Admittedly, this is a relatively generic framing, but supplement it with data around rapidly increasing contact complexity, far more nuanced products and solutions, and complicated technology—not to mention customer expectations that now are dramatically heightened—and it quickly becomes apparent at how drastically different the service and support function of today is from that of even a year or two ago.

In fact, in some recent research, CCC highlights the function’s shift to what we call the “Quality 2.0 Era,” which is characterized by both complex issues and heightened customer expectations.  This is a long way from the “Productivity Era” of the late 1990s, early 2000s, when fast resolution of simple issues was sufficient.  As is it distant from the “Quality 1.0 Era” of the mid-2000s, where customers increasingly wanted successful resolution of more complicated issues.

Yet these changes have largely happened under the noses of most service and support organizations, many of which have not transformed their organizations to align to the changes in issue complexity and customer expectations.  In reality, many organizations have been caught offguard by how quickly customer demands and expectations changed.

Which begs the question: What does the next era of service and support hold?  And how should we prepare for it?

A few hypotheses, informed by me and colleagues on the CCC research and advisory teams:

I. Service and support increasingly becomes a learning/teaching function.

As companies continue to work to make it easier to self-serve on simple issues, and the number of live or assisted contacts decreases, companies will increasingly look to help customers optimize their use and knowledge of products and services.  This could happen either on a 1:1 level or even 1:many level and could entail teaching about functionality and integration.

This is not to say that the service and support function will go away entirely, but it will have an altered mission.  This trend has immediate application to the business-to-business world but you could also imagine consumer customers engaging to learn more about products and services as well.  Self-service and multi-channel tools would be very relevant here.

II. Service and support will create greater focus on enabling customers to solve problems as opposed to the company always providing the answer.

In a world where issues are rapidly becoming even more complex, customer knowledge can actually outpace that of organizations, which means service and support cannot always give customers an answer (or the right one).  Furthermore, social media has in large part led to customers enjoying and desiring to connect directly with each other.

Social media, networking, and collective problem solving could well become not just another channel or nice to have, but really a philosophy and focus for the organization—and the olden days of staff solving problems will really give way to communities solving each other’s problems.  We’ve seen similar changes happen at technical support organizations where companies enable customers, and it’s quite probable that this could transcend to the service world as well.

III. Service and support becomes a very narrowly focused organization.

Too often today service and support ends up taking on one too many new responsibilities—generating revenue, differentiating the customer experience, collecting and analyzing voice of the customer—with the organization’s mission constantly expanding and often leading to “scope creep” and potentially hindering organizational performance.

As organizations gradually learn the “jack of all trades is the master of none” philosophy, there is a good possibility that the organization will shed some of its excess responsibilities, or at least start to prioritize its efforts (something that remarkably few organizations do).  My hunch is that revenue generation (not just cross- and up-sell, but also lead generation and qualification) and/or process improvement (largely through voice of the customer) will become the top priority.

What is your prediction about the next era of service and support?  Where are customers and the service and support function headed?

Senior executives in the service and support organization must be heeding the messages from these articles, as we are seeing renewed interest in our research and benchmarking related to organizational design.

This is particularly true for B2B support organizations that we work with, many of which are now reassessing the way their function has operated and organized for years.

A number of reasons for the renewed interest exist, but the most frequently verbalized is this: Faced with the realization that the days of basic order entry by humans are nearing a close as more and more customers prefer to self-serve and operating budgets shrink, more B2B organizations are seeking to innovate and optimize the service and order management function.

Interesting to note, however is that B2B organizations aren’t merely considering role and title changes, but in some cases actually shaking up the entire order management function and reorganizing to align differently to the business.

Here’s a look at some of the most interesting trends we are seeing today:

1. Creating business excellence centers—This is primarily occurring in organizations that seek to create greater collaboration between service and sales, going so far as to collocate service and sales staff in a single location.  Typically these business excellence centers are central hubs in a single region and are organized by product, industry, customer, or other major segmentation scheme.  The benefit of this model is both the savings generated by consolidating a service organization footprint but primarily the collaboration and account information sharing that is facilitated.

