By By Joe Fleischer and Keith Dawson for CallCenter Magazine

Customer relationship management (CRM) has come under much criticism—justifiably.

Simply put, many organizations haven't been ready for CRM.

At first, CRM literally lacked definition. These days, more companies recognize that CRM is about becoming more knowledgeable about customers, and striving continually to serve them better based on what you learn from them.
What's lacking in CRM now is perspective. Without perspective, you have no history. And CRM's history is still too short to be meaningful.

As we head into the last four months of 2003, we may think we have too much perspective. With CRM, we tend to look back and see failure where we once assumed we'd succeed.

But CRM didn't fail any more than a toddler fails at walking. And from the perspective of the two-decade history of call centers, CRM is indeed young and has yet to mature.

Maturity happens by learning and adapting. The two companies we profile, KeyBank and DYMO, are of different sizes and within different industries. One's a bank with hundreds of call center agents; the other is a manufacturer of label printers with an eight-agent center.

Both have made changes, both technologically and operationally, to make it easier for customers to get the help they need. If CRM is to earn any legitimacy beyond a buzzword, more call centers like KeyBank's and DYMO's have to present proof that CRM can work.

It's often convenient to refer to CRM software, which we'll cover in our December issue. But CRM isn't something you buy in a store. Nor is CRM a recipe where call centers can expect the same results from taking the same steps.
Like anything that runs on a machine, CRM software can't show you how to serve customers. Nor does the mere fact of possessing data about customers help you understand them.

In the end, CRM is what we've said it is all along: a process. Children learn to walk by sometimes struggling as they do so. When they're young, children follow the steps of others. It's not until they're older that they can discover the directions that their own steps can take them.

In sharing how they are improving their connections with customers, KeyBank and DYMO are contributing to a body of literature on CRM that grows not only in size, but also in stature.

It will take time, but CRM will emerge as the principle that guides customer service. When we look back years from now, and when we understand CRM better, we'll have call centers to thank for the education they provided.

BANKING ON GROWTH

Why should call centers care about CRM? At banks, for instance, branches are more conducive than call centers to fostering individual relationships between tellers and customers. A frequent visitor to a branch has a much better chance of speaking with the same person from a bank than a customer who frequently dials into the bank's call center.

Yet, ironically, it is the absence of a bond with specific individuals that establishes a customer's relationship with a bank.

Why? Customers can seek help from hundreds of agents from a bank's call center, compared to a few people at a branch. Since each agent is responsible for communicating on the bank's behalf, call centers are more efficient operations for maintaining relationships with large numbers of retail customers.

Where customers encounter difficulties is when they have to deal with separate organizations, even within the same bank, for services other than checking or saving accounts.

Likewise, call centers within banks run into challenges when their goals are to process more transactions rather than to provide more tangible value to the bank and its customers.

Cleveland, OH-based KeyBank is working to bring the operations of its call centers in line with the expectations of its customers.

During the past two years, KeyBank has integrated on-line banking, established new criteria for evaluating agents and introduced a new form of customer support at its two retail banking call centers in Buffalo, NY, and Auburn, WA.

Terry Koubele, a senior vice president with KeyBank who manages KeyBank's retail call center operation, says that the equivalent of 230 full-time agents at these sites answer 375,000 calls per month.

On-line banking is where one of KeyBank's most recent changes at its call centers has taken place.

As of the start of June, customers no longer have to dial a separate toll-free number to get help with nontechnical questions or issues with on-line banking. A call to the bank's primary toll-free number now accomplishes the same thing.

On-line banking may require financial institutions to invest in new technologies, but it doesn't necessarily change who the customers are. When handling transactions in person, by phone or on-line, increasingly, says Koubele, KeyBank is finding "it's the same client."

Customers still have the option of using the other number if they have technical questions about downloading transactions using software such as Intuit's Quicken or Microsoft Money. But if they want to stop a payment that results from an on-line transaction, or they need new passwords to access their accounts over the Internet, they dial KeyBank's main toll-free number.

Another big change, which KeyBank put into effect at the beginning of this year, is a new incentive plan for agents.
Instead of recognizing agents who process the most applications for KeyBank's services - which include checking accounts, saving accounts, credit cards, overdraft protection, mortgages and CDs—the bank recognizes agents for the number of applications they initiate that produce revenue.

