Chris Kanaracus’ article contains a thought-provoking summary of the issues and challenges facing the CRM market in 2009.

ClickFox would certainly agree with the stated view of Forrester Research analyst William Band that CRM applications can end up providing “a fragmented view of the customer”.

In the past, the basic problem has been that most approaches to CRM have been handicapped by their reliance on traditional siloed analytics tools.

Such tools are good at providing quantitative information about customer interactions at one particular enterprise touch point – the call centre, interactive voice response (IVR) system or company website, for example. However, they fail to ‘join up the dots’ between these points and provide an holistic view of customer behaviour across them.

Therefore, they invariably fail to work out why a customer has acted in a particular way in a given situation. More importantly, they struggle to provide an understanding of the ‘true’ customer experience.

Often, they will capture only one dimension of this - previous telephone calls to the contact centre, for example. In fact, many traditional CRM systems do little more than record the agent’s interpretation of the conversation with the customer through notes entered into the system.

They fail to shed light on issues within the customer’s previous history of interactions with the organisation as a whole, which have led that customer to contact a live agent in the first place.

Fortunately, a new approach known as customer experience analytics (CEA) has emerged which tracks and examines how customers interact across and within all enterprise touch points. CEA takes businesses beyond the capabilities of traditional CRM by allowing them to identify bottlenecks in transactional flow, precisely define causes of costly opt-outs to live agents and uncover opportunities for extending automation, cost-savings or increasing revenues.

Understanding what drives customers from one channel to another also gives businesses the power to maximise and change behaviour, optimising their most efficient channels while enhancing customers’ success and satisfaction and ultimately securing their brand loyalty. Critically, it offers the most effective method available of turning customer behaviour insight into customer service improvement – effectively delivering a completely new approach to managing customer relationships.

As Kanaracus’ article points out, in today’s difficult economic climate, customers must prepare a more stringent business case for the purchase of CRM. CEA solutions with their ability to track and measure the customer experience, enabling problems to be pinpointed and solutions developed, are capable of providing the evidence business decision makers need to justify such an investment.

Good article by Kanaracus. The new approach known as customer experience analytics (CEA) will add value to CRM. The contact management part of CRM empowers the sales rep with, yes! contact info. So much effort to get to the customer. No effort has been put into empowering the sales res with knowledge on the products he can offer. Emcien offers an SaaS solution that is a sales recommendation engine and sales prospector. It can tell a sales rep what similar customers bought. But more importantly, with a few choice product specs from the customer, Emcien can recommend good product choices based on buying behavior, trends and good customer fit.
http://www.emcien.com