2. Redefinition of staff roles—Many B2B organizations are going through role and skill clarifying exercises, meaning that companies are taking a second look at the skills staff need to effectively serve in their roles.  Organizations are not firing staff per se, but they are clearly laying out precisely what skills staff need to be effective in their roles, in many cases creating competencies for the benefit of staff and managers.  Interviewing staff to place them in the right role has become a focus, as is increasing training to upskill staff appropriately.

Of course time will tell how successful these long-term strategies are.  But those organizations in the middle of the journey report positive preliminary indicators.

Interested to learn more from companies in the process of reorganizing—where else are you focused today?

CCC Related Resources:

Field Support Organizational Structures

B2B Key Account Rep Activity Audit

Deepening the Customer Relationship (B2B)

Boosting Self-Service “Stickiness”

J.C. Penny, the American retailer, is getting a new boss.  Ron Johnson will become their new CEO in November after having led Apple’s retail store operations for the last decade.  Mr. Johnson is credited with the success of Apple’s retail store operations – and the results speak for themselves.

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal:

• More people now visit Apple’s 326 stores in a single quarter than the 60 million who visited Walt Disney Co.’s four biggest theme parks last year.
• Apple’s annual retail sales per square foot have soared to $4,406. Add in online sales, which include iTunes, and the number jumps to $5,914. That’s far higher than the sales per square foot and online sales of jeweler Tiffany & Co. ($3,070), luxury retailer Coach Inc. ($1,776), and electronics retailer Best Buy Co. ($880), according to estimates.
• Needham & Co. puts Apple stores’ profit margin at 26.9% in an industry that typically has profit margins hovering around 1%.

These results are impressive, but not surprising.  Why?

Because Apple, through their training and support, enable their retail staff to sell the way customers want to buy.

CCC note: Interestingly, these findings have very similar undertones to CCC’s research how B2B service and support can influence loyalty.  In essence, when we “teach” customers something they value, rather than try to sell them something we think they need or simply treat them as a transaction, the experience becomes more positive.

And the Wall Street Journal article described several features of Apple’s training and sales process that align to this very finding:

• According to several employees and training manuals, sales associates are taught an unusual sales philosophy: not to sell, but rather to help customers solve problems.
• “Your job is to understand all of your customers’ needs—some of which they may not even realize they have,” one training manual says.

Apple’s retail sales approach is best summarized by a quote from a former employee, who said, “You were never trying to close a sale. It was about finding solutions for a customer and finding their pain points.”

To me, the most fascinating implication here is that these impressive results can be had in what is arguably the most transactional of all sales environments – the retail sales floor.

Apple’s sales representatives might only have 20 or 30 seconds to engage a potential customer in a conversation, and what Apple’s results show is that when a sales person focuses on the customer’s outcomes or problems rather than a product’s features and benefits, customers will respond with higher sales, even at premium prices.

So for organizations who feel that they are trapped by a highly-transactional sales environment, the lesson here is clear – even if we have only a few minutes with our customers, we must enable our sales people to teach customers about their challenges rather than relying on a sales approach that focuses on the products we want to sell.

Do you think this is as relevant for a service environment as it is for sales?  Let us know.

Related CCC Resources:

• Breaking the Issue Resolution Barrier (which addresses the concept of Next Issue Avoidance)
• Shifting the Loyalty Curve (B2B Findings)
• Bell Canada’s Event-Based Issue Resolution

This is a guest post by Andrew Kent, who researches and writes for our sister program the Sales Executive Council.  This is the second in a two-part series about the coming revolution in energy sales (read part one here).  Both posts were originally published to the Sales Challenger blog.

