North American Customer Service and Support Applications Markets

CSS, a Vital Contact Center Subset of CRM, Delivers Easy-to-Retrieve Customer Data Instantly During Customer Interactions

The CSS system is the portal into the vast data repository that a company uses to store customer data. Although the complete customer relationship management (CRM) is used outside the contact center for several analytic and sales-related purposes, inside the contact center, CSS packages the massive data store into bite-sized chunks that can be delivered instantly at the time of interaction. The primary job of the center is to cater to service-related inquiries. A proper CSS system whittles away any unnecessary data views that are irrelevant from an agent's transactional perspective by showing agents a contextually relevant view of the history of the customer's interactions with the company, especially records of past purchases, service orders, and complaints. This repository could give all employees in an enterprise such as the sales staff and the billing staff, a single version of the truth about a customer, thereby providing a seamless and consistent customer experience across any contact channel. After the data from the back-end database is retrieved, the CSS software pushes out information, often in the form of scripts, advising agents on customer handling techniques. The overall growth in CSS has been driven by an increasing enterprise emphasis on enhancing customer experience to retain customers and increase the value of every customer. A longstanding drive to recast contact centers as profit-generating entities has made many existing CSS customers re-evaluate their technology and seek out adjunct products to help agents cross-sell and up-sell. Growth in this sector has been at par with growth in other contact center tools. However, it is characterized by a rising divide between premises-based software and hosted, or software as a service (SaaS) tools, that appeal to the cost-conscious and time-sensitive small and mid-sized market. The ability of tools to create and leverage communities of customers is an emerging trend that bubbled under the surface in 2008, likely to emerge as a key differentiator among product suites. Though there are multiple ways to implement this, the common element is the attempt to extract knowledge from existing customers and use the base as a proxy for expensive expert assistance. This is rising as a mid-point between self and agent-driven service and not all companies that attempt it are able to implement it perfectly. Here lies an opportunity for vendors that are successful at community building to leverage their own understanding of best practices and differentiate themselves from the traditional CSS vendors.

Technology

The following technology is covered in this research:

• CSS software