Example of Intelligent CRM Interactions

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Business Intelligence for CRM" The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

For this example of intelligent CRM interactions, we will use Amtrak. Because of the fact that most of the time when people are traveling on trains, and they can’t use the Internet, they didn’t have all these Web capabilities so they stayed really call center focused. They have all the station agents where you can buy tickets. Now they have a great website that 85,000 people visit on a monthly basis.

It's very impressive, and then you get partners like AAA or travel agents that sell tickets so what Amtrak has to think about is, is this information intelligence about the customer? If I don’t connect these different distribution channels together, I might lose the piece of information that I needed to go into that profile, so we are up to date, and we can use that information in my intelligent customer interactions.

I will give another example of multi-channel interactions. I am going to flip between Amtrak and AAA today, I could give you a lots of example, but I just chose those so I am going to go a little bit in depth because that both customers but also interesting stories.

Tracking Multiple Channels

AAA also has multiple channels. ERS is your emergency road service. That’s the guy or gal who goes out to jump out your car or tow your car, whatever it may be. Then they have branches. AAA has offices or branches as they call them, in many different cities. They have a very impressive contact center. They have a contact center for insurance, for travel, and for emergency road service.

Then there is direct mail, and I am sure you receive a piece or two every month. They have one of the largest direct mail houses in this country. Then they have some very impressive kiosks for AAA service. You can see them at malls or at airports or a variety of different places. They are trying these. Then they have got an extremely well-thought through AAA.com Web site that allows you to get everything, from fixing problems to ordering insurance online.

So these are their channels, and AAA said, you know it is not just that we have to offer these, we have to make it real. So here is for real, this is from the Northern California club which is includes Northern California, Nevada and Utah. It is a fairly large club in the AAA family, and here is how they sell insurance.

So there are three easy ways on the upper left hand side, three ways you can get a quote from AAA. So you can click on online, and that will give you the online quote within minutes like you would expect. You could do it via requesting a call on the upper right hand side and you put your number there, and you get a call back within the next number of minutes. Or you can call them, and this is a general number for their contact center.

And if you say, you know what I don’t go for all these kind of generic channels, I would rather know who my agent is, my insurance agent in my local area, you can click on that and you get the name of the particular agent and his or her details so you can call them that way as well. So here is the company AAA who is really beginning to master the need to share information effectively across different channels.

This is really important for intelligent customer interactions. If you capture intelligence in one channel, but don’t offer it or capture it from another channel, you risk really getting the full picture of what that customer is trying to do with you. So the objective is that the customer has a seamless experience.

Read what InetSoft customers and partners have said about their selection of Style Scope for their solution for dashboard reporting.

That seamless experience must be across multiple channels. It can't be a seamless experience within a channel. It has to be across the channels that you offer. And then you also want to have that seamless experience, or each moment of truth as we call it in the industry, where somebody is calling a contact center, or working with the Kiosk, or online, or on the telephone in the store, where you know that they are dealt with using the care and love and concern that you would expect for best in class organizations.