Implementation
The implementation stage will require careful planning and systematic assessment throughout all the stages of change. The central issue is to make everyone work together as a team. To achieve that, before planning the implementation, I will focus on gathering information about customers’ wants and needs to make sure that the planned change will be customer-centric. After that, I will word the mission and vision statements to create a baseline for assessing innovation. Finally, I will establish an effective change leadership team from the trusted employees of the company to ensure the support and commitment of the upper management and front-line employees and improve communication of goals and objectives to all the stakeholders. When the preliminary work is done, I will focus on planning the implementation of the CRM system. When the plan is finished, I will conduct a pilot project to see if anything needs changing and then start the change process. During the implementation phase, I will continuously assess the results using appropriate performance metrics.
Performance metrics are of extreme importance as they help to measure both internal and external success and process efficiency. Setting up appropriate performance metrics is associated with the establishment of baselines and standards, enhanced management of customer experience, improved communication of the company’s goals, and optimization of employee compensation. I believe that the best way is to make the employees from different departments work together is to motivate the personnel. Implementation of appropriate metrics will allow the employees to see how their actions affect their rewards; therefore, they will try to put every effort into improving their performance. I will also focus on customer satisfaction by implementing VoC programs and service quality measurements. Among the external metrics, I will implement customer lifecycle metrics, including retention, win-back, and customer profitability. Among the internal measures, I will focus on implementing operational and process metrics, among which are complaints, conversion ratios, and response levels. Even though the number of measures is considerable, I am sure I will be able to create a comprehensive system of metrics that will work efficiently.
One of the crucial points in implementing technology-based changes is to make sure that technology is used appropriately. To achieve adequate use of technology, I will choose a CRM system that will be compatible with the company’s system. At the same time, I will make sure that new technology meets the needs of both customers and employees.
Technology for Company Goals
Marketing
The use of technology in marketing is of extreme importance, as it allows making data-driven decisions and monitoring customer feedback. However, the use of technology needs to be aligned with the company’s goals and objectives. However, the use of technology needs to be efficient and limited not to shift the focus from customers to technology. Since the purpose of a customer-centric company is to provide the best customer experience using minimal resources, technology use needs to be carefully planned.
Social Media Surveys
The central competence of the marketing team is to conduct market research and obtain customer intelligence. Customer intelligence is best obtained by conducting surveys and analyzing their results. Therefore, I will insist on using social networking to gather information from the customers. After that, I will use big data technology to analyze the findings and make strategic decisions in marketing. Such data analysis is crucial for understanding the customers’ wants and needs.
CRM System
Social media surveys, however, do not allow real-time monitoring of changes in customer interest, demands, and problems. Therefore, a marketing team needs an effective CRM system that will improve its performance. First, the CRM system will be used to measure and analyze the funnel health of market leads as they mature along the sales cycle. Second, it will help to gather behavioral data of new leads to trigger sales action. Third, the CRM system will facilitate the identification of opportunities to nurture prospects along the customer’s journey. Fourth, the system will be used to communicate with the sales team. Finally, the proposed technology will help to predict the success or failure of new ideas.
To gather enough data to achieve these performance improvements, I will put a special emphasis on making comprehensive service records, promoting the use of technology to trace real-time customer behavior, and compiling website heat maps to understand the efficiency of web resources. I will insist on systematizing and analyzing demographic data of the users and profiles of companies using the CRM system. Finally, I will make sure that all the preferences and contact information are stored in the CRM system to guarantee orderly communication. I will promote the use of cloud services to minimize costs and improve accessibility.
Call Center
Productivity
The central goal of the call center is to provide customer service and convert inbound calls into leads. Therefore, agent productivity can be measured in average call time, conversion rate, and case resolution. To improve the average call time, I will monitor average call time both online and using weekly reports. I will analyze which employees underperform and provide appropriate training for them. I will provide the employees with the ability to monitor their own KPI online so that they know if they underperform. As for case resolution, I will ensure that all the call center specialists create adequate service records. The analysis of these records will demonstrate what the most difficult questions for the employees are so that I can create scripts to guide them.
As for improving the conversion rate, I will utilize call-tracking software that will help to reply to every call. There are times when a call center, even with the best staff, cannot answer every call. If a customer does not have his call answered within a minute, he or she will most likely call a competitor. Call tracking software will help the company to call back to the customers whose calls were not answered. At the same time, I will use the CRM system to consolidate the inquiries from all the sources, including phone calls, massagers, online chats, social media, SMS, and emails, in one place. This will help keep track of all the ongoing conversations.
Customer Retention
To improve customer retention, I will gather feedback from customers after every call using automatic callback systems. The signals of negative experience will be automatically sent to the manager and to the employee, whose call was unsatisfactory so that the employee calls back at tries to make up for the misconduct. I will also gather all the demographical information and preferences of the customers to anticipate their needs and offer the most appropriate service. Such interventions are expected to increase the number of loyal customers.