CIM should be a required component of any CRM strategy, if the organisation is handle all inquiries and transactions with customers effectively and at an equally high level.

To develop better relationships with customers, businesses must focus on delivering a great customer experience consistently. This can only be achieved if one learns about the customer's unique needs during each interaction, assimilates that knowledge and gives each customer inquiry the best possible resolution at any given time. Communication, therefore, is the key to building a unique customer relationship, both in a business-to-business (B2B) context and in a business-to-consumer (B2C) context.

Traditional customer relationship management (CRM) approaches focus mainly on implementing customer life cycle management. By themselves, though they fail to deliver a single agent view for multi-channel contact centres. On the other hand, more and more customers nowadays use and leverage different communication channels, making it increasingly important for organisations to move away from single-channel call centre based customer services to multi-channel contact centres.

A customer interaction management (CIM) solution should be a required component of any customer relationship management strategy. The principles of customer interaction management dictate that an organisation must handle all the inquiries and transactions with the customers equally, regardless of communication channels. It is important that an organisation keeps a consistent view of the customer through all the interaction channels and the history of each interaction. But even more important is to deliver a common experience across all channels.

CIM solutions go beyond the traditional channels of communications, to new channels like the web, chat, email, self services, wireless, collaboration, voice over internet (VoIP). CIM is the new hybrid of traditional CRM technologies that have been adapted to the internet as well as to the growing number of personal communication devices. They enable companies to add more customer-facing touch points to create a 360-degree interaction capability and enhance customer communication.

CIM enables companies to bridge the gap between customer life cycle events and organisational touch-points, leveraging integrated communication channels with intelligent business logic. They can improve business performance by lowering the overall cost of service delivery, while increasing customer satisfaction and retention.

For an interaction-intensive business process, communication can be assisted or unassisted. Assisted transactions need communication with a human being, while unassisted transactions require no human representing the business to assist customers. It is important that customers are allowed to choose how they want to interact.

Unassisted transactions cost much less than assisted transactions. But not all customers and partners are comfortable with unassisted transactions, so this issue must be handled carefully to avoid eroding relationships. A CIM solution provides capabilities for both.

Email: The e-mail response management (ERM) system must be able to provide automated responses to e-mails, as well as partially automated responses routed to agents for review, processing and reply.

The system can manage outbound email campaigns that allow three response options - phone number, e-mail reply or website URL. Each of these channels can be configured to send responses to both assisted and unassisted response systems. Web collaboration, chat as well as both automated and assisted e-mail responders must be capable of handling the number of transactions brought in by the campaign.

These solutions also enable personalisation and campaign management. Personalisation enables customers to modify their contact profiles, with an opt-in / opt-out facility for e-mail campaigns. Campaign and list-management can create targeted direct marketing campaigns.

Websites: Websites are fast becoming a central interaction point for the vital 30- to 50-year-old high-value consumer group, with high average disposable incomes. Website response management can build relationships with core customers if it has the capability to enable business partners and customers to interact with an agent using chat facilities.

While designing a website, contact zones associated with particular customer segments, or with other stakeholders like vendors, distributors or a nationwide sales force can be established. These can even be as narrow as for individual marketing campaigns. An association could result between a particular zone, a business process or a type of interaction that your customers want to initiate with your business. A zone can be associated with a consumer selection to obtain a web collaboration and chat session with an agent. Or, they can also be associated with direct call-backs over a PSTN or VoIP to create a one-on-one meeting to discuss what products and services best meet a customer's needs.

Optimally, zones can be configured for interactive chat and semi-automated responses that are designed to move the customer to self-service transactions. One representative could handle up to six sessions at a time in asynchronous mode. These areas can be added to a website by zone or added to every page in the site in a queued design model.

Online communities: Not all business processes are best served by a one-to-one assisted interaction. Using chat rooms, online communities can be created that establish customer-interest forums. They can also handle virtual training on products or services and group consultative selling meetings. Establishing a website as an information portal about the company's core capabilities can building lasting relationships.

Forums can be linked to telephone conference calls, for one-on-many as well as many-on-many communications, which can be switched to a one-on-one interaction with a representative if required. Online communities are very effective for getting customer opt-ins to an e-mail or telephone-based direct marketing campaign.

Telephones: This traditional channel is still the most relevant for dynamic customer communication. The point is, it is even more effective when combined with the new channels. A combination of e-mail, voice and post-mail can more easily elicit a response from a targeted segment.

If the first e-mail gets no response, another cannel can be brought into play. However, if in the course of one channel's campaign, a response is received from an earlier channel (say, email), it is crucial to remove the customer from the other and not annoy them with redundant requests. This can be automated by a well-configured CIM solution.

In a B2B environment, using an internet connection and a telephone creates an assisted web transaction with a phone call. The number of combinations is virtually endless. Therefore, it is very important that the CIM solution can seamlessly integrate each channel - but especially telephones - into an overall communication strategy that leverages the enormous capabilities of e-mail and interactive websites.

In time, the convergence of voice, web interaction and e-mail response will differentiate a company's customer relationships from the competition.

Integration: The CIM solution must complement the CRM solutions that the organisation is already using, through application programming interfaces and business service components that can interface with third-party CRM applications.

The right solution can help build a lifetime customer, offering more value in every interaction. CIM provides the communication mechanisms to facilitate this. New internet technologies, combined with CIM tools and techniques, enable the organisation to realise CRM goals of one-to-one marketing.

Knowledge management
Integrated knowledge management solutions can promote provision of knowledge to customers through systems like one-time article publishing, which make individual articles available via various methods.

Chat: Chat enables customer service agents to communicate with multiple website visitors real-time. Chat software can route the interaction to the most appropriate agent and provides real-time collaboration, including bi-directional co-browsing (page pushing) and instant messaging between agents and supervisors.