In my previous post, I argued that the conflict of interest between energy & utility companies and their customers makes these companies’ business models unsustainable. In short, the more efficiently customers use energy, the less money energy suppliers make—and customers won’t remain in the dark forever.

The solution, I believe, is to stop selling stuff (kilowatt-hours, therms, or joules) and start selling outcomes (light, heat, and motion). Indeed, one forward-thinking utility company recently shared with us their new Commercial Teaching pitch that focuses B2B customers on the money they could save from energy efficiency building retrofits, and off the price per kilowatt-hour.

It’s a compelling pitch, especially in deregulated markets. The customer saves money off its energy bill (the payback period is typically just 3-5 years), and the supplier picks up a new account.

But while energy investments make economic sense, customers have been surprisingly slow on the uptake, frequently rejecting energy projects that are in their economic self-interest.

For example, a contact in the green building industry warned me that most decision-makers are unreasonably skeptical of energy solutions, due to a lack of case studies proving they work, and the inherent difficulty with quantifying energy savings (i.e., external conditions may cause energy use to increase, even though that increase may be less than it would have been otherwise thanks to energy saving projects.).

Therefore, just as in any case when a customer is not thinking about its business properly, the burden falls on Sales to reframe how customers think about energy use.   (CCC note: We think the same goes for the B2C world…when a customer is only thinking about your product in a single dimension, the burden can fall with serivce and support to reframe that perception.)

To successfully shift to outcomes-based selling, sales leaders in the industry should develop commercial teaching pitches and train sales reps to do four things differently:

1. Reframe energy as a service, not a commodity. Teach customers that what matters isn’t the price per kilowatt-hour, but rather the outcomes a customer can achieve at a given level of energy spend. This might mean producing the same output using 20% less energy, or improving their brand by switching to cleaner (though more costly) energy.For example, Schneider Electric, a major player in all things energy, refers to itself as the “global specialist in energy management,” not “a leading energy technology provider.” The emphasis is on how customers use energy, not the technology itself.
2. Challenge customers’ investment filters. We often assume that top executives are always experts, but the CFO Executive Board (a sister program of SEC and CCC) found that CFOs typically apply investment filters that fail to accurately capture the true potential of energy investments. To counter these flawed assumptions, commercial teaching pitches should correct four CFO mistakes:
   1. Underestimating the total impact of energy projects (e.g. reduced compliance risks and maintenance costs)
   2. Disregarding future energy price increases
   3. Prioritizing speed of payback over total savings potential
   4. Ignoring the lower risks associated with energy savings compared to other investments.
3. Build innovative deal structures that move CAPEX to OPEX. SEC has found that star sales managers innovate on deal terms to work around customer obstacles. In energy sales, this typically means some form of performance contracting, which is becoming more feasible than in the past due to the falling cost of measuring energy use. Performance contracting is especially helpful when the obstacle to a deal is lack of capital or a principle-agent problem (e.g., the party who pays the energy bill does not own the building).
4. Agree on the method of measurement before closing the deal. Many customers remain skeptical of energy projects, not because they don’t save energy, but because savings are hard to precisely quantify. To avoid fighting over results retroactively, make sure customers agree on how their energy outcomes will be measured before any paperwork is signed. The desire to remain consistent with prior commitments is a powerful psychological motivator to agree with the results you find.

Energy management is a new field for most customers, and one in which they often make poor business decisions. By following the above guidance, sales leaders can make themselves indispensible partners both to their own companies’ growth and their customers’ bottom lines.

Related CCC Research:

• Utilities Discussion Forum: Budget Billing Programs
• Unleashing Service-to-Sales Potential
• Service-to-Sales Topic Center

We know a number of our retail and consumer banking members are intensely interested in the mobile payments space, and with good reason: according to a study commissioned by MasterCard, 63% of the coveted 18-34 demographic feel comfortable using phones to make payments and about the same amount feel like their phones are more essential than their wallets. Mobile phones – particularly smartphones – are increasingly indispensable for any trips outside the home.

