The quality of service your contact centre provides to customers is a key differentiator in the conversion, retention, and onboarding of customers. As market expectations evolve, brands will need to keep up and digital teams are expected to play an important part.
The risks of not meeting these expectations are significant. A company not putting the customer’s needs ahead of their own business goals was the top reason for people being unsatisfied with a company, which in turn leads them to be far less likely to give a company a second chance if something goes wrong.1
Service matters here. A recent study by the International Council for Shopping Centres has found that 82% of consumers will buy elsewhere if they receive poor customer service.2 On the flipside, Harvard Business Review showed that customers who had had the best level of customer experience with a brand would spend, on average, 2.4x the amount on them annually than someone with a poor customer experience.3
As brands are expected to provide service across multiple hours, covering all areas of expertise, and often at all hours. A digital strategy that maintains these standards, while continuing to act in a lean, resourceful manner must be central to the modern business. Here are four ways to achieve that.
Tracking the journey back from the sale is a vital aspect of assigning a value to marketing activity, and when done successfully will unlock commercially relevant insights about the impact of your digital activity. Tying digital activity to contact centre outcomes is a key step in closing the research online, purchase offline gap.
This is especially important when you are selling personalised, valuable products or services and the customer requires consultation with a knowledgeable person in your contact centre.
“An incoming phone call is often the first major event in the path to purchase. Most people who call us for the first time will have done plenty of online research on our site. Tying that historical browsing data back to the call gives us powerful metrics that help us improve our messaging, and make our campaigns more relevant to both new and existing customers. Knowing where our advertising spend is working best is a truly beneficial insight and has become one of our most vital metrics."
James Morgan | Head of Digital, Sk:n (Read the case study)
An informed support representative is going to find a solution for a customer far quicker than one with no knowledge of them. A clear picture of the customer and your relationship with them benefits both the brand and the customer, as you are aware of what pages they have visited and can thus tailor the conversation to their needs without wasting minutes on answering irrelevant qualifying questions.
Despite taking the conversation offline, this is still possible for phone calls via Infinity’s Caller Insights App for Salesforce, which shows your contact staff exactly where a caller has come from, and what the caller’s history with you is. Immediate, tailored insights increase the quality of service, improves close rates, and reduces the length of service calls.
As brands continue to invest in chatbots to do the heavy lifting for a lot of enquiries, they need to look at how they facilitate a better level of service from their contact centres. Tracking when specific query paths are responsible for offline calls will lead to iterative improvements in your chatbot service as you get better at identifying what problems need solving.
This knowledge works two ways. It will not only ensure you are solving more simple requests with your chatbot service and alleviating strain on your contact centre, it will also identify when there are complex problems that a chatbot can’t solve. These are people you do want calling your contact centre, and you will now be in a better place to serve them.
When a customer needs service, they want the experience to be as seamless as possible. Like with chatbots, they will ideally find the answer on your website and solve the issue themselves. This won’t be possible in all cases, but it is a reasonable expectation for a lot of smaller issues and one you should be working towards. This makes your contact centre even more valuable, as it frees your call staff up to attend to more complex issues and premium clients.
A first step in achieving this is identifying what queries your support staff are receiving the most, and deciding which ones could be avoided by providing clear guidance on your site. But that’s only half of the matter, the best support guidance in the world is no good if your audience isn’t finding it. To truly optimise your service, it’s imperative that you understand how people are navigating your website before leaving the site or calling for support.
A call tracking provider will tell you the point people give up searching your site and pick up the phone for support, as well as what pages they looked at on their journey. Finding patterns that lead to this outcome will tell you how to structure your site to reduce these avoidable calls.
Call tracking shines a light on the precise channels and touchpoints responsible for customers calling your business, opening up a clear pathway to revenue opportunities and crucial optimisation points within the customer journey. No business that receives a substantial amount of phone calls for sales or support can afford to overlook these insights. Learn more about the substantial benefits Infinity brings to digital-minded operations teams, and how we work alongside call centre technologies.
Start a conversation with us today if you’d like to discuss specific challenges you need to solve.
References:
1) "MarketingSherpa Customer Satisfaction Research Study", MarketingSherpa
2) "Low Prices Raise Customer Loyalty", Business Wire, (Aug 15, 2017)
3) "The Value of Customer Experience, Quantified", Harvard Business Review, (Aug 1, 2014)