Bridging the Gap: Linking CRM and Business Support Systems

As communication service providers (CSPs) have increasingly focused on bundling new and advanced services to attract and retain customers, many have unwittingly placed an enormous burden on their customer service operations.

According to information from industry analysts and consultants, customers are frustrated with today's customer service—or lack of it. The Yankee Group recently reported that less than one-third of Tier 1 operators have a single view of their customers, and even simple services may experience order fallout in excess of 80 percent. A July 2005 report by Accenture pointed out that poor customer service is still the top reason for switching service providers. Respondents to the Accenture survey ranked the inability of customer care agents to resolve problems—particularly on the first call—as their No. 1 source of frustration.

Inefficiencies at the customer touchpoints prevent most CSPs from providing superior customer service. At one point, customer relationship management (CRM) systems were thought to be the panacea for this, but these solutions have fallen short from the perspective of order management and billing services.

The fact is that most customer-facing operations still do not have real-time, integrated access to customer information or, in many cases, the order management and billing data that are necessary to provide world-class customer service. Customer service representatives (CSRs) continue to toggle between multiple applications to input, track and manage orders or to access and modify real-time billing information. As a result, the cost of service is escalating while customer loyalty and, ultimately, revenue are suffering.

Compounding this condition today are the shortcomings of the first-generation CRM solutions, popular in the 1990s, that were implemented across a wide range of industries, from retail to telecom to government.

These CRM solutions focused on providing a single view of the customer in an effort to improve operational efficiency. They did not adequately address CSR-level tasks and associated downstream processes that would have facilitated CSR effectiveness and productivity.

The missing CSR-level support is especially apparent in light of the complexities and tasks unique to the communication industry. This deficiency, combined with interface usability issues, tends to frustrate CSRs and lessen their effectiveness in day-to-day tasks. A Convergys-led study involving four of the most common communication-specific contact center tasks concluded that there is a dramatic difference in CSR efficiency between CRM systems and emerging applications that were designed to meet CSPs' specific customer service requirements.

CSM: Linking CRM and BSS

So how can providers leverage their existing investments in their CRM and business support systems to improve this situation?

The quickest and cleanest way is to address the gap between the CRM system and the business support system with a customer service management (CSM) strategy that integrates processes and data from the business and operational support systems (BSS and OSS) with the CRM system.

By improving the synergy between these systems across four key functions, CSPs can give their CSRs access to the data they need for resolving customer problems on the first call.

Here is what the improved synergy should deliver:

Integrated Account Management.

This capability enables a comprehensive view of the customer across the BSS/OSS. It allows CSRs to rapidly create, search and manage customer and account information through a single interface. Effective account management addresses the telecom-specific requirements often lacking in CRM solutions (such as flexible customer hierarchies and nested accounts that support business and family-plan customers). The enhanced solution should bring account management options to the CSR's fingertips, including the ability to:

•Create and modify customers
•Create, modify and terminate accounts
•View customer and account summaries
•Create and update customer contacts
•Manage complex customer and service hierarchies
•Input service and billing addresses
•Store interaction notes
•Collect customer profile data (for example, preferred method of contact)

Efficient and Accurate Service Order Capture.

This capability enhances CRM applications so that CSRs can identify ordering problems early in the process and operators can reduce fallout, cut downstream rework costs and increase margins. Critical to the service order capture function is a quote-to-order process that can handle any type of communication service request in a manner that takes into account the validation perspectives across the BSS as well as the customer's existing service hierarchy. This delivers the assurance that order data are captured correctly, that all products in a quote can be both provisioned and billed, that necessary fulfillment and billing configuration information is complete and that its status can be checked at every stage. To overcome CRM ordering limitations, CSPs require service order capture capabilities such as:

•Capturing any type of customer order request (move, add, change, disconnect or status, suspend/resume, upgrade and supplement) for fixed and dynamic service bundles
•Enforcing order entry edits, such as data formats or required fields, to ensure that data comply with downstream system requirements
•Guiding order configuration
•Validating quotes and orders based on product business rules, billing and provisioning rules, the customer's existing service hierarchy, product dependencies and mutual exclusion rules
•Sending validated orders directly to order management

Convergent Billing Management.

This capability gives CSRs direct access to detailed convergent billing data, enabling them to efficiently handle all billing-related interactions. This includes drawing data from multiple convergent billing data sources. By providing CSRs with access to a customer's purchasing capabilities and billing history, including current and past due balances and views of the actual bills customers receive, the integrated solution allows CSRs to:

•Accept and make payments on behalf of the customer
•Complete billing and usage inquiries
•Input or determine the status of disputed charges
•Place requests for adjustments
•View payment history
•Determine billing status, including past due amounts

Effective Customer Care.

This capability requires support for integrated account management, efficient and accurate service order capture, and convergent billing management. It also requires tight, direct integration to other systems, including legacy CRM solutions, and improved screen designs to better display customer data. In other words, the solution must enable consistent, comprehensive and prompt care across all touch points to deliver customer-centric service. During interactions with the customer, CSRs can:

•Provide real-time status updates on orders, disputes or trouble tickets
•Access detailed historical account, ordering and billing data
•Resolve billing disputes
•Manage the customer's service hierarchy and update orders in real time with move, add, change or disconnect requests
•Create trouble reports and initiate the trouble ticket process

It's a win-win solution for the service provider and customer alike. By applying a CSM approach to bridging the gap between the CRM and business support systems, customers receive personalized care from service providers, with information quickly and accurately delivered from a single source, while customer care agents are empowered to work more efficiently and logically and with fewer applications to master.

This approach can enhance CSR productivity, improve customer satisfaction, keep more customers and capture more revenue.

Larry Schwartz is executive vice president of global operations for the Information Management Group (IMG) at Convergys Corporation. Convergys supports many of the top global wireless service providers with its Infinys BSS software, including the Infinys CSM application for improving customer service management and CSR productivity. Information about Convergys can be found at www.convergys.com.