Given signs like these of increasing customer demand, it’s no wonder why folks are jumping in. But it seems like there are more questions than answers at the moment.  What does a successful mobile payment platform look like? What advantages does it confer relative to the status quo, a mix of cash and plastic? Six hypotheses we’ve thought of:

The “arms race” scenario. Are banks and retailers moving into the mobile space simply because their competitors are doing it? If this is the case, what are the signs you’re seeing of growing demand on the consumer side?

A data play. Does mobile offer significant advantages in customer understanding, relative to plastic? Do typical mobile payments user agreements allow processors and retailers to access information in other parts of the phone?

Increased brand awareness. Do payments give retailers license to push ads to the phone? Does the mere act of using a branded payment platform, whether provided by financial institutions (like MasterCard) or retailers (like Starbucks) reinforce brand connections in a way not previously available?

Savings on interchange fees. Particularly for mobile apps like Starbucks’, which are tied to loyalty program accounts, is there a significant savings on interchange to be had? We imagine that a single large transaction (loading the loyalty card) is more advantageous than multiple small transactions from a retailer’s perspective.

Decreased friction at the point of sale. Do mobile platforms (particularly those based on near-field communications) offer significant advantages in terms of friction and willingness to buy? Is buying with mobile less mentally demanding, from a consumer point of view, than plastic or cash? Do you project labor or equipment savings as a result of shorter checkout lines?

Better shopper marketing. As mentioned in a recent Wall Street Journal article, are mobile payment systems providing a hook for shopper marketing-focused tech throughout the rest of the store? If you’re a retailer, and do in-store mobile coupons, are you seeing higher conversion rates compared to other coupon provisioning systems?

So, what do you think?  What are your biggest hopes or worst fears as it relates to mobile payments and customer service?

The utilities business faces a looming crisis—if not today, then in the decade or two to come.  Simply put, the industry’s current business model is set up such that smarter use of its product threatens its profits, and this tension between supplier and customer can’t go on forever.

But utilities companies need not view this as a threat.  On the contrary, leading utilities are already capitalizing on one of the biggest megatrends in Sales today: the need to make more money by selling less stuff.

The root of utilities’ problem is this: their ability to grow depends on selling more kilowatt-hours each year, but consumers and society have an urgent need to use less—and are waking up to the fact that they actually can.  Peter Fox-Penner writes in the Harvard Business Review (July-August 2009):

Utilities have always assumed that their output would continue to grow… But electricity and gas customers—aided by the utilities themselves—are reducing consumption.  Sales are already flattening, and they’ll only fall faster as governments put in place more incentives to control greenhouse gas emissions (p. 18).

The U.S. Department of Energy projects U.S. energy demand to grow by only 0.7% a year over the next 25 years, and U.S. energy use per capita will never surpass its 2000 peak.  Indeed, McKinsey estimates that the United States could cut $1.2 trillion off its energy bill over the next ten years.

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) “Annual Energy Outlook – 2011”, released April 26, 2011

This is great news for consumers and the environment, but it’s a lot of revenue for utilities to give up.  How do you cope with a world in which policy, consumer needs, and the very planet conspire against your business?

The answer is to stop selling stuff altogether, and start selling outcomes.  In the case of energy, you’re not selling kilowatt-hours, therms, or joules—you’re selling light, heat, and motion.  Fox-Penner explains:

Selling services, not output, is the logical next business model for the industry.  To put it simply, customers would pay for each lumen of light generated [or unit of computer time, heat, cooling, and so forth] rather than each watt of power consumed… Because the use of such energy services will continue to grow for the foreseeable future, utilities could expect rising rather than falling revenues.  Moreover, power companies would have a strong incentive to develop and market new technologies.  Utilities would get into the business of selling or leasing such technologies and persuading customers to use energy-efficient appliances (pp. 18-19).

