September 4, 2000

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CRM And Call Centers Defined

By Mitzi Waltz

n its most basic form, customer-relationship management is a business model, not a piece of software. CRM aims to make sure that everyone who contacts a company gets the information or assistance they need, while also ensuring that everyone who deals with customers can access the entire organization's hoard of data about each customer. That knowledge base should let everyone from the salespeople to the technical support crew be more proactive and responsive, and it also should make more efficient use of telephony and database resources.

CRM software keeps track of incoming calls, E-mail, faxes, Web hits, and, in some cases, letters and wireless communications. It generates reports that help companies anticipate and respond to customer needs.

For example, if a company's employees have logged 18 calls to tech support in a week, that information could generate a visit from a field tech to solve the problem on-site, a written apology, or even a visit from a salesperson with a solution to the underlying problem.

Call-center applications, on the other hand, derive from hardware and personnel functions. Like the PBX-enabled phone banks that preceded them, today's call centers are tightly focused on routing communications to the right person in the right department: help desk, sales, or customer service, for example. Most have tools or add-on modules for handling both incoming communications and outgoing communications, such as sales calls.

There are also options for supporting groups, ranging from a dozen tech-support reps working from their homes on up to giant cube farms with hundreds of customer-service reps.

During the past decade, call-center applications gradually have been bulked out with standalone applications and modules that attempt to tie in E-mail and Web inquiries, and recently with occasional forays into voice-over-IP functionality.

Return to main story, "CRM And Call Centers Get Together."

Illustration by Greg Stevenson

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