Content and CRM: Completing the PictureContent and CRM: Completing the Picture

If you could hear what your customers were thinking, would they be saying "Don't they know we were just acquired?" and "They act like this is the first time I've called about this problem?" You don't have to be clairvoyant — or invest in costly focus groups — to find out what people think of your products and services. Customers routinely share their complaints (and their praise) through your sales and service reps — you just don't know it. And is anyone paying attention to the online chat and e-mail inquiries streaming in from your spanking new self-service Web site?

Perhaps your sales and service representatives are relying too heavily on name, title and account data that offers only a partial view of the customer. There's a world of information that exists in e-mail messages, statements, invoices, chat sessions and syndicated feeds that could bring clarity and dimension to customer profiles, yet many customer relationship management (CRM) and customer service systems don't access this content.

For years, content and document management vendors have helped bridge such gaps with prebuilt and customized integrations with CRM systems and customer service solutions. The effort to tie these systems together sometimes took months and tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop, but sales and service reps gained access to crucial customer content without leaving their accustomed interfaces. Workflow technologies were integrated in much the same way, speeding lending, claims and other content-intensive processes. The key drawback of this system-to-system integration approach was that customized code often had to be rewritten whenever systems and processes changed.

Leading content management vendors are now moving to more flexible, standards-based content integration approaches such as services, but what options exist for the many small and midsized businesses that don't have content management systems? Even among banks, insurance companies and larger businesses that have long relied on document management and workflow, isolated silos of customer information still exist or, in some cases, are being created by disconnected self-service initiatives.

To fill the content void, enlightened organizations (and CRM vendors) are adding management, search, integration and even analytic tools to tap into everything from online leads, chat sessions and syndicated content to customer statements, invoices and e-mail messages. By combining content with the structured data available in CRM and customer support systems, they're giving sales and service representatives a more complete view of prospects and customers.

Put the Customer in Context

The dirty and not-so-secret truth is that many people on the front lines hate using CRM systems because they're forced to enter mountains of data about customers. The less trained and motivated the workforce, the more likely the system is to be full of typos, missing fields, redundant entries and cryptic notes.

"CRM is like a library with incredible amounts of information, but it should be organized like a university library, not a flea market," says Paul D'Arcy, vice president of marketing at Message One, an e-mail continuity and disaster recovery services provider. "Many CRM systems are a mess, with redundant information for the same companies and contacts. You're never quite sure which information is up to date."

To clean up its own Salesforce.com implementation, Message One added InsideScoop, a Web-based integration and data cleansing service designed to work with the hosted sales force automation system. InsideScoop can enhance customer and prospect data with information from internal content and leads as well as syndicated data available from Dun & Bradstreet, Thomson Financial and others. The service helps fill CRM fields that would otherwise be empty, adding detail on locations, financial reports and legal filings. InsideScoop's cleansing tools can dedupe and update information in the wake of acquisitions and restructuring, and it also can ingest news feeds, Web-generated leads, e-mail messages, blogs, discussion forums and credit reports to enhance customer intelligence.

"We get about 1,000 leads per month from trade shows and the Web, and we use InsideScoop to append all sorts of information such as location information and detail on parent-child reporting relationships across the company," D'Arcy says.

Well-maintained CRM systems are replete with information, and some companies have learned to mine the available intelligence. At HP, for example, business-to-business sales teams make extensive use of the notes fields in the company's Siebel CRM system. These chunks of text, typed in by sales reps or copied directly from customer e-mail messages, provide insight for future sales calls, but HP's Customer Data and Knowledge Service unit also extracts information from these notes to learn more about broad groups of customers.

For many years, HP has used SAS data mining software to identify high-profit and high-growth customer segments based on demographic and revenue data, but in 2002, the company added SAS text-mining tools to gain deeper insight on customer wants and needs.

"We learned that different customer segments were communicating with us about dramatically different topics and themes," says Randy Collica, HP's senior business/data mining analyst. Spotting customer hot buttons related to product configuration and pricing enables HP marketing teams to understand the customer better and come up with different solutions and packages for different segments. The company also creates predictive models that can be applied to prospect databases to target potential new customers.

HP now routinely performs text mining on Siebel notes fields. Collica says it only takes "a couple of hours" to mine and merge the text-driven insight with other data because the information resides in the same Oracle database underneath Siebel. Collica says future projects will likely focus on Web-based content such as profiles of registered online customers, online chat sessions and responses to e-mail campaigns.

"The Web offers good contextual information because the HTML files are usually structured with topic fields," he says. "The notes in Siebel are very free form, and you might encounter all sorts of abbreviations, typos and misspellings."

Analysis of Web-derived text could be used to craft customized e-mail and banner advertising campaigns, says Collica, and he adds that HP has even used text mining to analyze industry news and rival Web sites for competitive analysis.

Improve After-Sale Support

It's well known that it's easier to sell to existing customers than to find new ones, so providing superior service is as important as prospecting. In these efforts, too, access to content is an enabler, so much so that it recently led Siebel to acquire edocs, an e-billing, online self-service and transaction processing provider.

