Everyone knows that it costs eight times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to retain an existing one and as a result everyone is interested in customer management. Everyone also knows that automating functions is one of the best ways to save a company money, so we are all interested in automation. However, few people know that automation can also, if approached correctly, improve the quality of a company’s customer management.
If not approached correctly it can have the opposite effect; this is why B2B marketers are approaching the area very cautiously. Traditionally, B2B marketing has relied heavily on personal interaction and practitioners are loath to compromise this for the sake of cost savings. Yet, as Paul Scott, business development director at Dimension Data, comments, “The biggest single change in contact centres in the next five years will be the increasing use of automation to answer calls. Agents are an unsustainable model for the future. Automation is the way forward, and those companies that do it well will be the winners.”
Interactive voice recognition
Ian Osborne, chief executive at call management provider Yac, says, “Automation within call management solutions is an important element of dealing with incoming customer calls. Specifically utilising interactive voice recognition (IVR) to help route callers to the most appropriate destination is a valuable tool.” This can go beyond simple call-handling. It is also possible to automate tasks such as re-ordering and appointment booking.
For the customer, these can provide a professional and consistent welcome. They can be quicker than waiting for an agent. B2B marketers can even tailor the automated response to the likely needs of each individual customer.
Companies are increasingly moving away from inflexible hardware, which costs approximately £2000, and towards web-based solutions that cost as little as £240 per year. With every IVR solution, however, the key is to offer an easy escape from the system, so that a customer who just wants to speak to a person can do this easily.
Email management
As B2B marketers begin to see the higher open and click-through-rates that result from personalised emails, we can expect them to become increasingly interested in higher-value email management systems. The cost of these systems varies depending on levels of use, but by and large they are a fairly inexpensive way of delivering high volumes of quality marketing communications to customers.
Estate agency Knight Frank has been using an email management system from Concep to send commercial property updates to approximately 5000 key investors. Its marketing team has been particularly impressed by the way they can view which customer clicked on which property in order to tailor future communications accordingly. Law firm Clifford Chance has also used Concep’s system to build databases of subscribers to newsletters on various aspects of law.
Anthony Green, sales & marketing director at Concep, admits that there are risks involved in automating the sending of emails. He says, “If you don’t manage your data well, they might go to some people who don’t want them. Getting past corporate firewalls is a huge problem in B2B. However, in two years everyone will be doing this. Basically, you won’t be able to just spend a pittance on generic emails as many people are doing now. You’ll need to be much smarter than that.”
Desktop alerts
Pat Geary, chief marketing officer at Skinkers, believes that the future of automated customer management is not in emails. He says, “90 per cent of email is spam. No one reads it. In all the tests it’s clear that people only open emails from friends and colleagues; they don’t open those from companies. As a result, B2B marketers need to find a new way of communicating with their customers.”
He claims his company’s desktop solution is the answer. In brief, it involves downloading a programme, which then sends updates from a company to your desktop. Geary at Skinkers, continues, “Business buyers tend to spend a lot of time at their desktops so this is the best place to communicate with them. It lets them choose which companies they want to hear from.”
The challenge for the marketer is to persuade his customer to download this marketing tool onto his/her desktop. It requires a particularly strong existing relationship. So, while many of us have BBC news alerts on our desktops (Geary points to Birmingham Midshires and two other major financial services organisations using Skinkers to communicate with IFAs, and Virgin Atlantic who use it to keep its travel agent network informed of new promotions) as yet it has not been used by any B2B marketers to communicate directly with customers. It may, however, be one to watch for the future.
Online ‘smart agents’
One customer automation system that is about to migrate from consumer to business marketing is the online smart agent. These are automatic responses provided by an intelligent knowledge base to online customer queries. Its manufacturer, Synthetix, claims that the smart agent is able to answer approximately 80 per cent of customer queries instantly using a natural language interface. It escalates those queries, which it is unable to answer at the call centre or through an enquiry form.
The potential benefit of this type of automation to customers is that they receive an instant response to their query without having to call or email anyone. It also frees up call centre time, leaving agents free to deal with the most complex enquiries. This allows the marketer to understand typical customer problems and so redesign sales tools, products and processes to eliminate them.
To date, the smart agent has only been used by consumer marketers. Yorkshire Building Society has used ‘Helen’ to answer 7000 customer questions in just three months. However, BT Wholesale is due to begin using it in June 2006 and if it is as successful there, we can expect to see a more widespread roll-out in the sector.
Finding its feet
It is early days for the automation of customer management. B2B marketers are used to offering the personal touch and still need some persuading that automation is about more than saving money. Nigel Jones, business development manager at contact centre solutions provider Alcatel, sums up the dilemma, “This isn’t just about offering a ‘press-one-for-service’ option that many customers find hard to stomach. It’s about using new interactive technologies that allow businesses to offer a personalised approach, despite the absence of a human element.”
Perhaps Corporate Telecommunications offers a way forward for automation in B2B. The company sells telephone headsets to call centres. It sells almost entirely through its website and is pioneering the use of video and text chat on that website. Every agent has a web camera on their PC, therefore customers can actually see the agent who is helping them with their order.
In this way, customers have the choice of ordering quickly online or through increased human interaction with a live agent. In the future we may see an increasing number of B2B companies following this example and using technology not to stop customers troubling salespeople, but to bring their customers even closer to them.