Realizing the Benefits of CRM

This Press Release from Verint continues the Social Media and customer service drum beat. The recurring themes are:

1. A growing challenge to identify, collect and act upon data delivered through an expanding number of customer communications channels
2. The need for an aggregated and unified view of customer data across all channels
3. Analysis that delivers insight drives rapid and informed action
4. Companies are not equipped to analyze the interactions that occur via email, chat, social media, forums, etc.
5. There is a heightened need for text analytics. Solutions that mine interactions and feedback across multichannel customer communications – including email, chat, blogs, review sites, social media and other text-based channels – continue to emerge
6. Workflow delivers insight to the people that are best equipped to manage issues, address specific customer service concerns, or get ahead of negative sentiments in social media

These may seem like familiar CRM related challenges, but Social Media, volumes of user generated content, and an ever expanding number of channels make these challenges more complex. At the same time, advanced analytics technology and advancements in computing power present an opportunity to address these challenges and realize some long awaited and much discussed CRM benefits. 

Verint has partnered with Clarabridge, a leading provider of sentiment and text analytics software for customer experience management. I expect to see more of these partnerships (See My Blog Post on Attensity) in the near future. Acquisitions may be another way this plays out, as providers of text analysis software become part of the solution fabric. 

The capability to automate the critical steps in this process – Identify, Collect, Analyze and Act – is expanding through a growing portfolio of analytic and process management technology. By exploiting this automation and leveraging advanced analytics in real time, many elusive CRM benefits will be realized.