is causing consumers to be represented multiple times in parallel, siloed systems. As a result, companies can’t see when they’re dealing with the same person or someone different. And, consumers become agitated when they are forced to explain that they already use a particular product or service.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, you can pull and scrub data from disparate systems using computer telephony integration (CTI) functionality and a universal desktop, and give your agents one, comprehensive view of each customer. This approach, which would allow your agents to view all previous customer contacts, regardless of method (telephone, email or chat), would make interacting with customers much more straightforward and lead to better overall customer experiences. Integrating these systems would also mean that you could implement a combined billing solution and ultimately gain the additional information you need for customer segmentation so that you could effectively cross-sell and up-sell.
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