Today’s multichannel world is growing more complex daily. Whether your orders are captured through traditional or on-line retail – via call centers, IVRs or affiliates – having the right applications in place is critical to the growth of your organization as a whole, the performance of your sales team, and to the loyalty and lifetime customer value you experience from your customers. And a closely coupled order management system (OMS) and CRM is a cornerstone to building a solid foundation for your retail business.
In addition to offering the customer more options, multichannel marketing allows a business more opportunities to interact with its customers and even have a dialog; each channel can help promote other channels. Since website and phone-in mail orders collect information about the customer that a brick-and-mortar retail sale may not, these channels make it possible to develop customer lists for future promotions and branding campaigns – and to understand customer channel preference. The intent of CRM solutions is to keep in touch with your customers and keep them engaged with your brand – answering questions, building the customer relationship, and providing incentive-based reasons for them to remain a loyal and frequent customer.
As a result, customer relationship management has become a multichannel discipline and savvy retailers recognize that they need to bond with their customers through whatever mix of channels their customers use and prefer.
But as with any broad based, metrics-intensive discipline, customer service applications and metrics have become quite packaged and commoditized, even if the brand behind the service is unique. And at the same time, these retailers recognize that best of breed suppliers can provide specialized service, expertise and technologies at a better cost – in the areas of call center services, fulfillment, media buying, ecommerce, and online services. And the one central point of convergence, data tracking and measurement is the order management system.
Integrating Order Management, Customer Service and Business Processes Diagram Courtesy OrderLogix
Equally important is a customer service solution that gives you the ability to monitor, manage and quickly adjust all of the key aspects of the multichannel sales process – including scripts, offers, continuity, discounts, up sells, cross-sells, and other elements of customer satisfaction, all in real time. This will allow you to maximize average order value, increase media efficiency ratios (MER), and generate exceptional sales and campaign results while at the same time increasing customer loyalty.
So there is probably no better and more logical place to pay attention to new technology than where order management and customer service converge.
Whether you are a large company with sophisticated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), accounting and CRM investments, or a smaller marketer experiencing high growth and looking to take the next step – modular platforms can be integrated with your internal systems and external suppliers to provide a best-of-breed customer service, sales and order management tracking platform rolled up into a single, flexible and cost-effective solution.
In the latest developments, leading order management providers are also offering integrated customer service workforce management tools and Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) integration – tightly coupling order management and customer service solutions to achieve maximum flexibility and scalability for the enterprise, with the added benefit of delivering additional insight and control. And in many cases, where CTI is implemented as part of the process and SaaS partners are used to avoid capital expense, the cost of the integrated customer service and order management system can be paid for in reduction of the average call time alone!