In other words, utilities’ profits go up when they help customers do the same things without burning costly fuel.

This isn’t as far out as it sounds.  Indeed, some forward-thinking utilities are starting to show customers how to spend less on energy.

Three factors make the shift to outcomes-based energy sales inevitable (and possible):

1. Energy-Saving Technologies. These are becoming cheaper and more widely available, aggressively marketed by firms like Schneider Electric and GE.  Winning utilities will preserve revenues by partnering to include these technologies in energy services bundles.
2. Smart Grid. Widespread Smart Grid adoption will soon provide utilities and consumers with device-level detail on energy usage.  In the long-term, this will enable utilities to charge customers based on device usage instead of energy usage.
3. Competition and Regulation.  In competitive markets, selling customers better outcomes for fewer units of energy helps utilities win share from competitors and justify higher prices; this helps makes up for lower volumeper customer.   In many regulated markets, utilities face stricter efficiency targets but can’t raise rates; energy services are a primary option for making up lost revenues.

Of course, this is all easier said than done.  In the coming weeks, I’ll be back with practical guidance on how to convince customers to come along with you for the journey, and what skills your reps need to sell outcomes instead of energy.

In the meantime, please feel free to comment on whether you see this shift to outcomes-based energy sales coming, and what you’re doing to get ahead of it.

Related CCC Resources:

• AMI Impact on the Contact Center
• Utilities Industry Peer Group
• Unleashing Service-to-Sales Potential

(This post was originally written for the Sales Challenger blog, which focuses on critical topics for sales professionals.  We think, however, that there is relevance here for our B2B customer support readers, particularly on the topic of segmentation strategy.)

It’s hard to get key account programs right. First, companies must figure out which customers to elevate to key account status (a challenging task in and of itself)—but most organizations stop there. Key account selection is often a ‘once-and-done’ event, and customers that have been designated as key accounts remain in that position for years.

Despite changing markets and performance, most companies treat key accounts as tenured positions. There are a variety of reasons for this—a fear of jeopardizing relationships and revenue. Account Manager loyalty that skews their relationship assessment. The feeling that they just can’t “give up.”

The reality is that keeping low-performing customers in your key account program wastes more time and profit than it brings in.

What’s the solution? Firing, or de-selecting key accounts.

Though it sounds like a risky strategy, there are ways to accomplish key account de-selection without putting revenue at risk.

TNT created a strategy for assessing key accounts in order to vigorously evaluate whether they are deserving of that level of time and money investment. The company does so by putting accounts in an “incubator” for a year, to test on a trial-basis whether that account will deliver profit. Any accounts that miss the mark are downtiered (or not elevated to key account status in the first place).

You can follow TNT’s example, too—when thinking about the key account de-selection process, some things to keep in mind are:

1. Early Communication of Mutual Expectations. This step is critical to preserving good relationships with customers. Make sure to clarify both parties’ goals and objectives as accounts enter the incubation program.
2. Routine and Ongoing Account Reviews. Institutionalize annual portfolio reviews, as well as joint reviews of progress toward goals. This enables the establishment of mutual understanding and a continuous focus on alignment.
3. Unbiased Stakeholder Input. Avoid biases by using an independent leadership panel to assess key accounts. TNT’s panel is made up of seniormost sales leaders involved in sponsoring the company’s global account program—the head of Global Accounts, the head of the Incubation Team, and the leaders of each of TNT’s segments.
4. Consistency and Discipline Around Metrics. Evaluating all key accounts against the same criteria allows for a fair, consistent assessment of their performance.

CCC members, you might also be interested in reviewing this information on determining the optimal account management strategy for your organization.

While conventional wisdom would suggest that relationship building is the way to win over a customer, some recent research from our program for sales leaders, the Sales Executive Council, suggests that high-performing sales reps take a very different approach to engaging customers.

