Observations on Customer Intelligence Data Integration

Merchants Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2006

Each year Merchants (part of Dimension Data) conduct an authoritative piece of research into best practice in contact centres. What is surprising is the continued gap between best performance and average performance for some very critical metrics. Take integration of key customer intelligence (CI) data, or how well integrated are core business systems and the contact centre? Frequently CI data is not shared between contact centre and other parts of the business (either from the contact centre or to the call centre).

Too bad the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair - George Burns

According to the benchmarking report on CI integration elements such as: delivery tracking, customer correspondence, pricing and product specification, performance varies from one in ten to one in three contact centres that have no integration whatsoever (relying on manual activities). About half again have access but not easily. This is surprising but helps to explain why service experiences can be disjointed.

So What?

This is a huge missed opportunity for improved efficiency and improved effectiveness. Customer exectations are firmly set as an organisation that has equal intelligence at all touchpoints. Frequently, equal intelligence means equally low intelligence, unfortunately. When a brand is good at integrated communications, customers expect that that high standard can be achieved repeatedly and the bar for the industry is raised. Consequently if a customer requests something of a staff member in a branch office, that customer expects that a contact centre advisor knows of that request. Easy to say, hard to do. But increasingly customers expect it.

Similarly with joined up communications, if you send a customer a letter inviting them to visit a website, you should expect that some will then call or email a contact centre and expect the adviser to a) know about the letter, and b) know about the website content. If you think about it from a customer’s perspective this makes sense. Don’t we all expect that? If you think about it from an systems integration perspective it makes your toes curl – don’t customers realise how hard it is to get seventeen different systems to talk to each other?!!! The trouble is, the customer doesn’t care how hard it is to get different data repositories, in different formats, in different locations to talk to one another. They simply expect that it does. Not from a reductionist, XML feed level, but at a common sense level – you keep trumpeting how good you are, surely you can keep track of all of my data. And they’re right.

Copyright 2007 Robert A Innes