Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

February 02, 2009

New Innoveer White Paper Offers Proven Ways to Get Through Downturn

By Brendan B. Read


Innoveer Solutions has released a new white paper, "CRM & the Economy," with proven advice aimed at helping businesses streamline sales, marketing and service operations to decrease costs and increase efficiency during the current downturn. These moves will also help them rapidly capitalize on new opportunities when the economy turns around.
 
The paper offers strategies for making small process and technology enhancements that can lead to large efficiency and cost-savings gains, backed by customer examples. It explores how refining existing CRM processes, tools and capabilities or linking different customer-facing activities and operations can provide companies with insight and business intelligence. This knowledge enables firms to support shifting business objectives during difficult economic times.
 
Among the Innoveer white paper’s recommendations:
 
-- Tracking service in­teractions enables companies to quickly identify and rectify product defects, and bill custom­ers who exceed their contracted service levels.
 
-- Optimizing in-progress marketing campaigns returns higher quality leads, thus making the sales team more effective and efficient, and re­fining customer segments and sales territories provides companies with a greater return on their marketing and sales activities.
 
-- Introducing self-service portals frees companies to charge more for “hands-on” support.
 
-- Improving lead management capabilities, partner relationship management programs and creating a single view of each customer that creates numerous opportunities for refining business practices, reducing costs and increasing efficiency, again with only minimal invest­ments.
 
The white paper provides several examples of Innoveer clients successfully employing such and similar methods. Among them:
 
-- A large New York healthcare organization, seeking to manage cost and improve service, intro­duced a one-call resolution model that enables its contact center agents to resolve 99 percent of incoming calls during the first call i.e. first call resolution. It deployed back-end integration that reduced call duration by 50 percent, and en­abled online self-service portals to further lower service costs by 18 percent.
 
-- A European organization that relies on its contact center to help sell policies and secure renewals, facing staff shortages that hurt its performance, refined its sales process to achieve its previous productivity levels, while increasing lead and prospect quality.
 
-- A high-technology manufacturer reduced the steps its sales representatives must follow to resolve customers’ calls, which de­creased training requirements and staffing needs by eight percent, saving $1.2 million per year.
 
“During the economic downturn, organizations will benefit from streamlining their sales, marketing and service programs, as this can have a multiplying effect, leading to significant cost savings, improved efficiency and numerous business outcomes over time,” says Adam Honig, president and CEO of Innoveer Solutions. “Now is a great time for companies to invest in revitalizing existing CRM processes as they will realize more out of their previous investments-and be well-positioned from a competitive standpoint when the economy rebounds.”

Brendan B. Read is TMCnet’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Michelle Robart


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