Customer interaction yet to exploit IP

Stuart Corner
Monday, 07 May 2007 10:12

Opinion and Analysis

Every day there seems to be news of another large organisation that has embraced the potential of IP to unify communications: integrating telephony, email and voice mail for efficiency and productivity gains. But when it comes to using these technologies to interact with customers, it seems to be an entirely different story.

The possibility is certainly there, and the technology available to do it. It even has its own acronym, CIM, customer interaction management. It is still  relatively new. US company Talisma claims to be CIM market leader and, according to president and CEO, Dan Vetras, the term has been around for about 18 months.

Talisma has been in Australia for about 12 months and in that time claims to have signed up 30 customers - a sure sign that organisations are waking up the possibilities for, and the benefits to be gained from interacting with customers through multiple, integrated channels.

Talisma Australia surveyed 43 of Australia's top financial service organisations - banks, insurance companies, mortgage lenders, and investment organisations - posing as an interested consumer to gauge their responses through different channels to two fairly simple questions, and to test the organisations' ability to correlate and integrate information received through different channels.

The questions were: "what kind of products and services do you offer for individual customers?" and "Do you facilitate online transactions with a credit card?" These were submitted by phone and by email.

Perhaps the most astonishing result was that, while 95 percent of organisations surveyed provided an email response option, more than half of these (56 percent) failed to respond within 24 hours. And 54 percent did not respond within 48 hours.

A further indication that the organisations are less than wholeheartedly committed to email was the finding that 77 percent of phone calls were answered with accurate and complete information, but of those emails answered, the corresponding figure was only 35 percent.