The call isn't all.
Without online insights, analytics tell only half the story.
By Terry Redding, VP of Product Development, CFI Group, 734-623-5423
With an increasing number of consumers turning to the Internet to find information, ask questions and share their perceptions of a business, the traditional call center has a significant opportunity to expand its horizons and in doing so, its value to the businesses it serves. Non-call channels like social media, and online chats and reviews hold fresh, genuine customer insights that have been largely untapped by call centers in the past. And with a growing number of customers preferring to communicate through online channels because of the speed and convenience, call centers that capture and report these important data points can grow their capabilities and value proposition in the digital and social era.
Though online channels have typically been managed by the marketing function, there’s a strong case for the call center to evolve into an integrated contact center by tracking, responding to and reporting on non-call channel feedback. According to CFI Group’s 2012 Call Center Satisfaction Index (CCSI), the sixth-annual exploration of trends within the evolving call center industry, the mix of service methods utilized by companies grew to the point that non-call methods such as email, web self service, and chat finally crossed the 30 percent threshold. Already on the front lines of receiving and managing customer input, service centers embracing this mix represent the next generation of contact centers, and have the capacity to package and provide non-call analytics to help businesses make better customer service, marketing and sales decisions. In doing so, they break away from vendor status to position themselves as true partners with staying power.
Many businesses have paid attention to social media and other online forums in order to conduct damage control when disgruntled customers air their grievances. But a deeper level of customer insights and understanding is available online, as long as someone has a disciplined approach toward analyzing them. Today’s contact center can propose to manage the acquisition of key customer feedback data points that empower their own customers’ marketing teams to improve overall brand connections with customers. Tips that can transform call centers into high-value contact centers that drive even greater value for the businesses they serve include:
· Get involved. Less than 20 percent of call centers currently draw insights from online and social channels, according to CFI Group’s 2012 CCSI study, so even small steps toward establishing an online presence will grant businesses a competitive edge. Web chats, for example, perform the essential function of a traditional call, only in a more convenient format for many of today’s connected customers. Traditional call center skills are easily transferable to a web chat environment and the availability of this as a customer feedback option will greatly increase a call center’s customer feedback sample.
Also, the contact center can also play an important role in making a business’ social media channels true problem solving tools. Monitoring for comments is only the first step in leveraging social media; customers who are online expect to be engaged. Proactive, even one-on-one, outreach by the company’s customer service team when a negative comment is detected allows problem solving to begin immediately, and can diminish the number of inbound calls to the offline contact center. CFI Group’s 2012 CCSI research reinforces the value of social media follow up, as consumer respondents that received such follow up after the posting of an online complaint rated their final satisfaction with the contact center experience close to 20 percent higher than their counterparts who received no such follow up.
· Get customers talking. The new “call us with a problem” is “tweet us.” An important step toward fully exploiting online channels as customer insight tools is, simply, letting customers know they exist. Working together with marketing, an integrated contact center should encourage customers to engage through social media. For example, before a call center agent completes a customer call, he or she should inform the customer that another great way to share feedback with the business is through its social or web chat platforms, and provide details regarding how to contact through those channels. While marketing can digest and manage insights and trends, the contact center plays an integral role in proactively encouraging online feedback, which is more cost-effective to service electronically than real time.
· Get measuring. Monitoring in isolation misses the point of a dynamic channel like social media. Interacting with customers and encouraging them to use online channels for service communication is an improvement. But establishing tracking metrics for non-call channels is a new way the contact center can integrate its services with a marketing team’s objectives. By gathering customer feedback trends via a company’s social channel and chat activity and website traffic and delivering them to the marketing group, the contact center empowers marketing to make real-time adjustments to programs and campaigns based upon how well or poorly they’re being received online. From an economic perspective, this service can help optimize the spend of a business’ precious marketing dollars.
While non-call channels are slowly being adopted in the call center industry, broader retail, economic, technology and social trends indicate that there is a powerful and lasting role for contact centers to play in taking advantage of a robust, inherent business asset at their disposal – online customer input.. Seek out a partner with experience in social media analysis tools and strategy to help your center do more for your customers, by doing more for their customers.
For more information on how to integrate social into contact centers, as well as on CFI Group, please visit www.CFIGroup.com.