When we think about our interactions with business partners, it’s actually not that different from sales.  More often than not, we’re trying to sell a perspective, aren’t we?  For instance, maybe we’re getting flooded with calls on a particular issue and we need the business to fix the upstream problem so that customers don’t need to call in about it.  The business doesn’t have to listen.   They’ve got competing priorities of their own—different things that are vying for their time, attention, and budget—so we’ve got to sell them on taking action.  This is why the SEC findings are so interesting to us in CCC.

What we found in SEC was that more than half (53%, to be exact) of business customer loyalty—that is, a customer’s propensity to keep buying from us, buy more over time and advocate on our behalf—is a function of the sales experience.  Remarkably, what happens in the sales interaction matters more than a supplier’s actual product and service quality, more than its brand and reputation in the market, and more than the perceived price-to-value ratio that company offers its customers.  In other words, how you sell matters more than what you sell.

If this isn’t eye-opening enough, consider this: customers don’t just want any sales experience, but an insightful sales experience.  To really ring the bell for the customer and capture that 53% loyalty benefit, customers are looking for the sales rep to deliver a unique perspective, to help them avoid issues and landmines—in other words, they’re looking for reps to make them smarter.  Customers will reward suppliers who deliver new insights about how to make money or save money, not reps who center the sales discussion around product features and benefits (the “show up and throw up” method).

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

If customers value a sales experience that delivers insight, what does that mean for sales reps?  SEC looked at thousands of sales reps around the world and found that all reps, irrespective of industry or geography, fall into one of a very small handful of selling “profiles.”  What’s more, one of these profiles is dominant when you look at star-performers and another tends to be characteristic of average, or “core-performing” reps.  Stars clearly fall into what’s called the “Challenger” profile—the rep who brings a unique (often provocative) point of view to the table, tailors their sales message to different customer stakeholders, and “asserts control” over the sales interaction.  By contrast, the profile that is least associated with high performance and the one that tends to characterize average performers, is the Relationship Builder. 

Relationship Builders are generous with their time and highly responsive to customer needs.  They’re really likeable, but not very effective.  It’s no surprise that Challengers win in the sales world given what we know about customer loyalty.  Customers want insight and that’s what Challengers deliver.  Challengers want to be respected more than they want to be liked.  They ultimately build strong relationships with their customers, but relationships built on value, not likeability.

The Challenger story has taken the sales world by storm.  We’re actually in the process of publishing a book on this research with our guidance on how to build Challengers.  But as interesting as this research has been to sales leaders, it’s been remarkable to us how it’s been picked up by other corporate functions.  CEB programs focused on procurement, learning and development, and IT have each done “Challenger studies” of their own and have found essentially the same thing: internal business customers value and will reward partners who bring them insight.  For instance, CIOs looking to deliver value to the business need their IT business liaisons to focus less on the ins and outs of technology and more on how technology can help the business save money and make money in ways business leaders didn’t previously anticipate. 

In an upcoming CCC Webinar, we’ll cover some of the highlights from the SEC research and show you some best practices from CCC members for delivering real insight to business partners. 

So again, if you want a seat at the table, if you’re looking for your business partners to pay attention to you, or even if you’re just looking for them to pick up the phone when you call, teach them something they don’t already know.  Instead of just building relationships, try challenging their thinking instead.

In fact, in 2010, U.S. airlines collected an additional $8 Billion, or 6% of revenue, outside of traditional plane tickets.

How did they do it?  Cross-sell/up-sell.

As it turns out, those $5 in-flight snacks, $50 airline lounge passes, and $47 early boarding/increased legroom upgrades add up to quite a lot.  (Collective groan noted here.)

Many of these upgrades and additional fees once  were relatively ad hoc—one could purchase such add ons at the airport but making arrangements in advance necessitated a phone call or complex navigation on the Web.  But recognizing that such secondary services are actually quite profitable, airlines are becoming serious about streamlining the ability to purchase such services.

Or as CCC would phrase it: Airlines are making it easy to for customers to buy more.

