Marketing Automation Connects With Contact Centers

Businesses that want to get closer to their customers are pursuing goals that seem to be at odds: improving customer service while also reducing call-center volumes and costs. To accomplish both, many businesses are transforming their conventional call centers into multichannel contact centers that support telephone, E-mail, the Web, and wireless. This provides customers with more service options while reducing the number of calls that customer-service representatives handle by phone.

Businesses that have implemented multichannel customer service are also looking to their contact centers to help generate revenue. The contact center is a logical place to capture relevant customer data, and businesses that can effectively obtain this data can use it to drive cross-selling, up-selling, and promotional initiatives through the contact center itself rather than by direct mail or bulk E-mail campaigns.

For instance, when a banking customer transfers funds between accounts, either over the phone or via the Web, the financial institution should be able to present the customer with an offer for overdraft coverage. Customers would get personalized offers geared to their stated preferences, transaction history, account status, or navigational patterns.

As contact centers play an increasingly critical role in customer interaction, many businesses are seeking tools to generate new revenue during such interactions with established customers. Marketing-automation technology typically is used in marketing or sales departments to conduct data analysis for segmenting customers or prospects, and to design, launch, and track campaigns that are based on this information. But the technology also has applicability within the contact center.

In a contact-center environment, established customers initiate interactions and have relationships with the company. It makes sense to offer these customers targeted products and services in real time via customers' chosen communication channels. For businesses with marketing-automation applications for analytics and campaign management in their marketing and sales departments, it makes sense to push these capabilities down to the contact center. Such technology can give contact-center agents the ability to offer recommendations and promotions of new products and services to specific customers in real time.

Many businesses have implemented customer-relationship management applications, such as those from Kana, PeopleSoft, and Siebel Systems, to bring effective multichannel customer-service capabilities into the contact center and to address the new complexity inherent in giving contact-center staff and customers access to customer-centric information through these channels. Most businesses that have already invested in CRM systems logically look for marketing-automation capabilities within these systems. But most of today's customer-service offerings lack the sophisticated capabilities provided by standalone marketing-automation products.

At the same time, many marketing-automation offerings aren't designed to handle the unique requirements of contact centers, which center on real-time interaction. So, for now, businesses that want to use marketing automation in their contact centers face the prospect of integrating their existing customer-service systems with marketing-automation products from vendors such as Protagona, Unica, and Xchange.

The technical challenges of supporting multiple channels are significant. Unlike phone or Web-based customer service, E-mail interactions don't happen in real time. Wireless interfaces are far different from standard Web pages, forcing businesses to present different information and actions to customers using wireless devices. In all cases, the customer-service technology should capture all relevant details about a customer interaction, giving customer-service representatives a complete view of the customer's interaction history across all channels.

Customer-service software works well for capturing, managing, and responding to customer contacts, though it doesn't inherently provide comprehensive, real-time analysis of those interactions for use in multichannel marketing campaigns. Many businesses invest in E-mail and Web-marketing campaigns, but most of them lack the analytical capabilities to use contact-center data to effectively target their campaigns to profitable customers. Potential customers often are deluged with unsolicited and unfocused E-mail promotions that haven't been personalized, are easy to ignore, and may be more irritating than informative.

For effective contact-center marketing, agents must be able to capture new customer data and update customer-profile and segmentation information within a marketing-automation application. At the same time, they need this data to recommend appropriate products or services. Phone agents often use scripts provided by the customer-service software to respond to customer problems and inquiries. The same scripts can be enhanced through marketing-automation applications to prompt the agents to recommend products or services.

Marketing-automation offerings must meet a number of key requirements to drive marketing within the contact center. Among the highest priorities are:

Dozens of vendors claim to offer marketing-automation capabilities, but relatively few are able to address these key requirements or to provide them within a contact-center environment. Today, the categories of vendors that offer the best marketing-automation products for contact centers are marketing-automation specialists whose systems offer analytics and campaign-management capabilities, and CRM suite vendors whose marketing-automation components can integrate with their customer-service elements (see chart, above).

Doculabs recently completed a formal evaluation of several marketing-automation products in these two categories, paying special attention to how well they addressed high-priority customer-service requirements. The following describes the capabilities these products can offer businesses that want to implement marketing automation in their contact centers.

During the product evaluation, two major trends became clear. First, while customer-service technologies and marketing-automation technologies historically have been separate categories, the vendors in these areas are expanding into each other's territory, through partnerships or acquisitions. Second, marketing-automation technology has a long way to go to address key requirements for real-time analysis and decisioning.

Because of businesses' growing emphasis on customer service as a means of generating revenue, marketing-automation capabilities are becoming critical. So, customer-service vendors are rapidly incorporating marketing automation's analytics and campaign-management capabilities, and integrating them more tightly with their service capabilities to support marketing campaigns across a variety of channels. As a result of the increasing demand for analytics--and the general lack of support for analytics within the contact center from CRM suites--some marketing-automation vendors are developing integration with customer-service vendors to round out their own offerings. Examples include Xchange's and Data Distilleries' integrations with Siebel for analytics and decisioning, and Unica's marketing alliance with the PeopleSoft 8 CRM suite to bring marketing automation into the PeopleSoft CRM environment.

The real-time analysis and decisioning capabilities of most marketing-automation products are immature. When evaluating marketing-automation products, businesses need to be aware that vendors may claim to offer real-time analysis and decisioning but really offer only preset business rules that make promotion recommendations based on previously captured and stored data.

In general, the focus of the marketing-automation vendors is on the Web channel and not on the contact center. But businesses now realize that their E-commerce sites are just one of many customer touch points, so they're looking to do real-time analysis and decision making across all channels, not just for the Web.

Overall, we expect that investments in marketing-automation technology will increase rapidly as businesses, driven by poor market conditions, shift the focus of their call centers to revenue generation. Marketing-automation vendors are just beginning to explore their potential in the contact center, just as businesses are only beginning to understand the value of deploying marketing-automation applications across the enterprise to capture and analyze all customer data.

Bill Chambers is a principal analyst, Gaurav Verma is a senior analyst, and Bob Anders is a technical editor at Doculabs (http://www.doculabs.com), an industry analyst and consulting firm. You can reach them at [email protected].