Why contact center automation would be scary darkness without CRM?

CRM is, first of all, a system that stores and manages information about all your interactions with business clients. Based on this information and its processing, business and other decisions can be made.

How exactly does CRM work in practice? And why would automation be impossible without data quality management?

Types of contact centers

From the point of view of CRM, we can talk about two types of call centers. The first are active , marketing contact centers. They are responsible for pre-sales: they trade, collect orders, conduct campaigns among potential customers. The second type of contact centers - passive , supporting. They take care of after-sales service, thereby providing services to existing customers in relation to the goods they acquire. Customers can report a problem or complaint, process an order, find out the delivery status, get product assistance, etc.
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CRM can greatly help both contact points. PBX and interconnected channels (chat bots, video calls, email campaigns, Facebook and other social networking sites, instant messaging) are tightly integrated and work in the most efficient way for the operator.

This makes life easier for call center managers, campaign operators and individual “queue” administrators.

CRM and support services

For example, in the case of passive contact centers, the so-called referral services, CRM helps to find and combine the most common requests and support for each level.

When the first level of the contact center does not know, for example, product malfunction, it switches to the second level or sends it to technology instead, etc. When deciding how to deal with a specific customer due to its history, specific products purchased, their number, etc., it plays an indispensable role. Otherwise, this would be just a subjective special decision of the operator, not supported by the data.

Similarly, CRM helps you customize the sequence of steps or requests . For example, the call center calls the operator. This is followed by operator requests, again based on specific customer information, product failure history, etc.

Another customer may be interested in where his order is located . In this case, the task of the CRM system is to provide the center operator with the maximum amount of information needed to track the order, with a minimum of clicks and elapsed time.

It looks simple, but in practice programming such things is quite difficult. In addition, it is also necessary to take into account the less standard cases where someone, for example, calls from his phone to report a problem with his grandmother. Thus, the operator can not get a phone number, and it all starts with checking who is on the other side. Even more difficult in CRM is the correct programming of the transfer of requests between the individual “layers” of a given company.

CRM and marketing contact centers

With active ( marketing ) contact centers, everything is a bit easier compared to support services. Someone in the field of marketing or commerce will offer such a campaign as OSAGO.

The main contacts will be prepared, then CRM provides a vital opportunity to check these contacts - are there any email addresses or phone numbers at all and are they assigned to some customers? The system also organizes filtering of contacts for which the company does not have rights. Can I send an email with a sale to this person? Or just the so-called opt-in, a well-defined question, can I solve this problem with the help of campaigns?

Then comes the execution of the campaign — via email, SMS, phone calls, Facebook, etc. CRM provides a number of actions for this implementation, for example, by sending or collecting data for evaluation.
Automation of activity, including artificial intelligence, plays an important role in this. Although it would be better to talk about some limited machine learning.

Telesales

An important role in marketing contact centers is also played by sellers, i.e. marketing traders . They do not sell anything to the buyer, and answer basic questions. They call, for example, potential customers who, during the campaign, extracted information from various parts of the CRM aggregate information that they might be interested in the product, but who do not have sufficient information or ambiguities and doubts about this.

But today, only telesales can replace a chat robot ("chatbot"). They are already relatively widespread, and many companies that do not use them are considering using them.

Chatbot scans the question and answer map and, based on the answers, can use the script to correctly evaluate what to ask. But his big problem is that he cannot yet recognize emotions. He evaluates the content, but not the tone of voice, irony, etc., so that the real intention of a potential client can be completely misjudged in the robot chat. At the same time, telephone operators are still indispensable.

Why would automation be impossible without data quality management?

Data Quality Management (DQM) is closely related to all of the above. This is a discipline related to providing the right data to the right people (working with data within the company) or, in the context of contact centers, sending the wrong data to the wrong people, for example, a business proposal by email that you cannot send for legal reasons.

DQM is at the very heart of automation, because the contact center will never work without the right data.

CRM as an invaluable call center assistant

From all the examples in the text, it is clear that CRM can help in the field of contact centers, be it help services or marketing centers. Both of these groups should have very well processed and cleaned data, and this would not be possible without CRM. The CRM system provides a tool for identifying, correcting, merging, and dividing data. It also helps you create summary data, for example, to find out that you need one additional operator. And it evaluates the success of individual components.

We can say that contact center automation without CRM would be impossible. And that the success of individual centers largely depends on the quality of the CRM system and the correctness of its use.