Edocs focuses on content-dependent processes that, for many companies, account for the majority of customer service inquiries. Customers include telcos, utilities and other groups that are also among Siebel's strongest constituencies. "[Siebel] customers such as Bell South will tell you that 70 percent of its customer service questions are related to billing," says John Ragsdale, an analyst with Forrester Research. "Edocs has prebuilt adapters for real-time integration with back-end billing, order management and financial systems, and it knows what customers are going to ask."

Edocs also brings Siebel e-mail and online chat response management software as well as vertical industry knowledge bases designed to automatically channel inbound customer requests-whether online, via e-mail or through traditional call centers-to appropriate contacts and self-help content.

It's often easy for customers to help themselves when their questions are routine and expected. But Wachovia, the fourth largest bank in the United States, found that its biggest challenge was the 5 to 10 percent of questions that were atypical. And when you handle more than 150 million customer interactions per year across 14 call centers and approximately 5,000 customer service reps (CSRs), even this small percentage presented a huge problem.

Wachovia's CSR's work in home-grown customer support applications, and it was searching against a Documentum repository with policy and procedure documentation. This central resource was put in place in 2002 with 10,000 to 12,000 core documents, but as volumes grew into the six-figure range, the index server started to bog down, says Pete Fields, director of Web and support services. Part of the problem was that indexing metadata wasn't well maintained by content creators, Fields admits, so in early 2004 the company decided to solve the problem with better search technology.

As a simple test, Wachovia identified 100 queries and corresponding documents that would help resolve related service issues. Using a script to test the original index server, the desired documents appeared among the top-10 hits on only 38 percent of the queries. When the same test was performed with a Verity K2 Enterprise full-text search engine, the desired documents appeared among the top 10 hits on 98 percent of the queries, according to Fields. That success led to a contract, and the software was implemented in August.

"I'd guess it's cutting 15 to 30 seconds out of each search, so there's no doubt it will pay for itself," says Fields, although he declined to detail the investment. A next phase will see the search technology applied to Wachovia's intranet, and the company also plans to develop knowledge bases for multichannel customer support.

In contrast to Wachovia, which focused on the call center, regional bank Huntington Bancshares solved a problem that cut across multiple service channels. Like many banks and other organizations, Huntington had an inconsistent and incomplete view of its customers, so it launched an ambitious services-based integration initiative in 2001.

In one of its first projects, Huntington addressed the seemingly simple problem of obtaining account balances, yet this involved multiple back-end systems and divergent rules that created inconsistencies. "When customers went to an ATM or a teller, they were getting different balances, and that bothered them," says Tim Scholten, senior vice president of business systems. "We wanted to build a single service that would define customer balance and deliver that information to multiple channels in real time."

Using a services-oriented integration engine from Synoran together with IBM WebSphere MQ middleware, Huntington has spent the last three years building reusable services and applications components. The balance service was completed in 2003, and it now delivers consistent information to multiple channels, including ATMs, call centers, voice response, tellers and online banking. The effort has eliminated many of the service calls that stemmed from questions about account balances. As evidence, online support staffing has remained steady, Scholten says, while the number of customers banking online has doubled over the past three years.

Late last year, Huntington concluded a nine-month push to build a new CRM application. Exploiting one of the main benefits of a service-oriented approach, developers used many existing services, including real-time balances. New services created specifically for the CRM application are now being reused for improved online support. Huntington estimates integration costs have been reduced by as much as 60 percent thanks to using componentized services.

Customer-related content tied to the CRM app includes check images, which are called using the same service that makes them available to online customers. And in a current project, Huntington is building a loan-origination application that will merge data from a DB2 database with loan documents generated by an Adobe document repository. The application will also capture inbound loan applications through the CRM system.

"Once the loan is submitted for underwriting, we'll pass information back to the CRM system so customers can check on the status of the loan at any stage of the process," says Scholten.

Avoid Service Siloss

Integrated content and knowledge bases have helped lower the cost of providing customer service, but in their haste to save money by replacing customer interaction with online self-service, some companies have lost site of the need for customer context. What's worse, they're even creating new silos of customer experience.

"You don't want to give up too much control to Web-based point solutions," says Ragsdale of Forrester. "If you believe in the 360-degree view of the customer, you really need to look at every interaction, including going online to look at a bill. That shouldn't be an adjunct to CRM."

It's now easy for many customers to find bills, statements, check images and searchable knowledge bases online. The question is, have you integrated your online service options with your overall CRM effort, or are you condemning valued customers to self-help hell? For example, are you tracking interactions with online knowledge bases and self-help menus? If not, you may not be aware of the frustrations customers have had searching for answers online or seeking answers via e-mail before finally calling a toll-free number (see Listening Post, this page).

"Some companies start tracking issues only when a customer escalates the problem to the call center," says Palmer of Delphi Group. "The company may think of this as the beginning of a customer support process, but from the customers' perspective, they may already be near the end of their patience."