According to a recent study by the Incoming Calls Management Institute, Inc. (ICMI), there are currently 50,600 Call Centers in the United States containing 2.86 million agent positions. Additionally in Canada there are approximately 4,500 Call Centers with 212,000 agent positions. In North America alone, this is in excess of 3 million agent positions with an estimated 2.4 employee shifts of operation in these centers – which is approximately 7.4 million Call and Contact Center Agents – with over 97 percent of these agents currently identified as headset users in North America. Additionally there are over 1 million agent positions overseas devoted exclusively to servicing the U.S. market.

One of the driving forces in the expansion of Call and Contact Centers worldwide is the burgeoning CRM (Customer Relationship Management) industry and its use in today’s technology-enabled corporate environments. CRM is a catch-all term that is most commonly used to describe software and related technologies that manage customer-facing business functions (most notably Sales, Customer Service, Marketing, and Support) and their related business processes and data.

The term CRM first emerged in the mid-1990s, created with the intent of describing how Sales, Marketing and Customer Service technologies needed to work not just within each department but also integrated together. Prior to the advent of CRM, some companies deployed Sales Force Automation (SFA) applications to automate the sales process and track prospect data, but that data did not usually leave the sales department. Therefore when customers called in with a problem or service need, the Customer Service department would be unaware of interactions with the Sales team. This lead to customers’ perceptions that the company was uncaring, incompetent or uncoordinated. This would often result in a frustrated customer departing for the competition.

Early customer-facing applications, SFA, telemarketing, marketing campaign management, and help desk served their individual purposes, but were unable to provide the integration that allowed companies to serve their customers with a “single face.”

CRM is neither a simple nor risk-free proposition, but not implementing CRM is also not an option. Markets continue to get more and more competitive, and the margin between success and failure grow narrow. Companies that are able to better manage customer data and customer-facing processes have a clear advantage over their competitors.

When implemented and utilized to its full potential, CRM allows companies to increase both their revenues and profits while lowering the cost of marketing, selling to and servicing their customers. The payoff is clear – by better aligning business processes and managing customer data across all customer-facing functions, companies can build successful, profitable and long-term customer relationships.

A CRM strategy is about much more than merely selecting the right technology – rather it is a business strategy that may very well necessitate that you completely reinvent how companies do business. Despite these challenges, many companies including many Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) have seen tremendous success with CRM.

Getting CRM right is about striking balance between tactically solving problems within specific areas and managing customer-facing processes and data across them. For CRM to be successful at both strategic and technological levels, it must be integrated.

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