Knowing and understanding individual customers, customer sentiment and customer market trends has become something of a Holy Grail for companies worldwide. By knowing the customer, enterprises are positioned to deliver customer experience excellence, bring to market products and services that exceed expectations, and gain the competitive edge in the market. However, despite the best efforts of marketers to analyse the entire customer environment – from the contact centre through to social media, a crucial piece of the puzzle will be missing if they do not include the enterprise telecommunications environment in the mix.
This is according to Marco Almeida, Head of Operations at Adapt IT. He notes there are two key drivers for better understanding the customer: Customer Experience Management (CXM), the evolution of CRM, and Know Your Customer (KYC) for verifying customer identity. “Both depend on having extensive personal information about the customer, along with all transactional data around the customer’s interactions with the company,” Almeida says.
Knowing your customer should be an enterprise-wide strategy encompassing everything from CRM to your telecoms environment
These interactions, while typically well managed in the company’s fixed line and contact centre environments, may not be managed at all when they take place in the mobile environment, where sales and support staff may engage with customers in ways that never reflect in overall telecommunications management and CRM systems.
“Within enterprise businesses, telecommunications plays an important role in CXM, CRM and KYC initiatives. However, where data resides in siloes, or is not available to the business at all, it becomes a complex challenge to source and analyse all the information needed to fully know your customer. Information about what transpires in the mobile environment must be made available to the rest of the enterprise via effective telecommunications management systems to support the goal of a single view of the customer,” He says.
“Mobile has been one of the fastest growing components of the total communications picture, however is often excluded from CRM systems. So, companies are investing heavily in understanding customers on social media, while at the same time they are losing data in their telecommunications environments. Only by centralising management and control of all of the communications channels are they able to manage communications effectively, extract all the relevant data and gain a full view of customers and their interactions with the company.”
Source: Adapt-IT