Those familiar with CCC research know that eliminating customer effort is our mantra given that low-effort experiences lead to greater loyalty.  The airline strategy is just one more application of why a low effort experience is so critical: quick and easy can quite literally yield dividends.

I’m not suggesting that cross-sell/up-sell is always as simple as clicking a link.  But there is something to be said about focusing on making it easier for customers to buy your cross-sell/up-sell pitch, particularly for those in the B2C world.

A few examples:

Don’t transfer customers to complete the sale—CCC members recently debated the merits of transferring customers to complete a sale or selling on the spot.  There is no doubt that having a specialized sales staff talk to the customer can make a big difference particularly in high stakes industry verticals, but if an organization is able to, eliminating the transfer can reduce much effort on the customer’s part.

Don’t force customers to call—Many companies believe that the secret to making a sale is getting a live person on the line to make the pitch.  But customers increasingly prefer to use online channels and forcing customers to switch to the live channel can be quite an inconvenience, particularly when purchasing an add on.  Consider building better Web functionality to seamlessly integrate cross-sell/up-sell opportunities or implementing proactive Web chat for sales, an opportunity we are increasingly seeing organizations embrace.

Build sales into the workflow of customers—While service takes priority to sales in most service and support organizations, waiting until the end of every interaction to make a sales pitch can mean customers in a rush likely won’t be receptive.  Instead, coach staff (note: CCC has much research regarding how to do this effectively in a service-to-sales environment specifically) to find the optimal and natural times in the conversation to make the pitch.  The more you prompt customers at the right time, the more likely they will be to accept the offer.

How have other service and support organizations streamlined the service-to-sales process and made it easier for customers to buy?  Would be keen to hear your ideas.

In fact, a recent Gartner analysis finds that despite a $225 billion investment in CRM over the past 10 years, companies have only seen customer satisfaction increase 3-5%.  And I would argue that the CSAT increase is probably not even related to CRM, but rather from an increased focus on process improvement and better frontline rep training.

The statistic is amazing, but as any service, sales, or marketing VP will tell you, not unsurprising.  Yet considering the multi-year, multi-million dollar commitment required to implement and optimize CRM, coordinate across multiple business units, and upskill staff and drive utilization, it’s worth a look at what best-in-class companies do to leverage CRM.

There are many root causes as to why companies struggle to truly leverage CRM—poor data quality, poor frontline staff usage of the tool key among them.  One of the biggest causes, however, is that attaining deep customer intelligence requires good people with good connections to truly bring the information to life.  Even the best, most detailed database entries do not approximate strong internal relationships where service and support staff can collaborate with each other and brainstorm service and sales opportunities, elaborating data points and offering additional perspective.

So no matter where your team is with CRM optimization, the following couple of ideas can enhance staff collaboration and customer information sharing:

• Consider co-locating staff to foster communication.  We know of several companies’ recent efforts to integrate contact center staff with sales operations staff.  Imagine the ability to look up background information on a client in the CRM system and then discuss opportunities to cross- or up-sell with the person who regularly works with the client and knows the ins and outs of her business.
• Enable regular customer-focused sessions among frontline staff and sales and marketing.  Focus sessions on particular customer segments (whether value-based, needs-based, or otherwise) and discuss customer needs, common issues, preferences, and behaviors.  While many companies hold these types of sessions for platinum accounts and customers, consider ways to scale this to encompass all customers.

And by the way, the aforementioned ideas are not only ways to better leverage CRM data, but also opportunities increase the value of service and support in the eyes of the business.  After all, service and support trumps all (even CRM) when it comes to knowledge of the customer.

CCC Members, find information on how to effectively co-locate staff here.  And for more information on CRM technology, please refer to CCC’s whitepaper on the topic and use these links to find peer perspective on Maximizing CRM Use to Drive a Better Customer Experience and CRM Vendors and VOC Collection.