SOA CRM: Using an SOA to Enhance the Customer Experience

SOA has a key role to play in customer relation management (CRM). SOA CRM can enhance the customer experience by improving customer service levels. This is a key feature of an SOA's ability to support a complex, cross-organizational CRM solution.

Using an SOA for CRM—for customer experience management—extends a current trend. To be competitive, companies are seeking to target and segment their customers. The goal is to create a better customer experience— ultimately in order to increase revenues. To achieve this, companies are offering customers multiple channels for doing business (for convenience) and deploying systems, including traditional CRM solutions and e-business software, to support these multiple channels.

But companies must be able to handle the added traffic and complexity of multiple channels to manage the customer experience and improve customer service. Here's a closer look at the most obvious approach to supporting special service levels—which turned out to be a worst practice because of its negative consequences—versus an SOA CRM approach, that is, using SOA management to guarantee and optimize service levels for CRM.

Worst Practice: Adding Duplicate Capacity Instead of Leveraging SOA for CRM

Revere Travel Associates (RTA), a global travel agency, built its business in the corporate market, with many agents working onsite at large client firms. After it expanded its customer service to include online ticket booking, some important clients complained about the performance of the portals—especially at peak times.

In response, the company categorized clients as platinum, gold, or silver, based on bookings they committed to in advance, and added IT infrastructure dedicated to the platinum, or most profitable, customers. The goal was to guarantee optimum levels of network and application performance.

In effect, RTA was offering service level agreements (SLAs) to platinum customers. To ensure service delivery, it expanded its data center and purchased more server hardware and related software, duplicating much of its existing infrastructure.

This solution was neither cost-effective nor scalable in the long-term. If the company gained additional platinum customers, would it just continue along this costly path to guarantee service levels? In fact, the duplicate infrastructure was necessary only during peak-usage times, when the potential to violate SLAs was a reality. At other times, the company wasn’t using more than 50% of its capacity.

Best Practice: SOA CRM—for Optimizing Service Delivery

In contrast, an effective SOA implementation can optimize Web service management for individual clients cost-effectively, using SOA SLAs to drive, in effect, SOA CRM.

In general, SLAs or service level agreements, guarantee the delivery of pre-determined levels of application performance and availability to customers. Using SOA management capabilities to support SLAs, companies can create individual business rules for selected customers to drive differentiated service levels in the SOA runtime environment and monitor and measure their performance to make adjustments.

In particular, by deploying an SOA CRM approach with a robust SOA runtime environment, RTA could have monitored for SOA performance issues and used governance policies that reflect designed business rules to reroute platinum customers to a set of standby services only during the detected peak-load periods (instead of building a dedicated, duplicate infrastructure to service these customer that was underutilized). The combination of well-defined governance policies and a much smaller scale of additional capacity for simply hosting the peak load standby services could have offered a much more cost-effective solution. In this way, they could have optimized service delivery to meet business goals for different sets of customers.

Progress Actional SOA management products support using SOA for CRM. They provide business process visibility and control of the activities of services in the runtime environment. In particular, these capabilities allow SLAs to be applied and tracked in the context of a specific business process or service level performance for a particular customer or group of customers. With these insights into the business—plus capabilities to automatically and manually adjust SOA operations, companies can optimize SOA service delivery to meet SLAs and enhance the customer experience.

For More Information on SOA CRM

To learn more about how SOA CRM and other SOA best practices, download "SOA Worst Practices Volume II: A Look at Governance."