CRM Knowlegde Base

by: Aina Neva Fiati - www.ThinkAboutCRM.com

In a nutshell, open source CRM software is any sort of program which deals with CRM – Customer Relationship Management – and can be changed by any software developer or even user themselves thanks to the publicly available source code. A couple of years ago, open source CRM software wasn’t even thought about and it was used mainly for other things. However, things have changed and now open source CRM software is gaining increased respect and popularity.

For those wanting to build their own or make a few changes to the existing CRM software, free contact program management is ideal. Open source software will not provide as much as the high-end CRM software will but open source CRM’s high flexibility makes it the ultimate choice of an awful lot of businesses. In addition, over the past few years open source CRM has come quite a long way in terms of providing to businesses.

by: Aina Neva Fiati - www.ThinkAboutCRM.com

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is defined as an information system which integrates such aspects as planning, scheduling as well as the control of pre and post-sale activities within various businesses. It is also a series of business strategies and technologies used to create intimate client/customer relationships.

CRM analysts and statisticians study valuable information related to different customer habits and behaviour so they are able to create methods aimed at increasing productivity, popularity and of course profit. Meanwhile, automated CRM converts analysed data into marketing strategies for firms.

CRM is beneficial in a number of different ways. For instance, it provides managers with critical tools used to analyse consumer behaviour, improve business integration and provide valuable feedback to fully understand the corporation’s return on investment or ROI.

It’s just a few minutes a day. What’s the big deal?
Can you quantify the impact that a lack of schedule adherence has on your call center?

This article will offer several approaches for putting some numbers to your schedule adherence or lack of it.

Impact on Service, Occupancy, and Cost

The table below shows what happens when we have 350 calls per hour with an average handle time of 320 seconds (or 62 erlangs of workload). Let’s assume we had planned to have 69 bodies in chairs to handle those calls in order to deliver an ASA of less than 20 seconds. What happens if just 5% of our staff (in this case, just 4 people) are not adhering to their work schedule during this period? Note what happens with 65 staff in place.

(Source: Wikipedia)

So, what is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)? And what are the real benefits for your company? Building sustainable and successful relationships with a large customer base is not the easiest thing to do and will have a direct impact on many core operational processes from product development to debt recovery. It is not purely a technical issue. It is not only about software implementation. And it is not just about sales. It is about the interactions of the entire business with your customers.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) covers methods and technologies used by companies to manage their relationships with clients. Information stored on existing customers (and potential customers) is analyzed and used to this end. Automated CRM processes are often used to generate automatic personalized marketing based on the customer information stored in the system.

1.1 IMPLEMENTING CRM

CRM is a corporate level strategy, focusing on creating and maintaining relationships with customers. Several commercial CRM software packages are available which vary in their approach to CRM. However, CRM is not a technology itself, but rather a holistic approach to an organization’s philosophy, placing the emphasis firmly on the customer. CRM governs an organization’s philosophy at all levels, including policies and processes, front of house customer service, employee training, marketing, systems and information management. CRM systems are integrated end-to-end across marketing, sales and customer service. A CRM system should:

• Identify factors important to clients
• Promote a customer-oriented philosophy
• Adopt customer-based measures
• Develop end-to-end processes to serve customers
• Provide successful customer support
• Handle customer complaints
• Track all aspects of sales

The evolution of a simple call center into a multi-channel contact center doesn’t just happen overnight. You many need to add or upgrade technologies, and certainly staff skills will need to expand as customer contacts begin to include email and Web chat in addition to incoming calls. It’s also important to re-think what performance measurements are important for this new breed of operation. Are the measures of performance that have served you well in the call center the same ones that will determine how well the multi-channel contact center is working?

This article will examine the “top twenty” performance measures commonly associated with personnel and the processes in today’s multi-channel center. The standard categories of service, quality, efficiency, and profitability will be used as the basis for the guide. For each of these, we’ll take a look at why some of the “golden oldies” will still work just fine into the 21st Century and which ones need to be a “remix” in order to keep up with the times. (Note: The term “call center” will be used to refer to a simple, incoming telephone call center and the term “contact center” will be used to address the needs of the multi-channel contact center.)

Whether manually created or developed through workforce management systems, once a set of workforce schedules has been carefully devised, it’s critical that your staff sticks to the plan. But one of the hardest things to manage in many call centers is getting agents to adhere to their daily work schedules. Most think, “Hey, there are dozens of other people on the phones now. What possible difference could it make if I just log off a few minutes early for my break? Just one person can’t possibly make that much difference.” Sound familiar?

Schedule adherence can be improved in many cases with a little education. Helping your staff understand what impact one individual agent has on service can go a long way in getting them to stick to their planned schedule.