Marks & Spencer: Customer Relationship Management Solution

Global retailer Marks & Spencer wanted to turn its already strong customer service operation into a highly efficient system for responding quickly and effectively to customer. A collaborative team created new, integrated processes for customer relationship management built on Siebel's eBusiness Applications. The solution quickly identifies customers, routes calls more intelligently and synchronises customer, product and order information.

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Global retailer Marks & Spencer wanted a more intuitive customer service system that provided a single view of the customer, built customer profiles throughout the customer relationship and helped the company:

• Improve efficiency and service performance.
• Better identify and realise sales opportunities.
• Increase customer satisfaction for competitive advantage.
• Ultimately grow margins, a fundamental driver for the call centre initiative.

A collaborative team—Marks & Spencer, Accenture, Siebel and Microsoft—worked to create Marks & Spencer's integrated customer relationship management processes and system built on Siebel's eBusiness Applications. The solution provides quick identification of customers, more intelligent routing of calls and complete control of agents' telephone extensions. Online interfaces with legacy applications synchronise customer, product and order information. The fully scalable database, the second largest Siebel built on Microsoft's SQL Server platform at that time, has ample capacity to support Marks & Spencer's customer base—initially some 18 million customers and more than 8 million contact activities.

Marks & Spencer now has inventive capabilities that enhance the way they serve customers. An agent knows a customer's Marks & Spencer history prior to answering a call. Customer inquiries are resolved consistently, completely, accurately and fast at the first point of contact. The system is tuned to sub-second response times on all screens.

From one enterprise-wide system, Marks & Spencer has historical tracking of all customer contact, a single view of customer information, shared customer information across call centre operations and quick resolution of and reporting on service issues. There is shorter call handling and work processing times and, thus, lower operating costs. With workflow and skill-based routing, agents can efficiently provide high quality, personalised customer service.

In this era of the "customer economy," the new call centre system is one way Marks & Spencer is progressing its tradition of world-class customer service.

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