This metric, which KeyBank refers to as the contribution rate, is among several factors the bank considers when evaluating agents. Koubele points out that the contribution rate doesn't measure actual dollars, and his eventual goal is to employ a metric that directly reflects how much revenue agents generate. But he is enthusiastic about how the new incentive plan dovetails with the call centers' new role within KeyBank.

"We are in a heavy rollout of sales training," says Koubele. That's where another area of evaluation, referrals, comes in.

KeyBank has a separate telesales operation in Buffalo that offers a portfolio of services, such as mortgages, where customers often need more guidance from the bank than they would with credit cards or checking accounts. Agents at the retail banking call centers generally refer customers to the telesales center for help with some of the more complex retail financial services KeyBank provides.

Agents at the telesales center ask customers about their financial needs, and recommend services, like education loans for college students, that correspond to these needs.

As Koubele puts it, "the key concept is having a conversation."

Yet although training on referrals is a high priority, it's not the only training agents receive.

The bank has an internal certification program. Six months after joining the retail call centers, agents take between eight and ten classes, including courses on computers and tests, to qualify for three levels of certification.

For now, much of the certification has to do with specific services the bank offers. An agent, for instance, has to be certified to handle calls related to CDs. But beyond enabling agents to assist callers with more services, certification leads to a more tangible reward: higher pay.

KeyBank, however, isn't seeking sales at the expense of serving customers. "If we're focused on sales, quality still has to be there," says Koubele.

With this in mind, the bank, which uses Envision's (Seattle, WA) call monitoring system, is also developing a more rigorous approach to quality assurance at its retail call centers. And the chief proponents of this effort are agents.
"One of the number one requests from employees was to have one-to-one coaching on a regular basis," says Koubele.

Team leaders used to require each of the 16 agents they supervise to listen to two recordings of their own calls per month, and view the screens that accompanied them.

That changed in June. Besides reviewing two calls per month themselves, agents now meet regularly with their immediate supervisors to listen to recordings of calls for a half hour. They then devote 45 minutes to identifying ways agents can communicate better with customers. Supervisors evaluate four to six calls per agent per month.
The two retail banking centers have a total of four managers who each supervise four team leaders. The managers listen to an average of one recording per agent per quarter to identify trends, whether they concern terminology agents use or opportunities for agents to handle calls more efficiently.

(Quality assurance isn't the only justification for getting outside opinions about recordings. Koubele says that a team responsible for security evaluates five calls per agent per quarter to ensure agents properly gather information from callers to confirm callers are who they claim to be.)

As we noted in our case study about Effective Teleservices in this year's July issue, the act of dedicating time to coaching is what underpins a genuine effort to define, and then refine, quality assurance.

At KeyBank, it's a combination of indicators - contribution rates, numbers of referrals to the telesales center and quality scores from supervisors - that reveal how well agents perform.

Feedback from customers matters, too. Koubele says that the bank conducts random surveys, mailing 100 surveys per day, and receives a response rate of between 10% and 15%.

It is customer feedback that demonstrates the efficacy of yet another way KeyBank aims to connect better with callers. (Check out our sidebar about how surveying customers supports CRM.)

In August 2001, KeyBank introduced a second-level support team to help customers with situations that require special expertise. If, for instance, a customer with a mortgage loan from KeyBank has a problem with a title search, an agent at the retail banking call center routes the customer to a member of this support team.

The agent requests the customer's permission before working on the problem, and confirms if a follow-up response within 24 hours is timely enough. (If 24 hours isn't enough, a team leader gets on the phone with the customer to try to resolve the issue sooner.)

After the customer grants permission, a member of the support team calls the customer back with an update in at least 24 hours. While speaking with the customer, the agent also explains every step of the process that he or she is working to expedite on the customer's behalf.

According to the surveys KeyBank conducted by mail, as of August 2001, the average rating customers gave to the bank's retail call centers was six out of a maximum of ten. Nearly two years later, the average rating for the call centers is nearly nine.

Change, even if successful, isn't always easy. Koubele acknowledges that for some agents, the emphasis on combining service with sales has been "kind of a shock." Indeed, as the call center evolves, so too do agents' jobs.

