Page 347 - Handbook of Modern Telecommunications

3-138 CRC Handbook of Modern Telecommunications, Second Edition

3.6.3 Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

The key system in the customer service area of provider business processes is CRM. This system is the
source of record for all customer and service data and often plays a dominant role in service delivery
processes, such as order management.
Customer Relationship Management processes consider the fundamental knowledge of customers’
needs and include all functionalities necessary for the acquisition, enhancement, and retention of a
relationship with a customer. It is about customer service and support, whether storefront, telephone,
Web, or field service. It is also about retention management, cross-selling, up-selling, and direct market-
ing for the purpose of selling to customers. CRM also includes the collection of customer information
and its application to personalize, customize, and integrate delivery of service to a customer, as well as
to identify opportunities for increasing the value of the customer to the enterprise. CRM applies to both
conventional retail customer interactions, as well as to wholesale interactions, such as when an enter-
prise is selling to another enterprise that is acting as the retailer.
This system often includes workflow data for customer support processes, such as trouble ticketing
and change requests. CRM systems are most commonly used by Customer Support Representatives
(CSR) in call centers, but may also have Web-based front-ends for customer self-service.

3.6.3.1 Customer Contact Management, Retention, and Loyalty
This process is part of the Operations Support and Readiness (vertical) grouping and the CRM (hori-
zontal) process group as well.
Customer contact management, retention, and loyalty processes deal with all functions related to the reten-
tion of acquired customers, and the use of loyalty schemes in the potential acquisition of customers, func-
tions that are generally sold as part of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) suite of applications.
They establish a complete understanding of the needs of the customer, a determination of the value
of the customer to the enterprise, determination of opportunities and risks for specific customers, etc.
These processes collect and analyze data from all enterprise and customer contacts. These functions
allow an operator to create, update, and view the customer’s information, and record and view all cus-
tomer interactions, so that whoever is speaking to a customer can see the history of issues that have
concerned that customer. More sophisticated systems allow capabilities to highlight customers as being
at risk of switching to an alternative carrier (churn indicator) and provide comparisons with other oper-
ator’s service packages to allow customer care agents to try to persuade a customer that their current
operator can provide the best value for the money. These indicators can be provided via integration with
business intelligence platforms.
In general, these processes provide the following functions:
• Verify customer relationship
• Interaction management
• Build customer insight
• Analyze and manage customer risk
• Personalize customer profile for retention and loyalty
• Validate customer satisfaction
3.6.3.2 Customer Information Management
This process is part of the Operations Support and Readiness (vertical) grouping and the CRM (hori-
zontal) process group as well.
Customer Information Management is a core piece of any CRM solution. This is used by all users
across all channels, to allow creation, update, lookup/search, and view of customer information.
Customer information includes, but is not limited to, the customer identification, profile, accounts,
service profiles, etc.