Virtual contact management: an alternative route to CRM; Think about the last time you called your bank, tech support or a catalog. Unless you are a preferred customer, your experience may not have been as pleasant as you had wished.

You may have endured poorly designed IVR menus that make your fingers go numb from stabbing the telephone touchpad, or you may have been forced to speak like you're chatting to a two-year-old. The live agent zero-out is hard to find or is nonexistent.

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You are put on eternity hold for live agents. Or after a few minutes with one, he or she informs you that you need to talk to a supervisor or to another department--and so your call is transferred and the process starts anew.

Now recall the last time you dialed your doctor after hours because your child was running a fever. Or remember when the new toilet you put in over the weekend forced you to go to your backup plan, i.e., calling the plumber. Or think of when you called your attorney's office on a holiday or after hours with a question.

Remember how these calls were handled, with those calm, courteous voices that listened and asked a few questions. Their quick responses, such as taking a message, scheduling an appointment, opening a trouble ticket, providing a number to call, paging a professional or patching you through to the right person, probably made you feel you were getting the service you needed.

What you experienced in the second instance (i.e., when calling the doctor, plumber or attorney) is virtual contact management (VCM). VCM is the evolution of traditional telephone answering services (TAS). VCM couples sophisticated contact center technology with traditional telephone answering services to provide a complete range of multimedia contact management services.

VCM is the alternative route to customer relationship management (CRM). It turns traditional contact center customer handling, such as when reaching a bank, catalog or tech support in the first set of instances, on its head.

The heart of CRM methodology is the mistakenly called "Pareto Principle," which states that 20 percent of customers produce 80 percent of the value, otherwise known as the "20/80" rule.

Yet instead of making the 80 percent go through IVR first and then zero-out to live agents, VCM first has all calls answered by live agents, who then triage the inquiries and give callers a range of options depending on their value. These include no-wait IVR response; offers to visit a Web site; hot-transfer to professionals who can help them if they are available; setting appointments; voice mail; and paging.

The virtue of VCM in CRM is that it recognizes that people prefer to talk to people. Those agents who answer the calls not only identify the callers but make that personal connection between them and the enterprise.

VCM allows cost-saving methods, such as IVR, to shine. Buyers are more willing to "talk" to a computer because either they initially spoke to a person or the IVR has perfectly responded to the need. Imagine being able to opt in to an IVR that you know will help you prior to you hitting the first button.

The information that VCM-enabled agents gather from customers facilitates targeted offers, better service and better retention through discovering issues. That is also key to CRM.

VCM slices handle time and costs by quickly finding out what callers are inquiring about, asking simple questions, entering issues and orders online and directing customers to the correct people.

VCM is also the best answer to handling the e-mail deluge while lowering response times and hiking customer retention. Live agents sort through inboxes and deleted folders for sales leads, service questions and other urgent messages that would have been lost or discarded by spam filters. VCM Web chat engages site visitors in the sales process that you may have otherwise missed.

The Limitation Of Traditional CRM Delivery

There are powerful reasons for organizations that sell or provide services through traditional contact center delivery, in-house or outsourced, to take the VCM road instead.

Despite massive investments made by contact centers in new and upgraded PBX, ACD, CTI, IVR and contact management solutions, many customers still do not like the service that contact centers provide. Those results show up in customer satisfaction surveys, call monitoring, complaints, bad press and possibly (though not always) in declining sales and revenues.

As one of many such examples, Connell Associates reported in 2004 that nearly 45 percent of respondents were dissatisfied with their customer service. The number climbed to over 60 percent for Web service and 70 percent for IVR self-service; 59 percent found IVR frustrating to use.

Here's the rub: determining who is a "top 20" or a "bottom 80" in CRM methodology is an inexact science. The technology tools cannot predict variables that affect buying patterns. These are changes in need, in likes/dislikes, and in disposable income such as promotions, demotions, new jobs and layoffs, marriages, births and deaths.

What can be predicted is that many of those customers who are "bottom 80s" may tell an organization to get lost when they become eligible to be "top 20s" if they disliked the service they had received. They will spend more of their new money elsewhere.

Also, it still takes considerable time, money and commitment to do traditional contact center CRM right. Tools such as advanced speech recognition (e.g., the system behind Amtrak's "Julie") are expensive and require installation and debugging. These products are generally beyond the resources of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

To cut traditional contact center-handled CRM costs and improve customer service, many contact centers have been shifting customer handling offshore.

Yet in too many instances, offshoring has worsened customer relations and retention because foreign agents often do not have a cultural affinity with Americans. Cost savings have turned out to be less than forecasted because misunderstandings have lengthened call times. There are reportedly more repeat calls and escalations to United States contact centers; hence the high-profile repatriation of contact centers by Dell's business arm and by Lehman Bros.

Most offshoring work has been for high-volume calls from larger companies. The program's involved setup, training and management complexities preclude SMEs from locating or outsourcing offshore.

