Business Activity Monitoring
This is one of those areas of technology that have many names. Business
Activity Monitoring is one that the vendors I work with like to use.
Other names you might have heard would be business alerts, CRM
automation, workflow automation, contact process automation or
sales process automation.
Regardless of what you call it, business activity monitoring is a technology
that can help any size business look bigger by being proactive and reactive with
little ongoing human effort. If you think about it, that's a pretty bold
statement because it's never as easy as hitting the install button. Before you
invest in this type of technology, it's important to understand, and document,
how it will assist your organization in the context of it's higher level
CRM strategy. Knowing what your goals are, and
what will influence your customers to make decisions that add value to your
business, will make the identification and implementation of these tactical
automations much easier.
What is Business Activity Monitoring
First of all, it could be standalone software, or a component of a CRM package,
or even lower level technology like Microsoft's Windows Workflow Foundation.
Whatever you choose will generally reflect the capabilities of your
organizations, and possibly the size (scalability could be an issue). But all of
these technologies have a set of overlapping features that can be used to
supercharge your capabilities as a customer focused business.
- Internal Email Alerting - Dashboards are
great, if you go to them. In many cases, it might be more effective to
compile a set of red flags and send them to various internal staff in a
proactive manner.
- Sudden relationship changes, or sudden aggregate changes (forecasts,
sales, etc.)
- Significant variances from goals for sales rep performance
- Reminder list of clients with Past Due balances
- Get notified that one of your customers was just placed on credit hold
- Get notified when inventory levels are low compared to forecast business
- Automatically balance your customer service load
- Notify your field service staff of important changes as they happen
- The list goes on an on.....
- External Email Alerting - You can ask
your customers to log into a fancy portal that you designed for them, and
many will. But, if you fail to push important information to them you may
pay the price in loyalty; whether it's financial, sales, marketing or
customer service:
- Notify a client of an upcoming contract renewal
- Automatically deliver cross-sell information to clients based on buying
behaviour
- Decrease the time it takes to respond to web requests
- Automatically deliver statements or other paperwork to clients with no
human effort.
- Automatically notify a customer of a delivery delay
- Reduce inbound inquiry call traffic by providing information as it changes
- Make sure customer support tickets get assigned and notify the client with
the details.
- Workflow Management - These can be very
complicated or relatively straight forward. I would argue that complex
workflows evolve over time from the input of internal groups focused on
their own needs. While this sort of technology can automate this, a
case could be made that your automating a train wreck.
Workflow can be simple functionality which is triggered from data change
events (business activity monitoring). Here are a couple of simple
examples that can have a powerful impact (if they are driven from your
overall CRM strategy):
- Auto-assignment of service tickets based on criteria input by a customer
and existing data in your customer database.
- An approval or sign-off notification
- Deliver a new job to a production team based on closed business
- On-Schedule / On-Demand Report Distribution
- For mobile warriors, sometimes it is easier to get an dashboard sent to
them than it is to find Internet access, connect to a VPN and then wait
while a real-time report is generated. Scheduled delivery will allow the
crunching time to happen off-hours and delivery to occur when your reps need
it.
Business Activity Monitoring software can deliver reports that are
generated on a schedule, or when data changes. Imagine getting an email that
notifies you that a major client has changed in some way. In that report
could be a first run at the analysis of why that change occurred. A little
bit of time up front can save a lot of employee effort over time.
- Cross-Application Integration - Where
comprehensive integrations haven't been put in place, these systems can be
used to share data. Data changes in one system can trigger a scripted (or
emailed) event that sends an update to another system.
- E-Mail Response Systems - One of the
most used features in Business Activity Monitoring is the parsing of inbound
e-mails. Structured emails can be delivered from web forms (reducing
programming time and eliminating some security issues) and parse based on a
set of rules. The resulting data can be used to update the customer
database, send internal alerts to employees, respond the prospect or
customer, and initiate more complex workflow processes.
This feature has the power to eliminate costly and time consuming human
processes that typically fail because of gaps and overwork.
- Self-Help / On Demand Client Requests -
You can build email response systems or web forms that allow customers to
find information they need and have it delivered right to their inbox.
What can Business Activity Monitoring do for my business?
I'm sure you can see from the discussion above that these systems are far
ranging in their capabilities. Many smaller businesses, even middle market
enterprises, get overwhelmed when trying to perform like their larger
competitors. Whether it's marketing, or customer service response levels, you
simply run into a wall when you try to throw too many people at a problem.
The answer is to remove the people from the problem and let them focus on
what they do best. Let the technology do what it does best. Leveraging business
activity monitoring systems this way will make you look bigger, faster
and more customer focused than you could possibly do otherwise. It will
simply allow your business to do more with the resources it has. After all,
that's the only efficient way to grow a business. Brute force growth will leave
a lot of dents and dings in your customer base and you'll probably end up with
low value customers.
Running and growing a profitable business is about focusing on your
source of revenue and profit: the customer. Keeping them happy means
knowing who they are, what they want to hear or what service they want to
receive, and knowing when they want to receive it. Then it all comes down to
having the ability to do it when it needs to be done. If it's stuck in a
file drawer while your key 30 year veteran assistant is out sick,
you've got a big gap in your business that could lose some of your most valuable
customers. Business activity monitoring could be the answer.
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