This Time You Should C.A.R.E.

This Time You Should C.A.R.E.
You don't work in a call center, you work in a Customer Awareness and Response Environment. No, really.


In the contact center industry, it is not uncommon for an idea or concept to quickly capture the collective imagination of the industry and take on a life of its own. Case in point: the computer-telephony integration (CTI) industry of the mid-1990s. Remember when everything had to have that all-important CTI component? Remember all those exciting CTI applications and demonstrations that never worked but looked really cool? Remember all those CTI companies and the hundreds of people that crowded around their demonstrations at trade shows? I wonder whatever happened to those companies. If you find out, call my Wildfire.
Later in the 1990s, after CTI was discovered to be more of an enabling technology than a solution unto itself and interest in the whole mess began to wane, the contact center industry began to swoon over customer relationship management (CRM). What started out to be a pretty interesting way of managing customer interactions took on the proverbial life of its own and once again captured the imagination of the industry. CRM stopped being an expensive, unwieldy, complex software solution and became the all-encompassing product ideal, the pinnacle of customer care excellence, the peak of perfection that every company and product strove to achieve. CRM became the contact center's Miss America. Miss CRM?
Today we know that Miss CRM of the late 1990s became the anorexic, overexposed, underage-drinking, too-many-late-night-parties, unflattering-pictures-on-the-internet has-been in the early part of this decade. Even special dispensation from Donald Trump couldn't have revived the career of Miss CRM.
Perhaps I've become too much of a cynic after watching these fads come and go. Whenever I hear a company trying to push some new idea or concept today, my first response is usually, "Why should I care?"
Ironically, I have stumbled across a concept that makes a lot of sense to me and makes it easy to understand why I should care. The concept is called Customer Awareness and Response Environment, or CARE. Pinpointing the origin of this idea is a bit sketchy, but it seems to me to be entirely appropriate for where the contact center finds itself today, deep into the first decade of the 21st century.
CARE is not a replacement for CRM, nor is it borne of the kind of fluff that typically emanates from the PR flaks who struggle desperately to come up with a catch phrase that will bring fame and fortune to their vendor clients. Rather it is a concept that addresses many of the issues facing the contact center today and provides guidance in the form of practical solutions for maximizing the customer contact experience.
CARE isn't a product, but it can be helped along with the proper tools. Still, if you're about to send an email to your trade show coordinator to make sure you have a big booth at the next CARE trade show, don't waste your time.
The idea behind CARE is to create the type of customer response environment that takes full advantage of the information and business intelligence that is commonly captured in the contact center and put that information to use in the rest of the enterprise. In other words, don't just provide lip service to the idea of making the contact center strategically important and a recognized contributor to the bottom line, do something to make it happen.
Contact centers today have huge amounts of customer information and business intelligence scattered about in disparate repositories throughout the operation. When systems don't communicate with each other it's difficult to marry together these silos of isolated information. The idea behind CARE is to bring all this information together in such a way that customers can be quickly and efficiently taken care of and the intelligence gained in the transaction becomes beneficial to the entire organization. No small feat, but do-able.
Not only is it do-able, it is already being done, as I discovered during a recent conversation with Garry Schultz, Vice President of Global Customer Support at Sonic/Roxio in Toronto. Garry is a published author (The Customer Care & Contact Center Handbook, 2003), a recognized customer care expert and one of my favorite speakers at conferences and industry gatherings, including the annual Saddletree Desert Forum.
When I asked Garry for his opinion on the viability of the CARE idea, he responded, "The Customer Attention and Response Environment idea makes a lot of sense to us at Sonic/Roxio. Customer satisfaction is paramount to our success and we set about to streamline our business processes, consolidate our applications and improve the experience for both customers and agents. We achieved this by implementing a web-based CARE initiative, which can be extended dynamically as our business changes. We have the ability to provide our customers and agents with all of the relevant applications and information that had traditionally been unavailable or difficult to access."
In the past, the contact center has been something of a poor stepchild to back office operations. It is not unusual to find that whatever customer software the back office uses gets extended to the front office. In the CARE environment the contact center is the starting point and the customer focus is extended from there to the rest of the enterprise. In other words, the contact center feeds the rest of the enterprise - the net result being that the contact center is finally recognized as the strategically important, inimitable operation that it's always been.
CARE is not a rip-and-replace approach as most technology-driven approaches are. It is an approach that lets you make the most and get the best out of the information you already have with the net result being superior customer service and the sharing of information throughout the enterprise. In today's contact center profession, this is something you should definitely CARE about.