These factors--highly problematic contact center technology implementation costs and offshore challenges--may be blessings in disguise for SMEs.

By going the VCM route, they can obtain critical customer service advantages while ensuring that cost-saving methods, such as IVR, are correctly deployed. That's key to their survival against their bigger competition.

Contractors and professionals have long relied on VCM, especially after hours, when many of their most urgent calls come in. If they did miss those urgent calls, the results would truly be catastrophic all the way around.

The Virtual Contact Management Approach

VCM delivers better-quality service because agents establish instant rapport with customers by listening and responding to their needs. The basic VCM tasks are straightforward: answering the contacts; asking questions; capturing messages; and, if need be, warm transferring the customers. Training is thorough, and agents are monitored for quality assurance. The agents are skilled in multitasking, quick thinking and typing, with the ability to work well under pressure.

Yet VCM can also include complex tasks, such as order entry and first-level help desk, also requiring additional training.

Consequently, the work for contact center agents is varied and interesting, which keeps employees motivated and prepared. The switch can fire them a simple TAS call or e-mail one minute, and then a five-minute customer service e-mail the next.

VCM enables more contacts to be processed. A simple call, wherein agents identify callers and direct them to someone or to a system to best help them, takes a mere 45 seconds and 60 seconds.

Yet because VCM agents screen contacts and direct them into self-service, voice mail and messages, escalations are minimized, which cuts costs by making better use of the marketing, sales or IT professionals' time. Having leads, service requests and appointments delivered to them avoids repeating the same questions or filling out forms when they talk to customers.

Total talk time is less because multiple escalations, long queues and IVR drill times before zeroing out are avoided. Both you and the customers win.

Because VCM also incorporates basic contact center functionality, these agents can take on tasks such as cross-selling/upselling, outbound customer care and telesales.

VCM applications can be networked across multiple contact centers. You can employ skills-based routing. The same traditional methods are still able in VCM: touch-tone selection of language preference on the auto-attendant or support for special DID numbers.

The technology required to support VCM is affordable, rugged, proven and scalable. There are vendors that have long supplied switches that support TAS and voice mail as well as contact center applications. Because the actual interactions are short and simple, IVR specifications and programming requirements are also less expensive and less complex.

Enabling VCM

VCM implementation is relatively easy, in theory. Most organizations already have some VCM in place for their administrative functions that are triaged by their front-desk receptionists.

These individuals undertake the same tasks that VCM agents carry out. They answer, triage and direct people and calls. When that person goes home, these calls are often outsourced to answering/telemessaging service bureaus. This model is then easily moved to customer service and order processing.

If and when an enterprise decides to shift its contact handling from a traditional model to the VCM model, there are several factors to consider.

There is a wider and less predictable range of call lengths and volumes that must be planned for. They can include the messaging call, online appointment scheduling, order processing, trouble ticket interaction, or e-mail response and chat.

Also, existing contact centers may not be set up or have the right tools to efficiently process and measure VCM, so equipment investments are very important.

The centers' switches must have scripting, voice mail, paging and multiple-message retrieval options that include e-mail, fax, PDA and phone to support VCM. This is in addition to automatic call distribution and reporting. Call recording is a must, both to protect enterprises if disputes arise and to check on contact center agent performance.

Outsourcing to service bureaus that have TAS/VCM equipment as well as traditional contact center experience is a viable option to in-house VCM program setup management.

These firms provide after-hours handling, flexibility and expertise at affordable prices. They are Web-enabled to supply services such as online order entry and e-mail response. They have IVR, auto-attendant and the ability to link their contact centers' databases into those of clients' for seamless CRM.

These bureaus know TAS and messaging extremely well, and they have successful contact center teams. A few of these vendors have multiple networked locations that add capacity and provide disaster backup.

There are many qualified service providers. There is also a professional development organization, the Association of TeleServices International (www.atsi.org), which sponsors a rigorously judged awards-of-excellence program. ATSI, founded in 1942, is the grandfather of all contact center organizations.

When planning a VCM strategy, look at and test IVR diversion rates. You may find more people willing to use IVR if they first spoke with a live agent, there-by reducing staff demand and costs. No matter how an enterprise delivers VCM, whether with in-house contact centers or through a qualified outsourcer, it will find the CRM route worth the trip.

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By Gary A. Pudles

The AnswerNet Network

Gary A. Pudles is the founder and CEO of the AnswerNet Network. Pudles was formerly vice president and general counsel of Apex Site Management, the U.S.'s largest telecommunications real estate management firm. He was manager of real estate for American Personal Communications, the first operational PCS network in the U.S. The AnswerNet Network, founded in 1998, is a supplier of outsourced contact center services including telemessaging (telephone answering and voice mail), customer service, help desk, telemarketing and fulfillment. It has over 1,600 seats in 53+ contact centers across the U.S. and Canada.