"We have hired service people whom we evolved to be sales people," says Koubele.

But evolution, in the best case, not only guarantees that call centers survive. It ensures they are able to grow. And in financial services, growth has to be more than measurable. It must be achievable.

"We're looking to double the contribution rate," says Koubele. "A lot of employees are already doing it, so I know it's possible."

CASE CLOSED

CRM is about more than what you know about your customers. It's also about how you communicate what you know about your own products, and how your customers use them.

Case in point: DYMO, a Stamford, CT-based manufacturer of a really nifty consumer product, the DYMO label printer. This device, which connects to your PC or Macintosh and prints mailing labels, costs between $100 and $200.

DYMO's business has been growing by about 15% a year, according to Joe Horvath, the company's director of customer relations.

"In a down economy, our business has continued to flourish and grow," he says.

With a host of new customers, and a regular product update cycle, DYMO was able to identify—and resolve—several issues related to software installation that cropped up repeatedly and took a toll on its customer service infrastructure.

More than one-quarter of inbound calls were related to problems users had with the Windows installation procedure. And on the Mac side, there were many calls about user interface issues as well.

The answer was to try to migrate as many of these calls as possible to an automated self-service system. Because once the product development team came up with straightforward answers, it was important to get that information out of agents' heads and into customers' hands.

"Using the Web allowed us to maintain call volume at a consistent level and not increase it as our business grew," Horvath says.

"We were able to create a product that was more robust, and an installer that was much smarter," he adds.
DYMO is putting more intelligence into the software to figure out the complex settings and communications protocols the installer needs to know to upgrade the label printer.

That may sound simple, but it wasn't apparent to members of the development team that they needed to do this until they received feedback from DYMO's customers.

a three-stage decision tree to identify what was going wrong. "We would find ourselves repetitively walking customers through the same three to four questions," he explains.

On top of that, the preparation of a return authorization was paper-intensive. "We eliminated all of that," he says, by connecting customer support software from Remedy (Mountain View, CA) to an XML module that hooked into DYMO's system for tracking product returns.

Now DYMO has software that automatically guides customers through that same decision tree, without necessarily having to speak with a live agent. DYMO also automatically sends e-mail messages to customers to confirm product returns.

"We're tracking information all the way through the repair facility as well," Horvath says. There's now a 24-hour turnaround time to return printers; Horvath says that period used to be "much longer" before DYMO implemented the new process. And, he adds, more efficient product returns have led to a "tremendous positive response" on the part of DYMO's customers.

DYMO uses Tell-Eureka's (New York, NY) LevelOne Virtual CSR voice response system to automate the connection among the XML module, Remedy's software and DYMO's in-house systems.

"It's more complex than typical IVR," explains Horvath. "When you call, we'll ask you a couple of sample questions to pass you the right info; we can literally resolve 20% of calls without any return material authorizations. In other words, we provide closure of the problem with no agent."

In fact, more than two-thirds of calls that come into the Tell-Eureka end of the system are completed there, including a large portion that are on-line credit card transactions.

According to DYMO's surveys, more than 80% of DYMO's customers say they like the voice response system and would use it again. As a result, DYMO is looking to apply automation to other types of problem-solving decision trees and to other product lines.

Horvath says he is particularly impressed by the voice response system's Web interface tool that DYMO uses to set up the XML connections.

"The greatest problem is the maintenance, the back end work," he says.

But even there, he expects that the combination of the tools will allow him to organize his information models once, and then tweak these elements only as they need changing, saving time in the long run.

DYMO doesn't run a large center—it comprises only eight agents - and answers 5,800 calls per month. But DYMO's improvements in customer support have big implications. DYMO no longer sees its call center as a drain on company resources. Instead, the company views customers, and the information it gathers from them, as sources of opportunities to improve DYMO's product.

And in a business that relies on customer loyalty to an inexpensive PC peripheral, that two-way communication makes all the difference in letting DYMO stay flexible, act quickly and ultimately, please customers.

©2003 CallCenter Magazine

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Tell-Eureka Contact: Chris McManus CenterStage Communications 718-832-9154 cmcmanus@centerstagecomm.com