Keeping Customer Data out of Internal Silos

Customers will call your business for a wide variety of reasons. Which part of your business needs to take responsibility depends largely on why they’re calling. If a customer calls for new service or a new product, that’s for sales.

If a customer calls with a complaint, that’s for customer service or operations. But despite this, customers are always customers for the whole enterprise. The division is a division of responsibilities within the business, not between different businesses.

Unfortunately, businesses can turn into sets of disconnected silos. Nowhere is this more obvious than when it comes to data, especially customer data. Sales has its needs and will analyze your customer data to suit it. So does operations.

So does marketing, HR, compliance, QA — across your organization, different departments and different functions all need to extract something from customer data. And each may use a different solution or tool to perform that analysis, or work through a different process. The bigger your organization, the bigger this problem of disconnection becomes.

Customer data yields insights that apply enterprise-wide. If a customer calls with a sales request, then it might be sales who takes the call, but the customer might make remarks about products they don’t like or employees who caused problems or competitors whose services weren’t as good. And these kinds of data are of interest outside the function of sales.

An ASR solution needs to respect the importance of customer data to every part of your business. If you can’t share data across departments, or data is delivered in a format that’s only meaningful for one department, then it’s not going to be as useful.

An open, flexible transcription solution can deliver the kind of structured data you need to keep all departments working efficiently towards business success.

Thinking enterprise-wide is one of the key requirements for getting the most out of your ASR system.