The Big Picture - Let the Customer Do the Work

This is another entry in what I hope to be a series of Big Picture posts that are more about CRM technology strategy than step by step config or code snippets. My last post kicket it off, discussing how automation is where the value is. I stand by that statement but I should atleast add one very important addendum. I drew a picture of a CRM implementation as starting a huge data model in which your client can begin collecting lots of detailed information about customers and their transactions. Transactions involve not just their leads and orders, but also the service requests, activities, and other custom task records which together create a profile of a customer's interactions with the client. Automation generally targets the transaction side of that data model. For instance, when a customer calls in to report a problem, an automation project could result in a series of service requests automatically generated and assigned to the right people at the right time with the right attributes set describing work that needs to be done to address that problem.


Another great way to "automate" though is to actually eliminate the layers between the customer and the data representing them. In other words, let customers manage their own data wherever possible. This makes the most sense in updating profile information like name and address corrections, but it can get far more complex depending on the nature of the client's business. The tools to implent this can housed within Siebel through eService, etc, or external (a third party or custom built portal application that integrates to Siebel). Either way, customer updates directly updates master data in the Siebel database (or wherever the customer master is stored).


I have been at clients that are afraid of this paradigm, afraid that user's will enter garbage data, but mainly afraid of losing control. While it makes some sense to build a light validation framework around these interfaces, the goal of the framework should be to make things easier for the customer, not to lock down data. At the end of the day, the customer owns their relationship with the client and it is not in their interest to purposefully corrupt this data. Plus anyone interested in doing so can just as easily do so over the phone. Allowing customer's to directly update as much of their profile as your client's business allows should reduce the service request volume handled by the client's support staff. At a minimum, the creation of service requests through the internet can smooth out call center operations reducing peak call times by rerouting some of those calls to the web, and reducing downtime by providing emails to respond to in the interim between call peaks.


This concept applies to Sales as well as Service organizations. The ability to actually complete orders over the internet though will be largely constrained by the complexity of the product being sold. Clients will have to weigh the incremental value of making some additional sales over the internet (a universe of prospective customers vs just those the in house sales staff can explicitly reach) vs the potentially reduced margins of a simplified product offering capable of being sold in this way.