Why has CRM got a bad name in the contact centre?

Paul White, CEO mplsystems
Most CRM systems have really failed to deliver on the promise of ease of use and excellent customer experience. The reason for that is quite often there is a fantastic array of features and functions out of the box, but they don’t fit in with your business process, with how you want to operate and run your business. And by the time you’ve spent a lot of money with expensive consultants and systems integration resources trying to configure and break and reshape that product, quite often you would have been better starting from a completely different place in the beginning. With a mashup solution, we take a completely different approach. We actually tailor, using incredibly easy-to-use tools, custom applications that are able to directly support your business processes. So you’re really getting classical systems integration-led stuff. You’re getting a bespoke application that’s directly fit for your purpose but without any of the costs, overheads, expense, and time.

Why don’t companies create agent desktops in-house?
Companies can do this in-house, but it’s going to be costly, it’s going to take a long time, and they’re not going to have the benefit of the collective experience of dozens of years of working with many, many different industry sectors. With our mashup solutions, you can basically either start from a blank sheet of paper, or you can start with one of hundreds of preconfigured templates that really get you quite a long way up the value proposition. The absolutely vital element is you’ve still got that fundamental configurability of all elements of the system. It’s not just tweaking at the edges. You can basically create and define a custom process or a bespoke application, but in a fraction of the time that it takes to do that traditional systems integration-led approach. Whether you’re doing that with a Big Four consultant or with your own IT department, you’ve still got the same challenges with that traditional approach.