Cisco Cisco CRM Communications Connector Libro bianco

Converged voice and data open the door for SMBs to increase

sales and profitability by delivering a superior customer expe-

rience. But technology isn’t a silver bullet. SMBs must tackle

some long-standing obstacles in order to reap the rewards of

the customer centric business. Below are four best practices

for using converged voice and data to help SMBs overcome

information, integration, cost and adoption hurdles.

1. Know your customer

Unlike their enterprise counterparts, SMB

employees wear multiple hats. Within an

SMB, everyone must be ready to face the cus-

tomer, whether it’s a company president

leading sales calls, IT-savvy marketers help-

ing to solve a technology miscue, or field

sales reps doubling as service technicians.

This requires up-to-date, 360-degree views

of individual customers that can be accessed by employees up

and down the organization chart and across all departments

(marketing, sales, service, finance, management, IT, etc.). These

customer views include unified email, telephone (including

voice mail) and database records so that each employee can

“pick up” the relationship where a fellow employee “left off.”

Three-hundred sixty-degree views are even more critical

when dealing with most valuable customers and high

growth potential customers (those able to become most

valuable customers over time). To “know customers” goes

beyond a purchase history or what happened on the last 

service call. SMBs also must match this information with

insight into the value and needs of different customers. This

combination is the cornerstone of customer profitability. For

example, the marketing department won’t frustrate a most

valuable customer with irrelevant offers because campaign

managers can see that this customer already has a range of

products from the company.

As SMBs increase their customer knowledge and centralize it

into single profiles, they can use converged voice and data to

bring that insight to employees. One advantage of an IP

Telephony (IPT)-CRM tie is that it can be “information selective,”

i.e. it calls up the information most relevant to the user making

the request.For instance,a billing rep and a sales rep may access

the same customer profile, but they each require different infor-

mation to meet the customer’s needs and deliver a satisfying

experience. A single, IPT-CRM system relies on screen pops,

click-to-dial, call routing, case management and other function-

alities to place the right customer information

in front of the right employee at the right time.

This customer insight helps SMBs to identify

revenue opportunities quickly and increase

profit, such as through a cross-sell or up-sell

offer during a service call.

2. Converge to reduce TCO

Integration is a major cost point for SMBs and

enterprises alike. But SMBs have had fewer options for tackling

integration, especially when it comes to PBX-based phone and

CRM systems.Traditionally,PBX and CRM had to be maintained on

separate networks. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) was high

because two separate networks required two separate support

staffs, separate training and multiple service contractors. As a

result, it didn’t make financial sense to tie PBX and CRM together

because systems integrators and custom code were needed. It

also left many companies unable to get information out of silos

and in front of customer-facing employees at the right time.

SMBs can reduce TCO by migrating voice and data 

infrastructures to a converged IP network.With a converged, inte-

grated network, there is only one network to manage and one

system to train technical employees and end users to use.

Customer information and insight are more centralized, and TCO

drops as SMBs do more with less. Resource costs in terms of dol-

lars, people and time go down, which falls right to the bottom

line. More importantly, an efficient organization is a more effec-

tive one. A range of functionalities help customer-facing person-

nel to meet the customers needs quickly, including Click to Dial,

CRM computer screen pops at the time of the call, call duration,

customer relationship tracking, new customer record creation,

and IP phone displays.

©2006 Peppers & Rogers Group. All rights reserved. Peppers & Rogers Group is a division of Carlson Marketing.

The Customer-Centric SMB: Increasing Profitability by Focusing on Customers

WHITE PAPER   2006

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The Customer-Centric Company Roadmap