Wireless technology is aiding various industries in serving their customers better by gaining efficiencies as they mobilize their workforces and enable a higher level of customer service-and increasingly, businesses are demanding wireless as part of their overall customer relationship management strategy.
According to Richard Smith, vice president of CRM strategy for Green Beacon Solutions, the company’s customers are making renewed demands for wireless access to CRM data.
“It’s making it possible for clients to take care of the critical things [they] need decisions on in a moment, and [they’re] not in front of their laptop, then handle the more complex tasks when they’re back in the office sitting in front of a laptop or a desktop,” Smith said.
Networks, devices aiding adoption
Contributing to the spread of mobile for CRM uses, Smith said, is that “we have access just about everywhere now, and the devices have gotten a lot better. You can drop them a few times without them losing all of their information.”
Some things that would help drive the adoption of businesses using mobile to facilitate CRM, Smith said, would be if there was further standardization around mobile operating systems. The emergence of GPS technology is just beginning, Smith noted, but the technology has the potential to, say, make sure an employee attends a meeting off-site.
“It just hasn’t become pervasive, but we’re seeing just the top of the iceberg,” Smith said. “Everybody will use it for directions, and it’s going to start factoring into a whole series of other things that we haven’t even really thought about yet.”
In the case of Asurion, which provides specialty insurance and warranty services for the wireless industry as well as wireless-based roadside assistance, an automated follow-up call to a customer’s wireless phone provides a chance to increase customer satisfaction as well as improve its performance.
Flat tires
When a customer calls Asurion for roadside assistance, they receive an estimated time of arrival for a responder who will, say, change a flat tire.
Ten minutes after the estimated arrival time, the customer receives an automated voice message that asks them to confirm that their help has arrived and requesting that they take a brief survey on their experience with the service. If the customer indicates that no one has yet arrived, they are immediately connected with a live agent who
The outbound calling solution is a result of a partnership between Soundbite Communications Inc. for its customer contact solution and Mindshare Technologies for its specialty in surveys and real-time analytics.
“The ability to continuously measure our performance and respond to real-time customer feedback in an automated and cost-effective manner is invaluable to our business,” said Dona Drehmann, director of customer satisfaction for Asurion.
Winnowing waiting window
TOA Technologies makes use of a Web-based system that relies on wireless in order to cut down the amount of time that customers must wait at home for a cable service person or a delivery-to perhaps an hour instead of a typical four-hour window of waiting impatiently and possibly calling in to a call center for an update on when to expect an arrival. According to Yuval Brisker, president and CEO of TOA, the company seeks to “really try to solve this deep customer pain and deep need to have information and have a better experience in everything related to appointments at home.”
The Web-based system involves techs and delivery people entering data into a site through wireless devices, and customers then can receive automated voice or text alerts on estimated arrival times. The system also intelligently learns the habits and length of time it typically takes a worker to complete various types of jobs, and uses the historical information in order to predict how long it will take for a worker to arrive at the next job.
Cable application
TOA’s technology, in whole or in part, is currently in use at four of the largest U.S. cable companies (including Cox Communications), some retailers and some cable companies in Europe, Brisker said.
Companies can choose what level of service to offer their customers and can offer them a choice of alert options, including some two-way interactions (such as the option to reschedule an appointment that’s supposed to take place that day) and a brief survey of the customers’ experience.
The main drivers for the use of the technology and its wireless component, Brisker said, are reducing costs and increasing efficiency through better scheduling and routing, and cutting down on customer calls to call centers-as well as improving customer satisfaction and differentiating from competitors by showing more respect for customers’ time.
“It’s taking the idea of customer care and CRM into the field in service of the customer,” Brisker said. “It’s one thing to say, ‘We have a CRM system that’s delivering data into the back end and we’ll use it to track behavior, use it to track productivity,’ and another think to make more efficiencies among people in the field, but in service of the customer, not in service of the organization.”
