A customer relationship management approach: Integrating the call centre with customer information
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Michael Meltzer has over 20 years’ experience in financial services, telecommunication companies and information technology. He has authored many articles on financial services and computing using the customer-focused approach, and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences. With a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing and a Master’s degree in Business Administration, Michael is a valued member of DMR Consultants global practice. He specialises in CRM/e-business, benefits realisation and performance measurement.
Abstract In the age of the e-consumer and the need to manage customer relationships the marketing dilemma that many financial service providers (FSPs) face is how to get closer to their target market without investing more in bricks and mortar than clicks and mortar. This paper looks at how the call centre and the contact centre can be integrated as part of a multi-channel contact and touch-point management within a customer relationship management (CRM) solution based on a scaleable data warehouse (SDW) architecture as the infrastructure for competitive advantage. The way customers are treated and their value to an organisation are reviewed with an emphasis on the customercentric view. The evolution of the call centre, contact centre and e-service are also discussed. This paper explores how the CRM philosophy and SDW architectures can be effectively integrated and implemented and lead to success. There is also a need for clear marketing strategies that can be applied to web and wireless enabled call/contact centres. This is to support customer retention, cross-selling and up-selling opportunities to improve direct/continuous marketing campaigns, marketing to the segment of one and to put the organisation on the road to marketing one to one.
Michael Meltzer 7 Winchester Park, Bromley, Kent BR2 0PY, UK Tel: 0208 466 6459 Fax: 0208 464 6949 e-mail: michael@ meltzer.fsbusiness.co.uk
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INTRODUCTION It could be said that all customers are fickle. They seem to move their business to another financial service provider (FSP) even though their present provider has the best services and prices available. In such situations there are at least two questions that need to be asked: has the provider really communicated with its customer recently and is it certain it has
Journal of Database Marketing
Vol. 8, 3, 232–243
the best deal? The second question should be dealt with by competitive intelligence analysis, but the first is based on the need for relationship management and a true dialogue, and that is the basis of this paper. This paper looks at call centres as they make the transition to contact centres. And although call/contact centres are often used as customer service touch points and as a
Henry Stewart Publications 1350-2328 (2001)
A customer relationship management approach: Integrating the call centre with customer information
means of tele-selling to non-customers many FSPs, telecommunication companies and retailers use them to retain and increase their share of their current customers wallet rather t
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