The call center world is rapidly evolving. Today’s technology-driven business environments have not only changed the game from the perspective of systems and processes, they’ve also increased expectations and broadened the business role of contact centers. It’s no longer acceptable to simply engage with customers with the goal of resolving issues. Now, call centers must dive into the deep and swirling ocean of data and analytics. They must not only measure customer loyalty and satisfaction, but contribute to predicting and driving the broader customer experience.
Why the shift to affecting customer experience? It’s partially because numerous recent studies cited the trend of customers basing buying decisions more on experience and less on product preference. In other words, companies that can provide their customers’ desired experience will actually beat those with a superior product.
Yes, even the rules of competition have changed and it affects nearly every department in the organization. The good news for call centers is that they will play a huge role in winning or losing. Enter the concept of the Intelligent Call Center.
Increase Your Call Center IQ
The old image of call center reps chatting happily away on their headsets is a thing of the past. Not that voice isn’t still relevant, but today’s customer care professionals must also be well-versed in numerous communications channels, such as email, survey response, live chat, self-service, and of course, social media. They need to embrace new ways of listening and of responding.
Intelligent Call Centers will use technology to deliver better service without obstructing agent performance. This is critical. For Intelligent Call Centers to succeed, technology must open new channels, but not confuse or diffuse the effectiveness of interactions. Also, Intelligent Call Centers must utilize the power of automation to increase productivity and stay a step ahead of customer expectations. Both of these requirements paint CRM into the picture.
As businesses capture more and more customer data across the lifecycle, the logical home for the data to reside is in CRM, so that it may be properly acted and reported upon across your business. Customer care agents should have clear visibility into customer interactions in other areas of the organization, in order to enter engagements in-context and not frustrate customers with repetitive questions. No one enjoys providing the same information to a company repeatedly. As mentioned, poor customer experience now equates to lost customers, even if they like your products. As such, strategically leveraging CRM will dramatically increase the IQ of call centers and enable businesses to achieve higher retention rates.
The Feedback to CRM Connection
As Intelligent Call Centers work to leverage new communication platforms and maximize the power of CRM, they should be sure to directly connect feedback data to CRM. This means creating support case forms, call scripts, and customer care surveys that integrate directly with CRM. The solution(s) used to collect feedback should also allow for many of these interactions to be automated, so that agents can focus on improving customer experience where it matters – in one-to-one conversations.
The Intelligent Call Center can directly improve customer experience by doing the following:
- Collecting customer feedback across numerous communication channels such as self-service case creation, automated closed case surveys, and social media, among many others.
- Centralizing customer data in CRM to provide context and visibility to agents, as well as to automate workflows that anticipate customer needs and increase agent productivity.
- Acting and reporting on customer insights to address individual issues while driving process improvements from aggregated results. This will also allow Intelligent Call Centers to identify and replicate agent best practices.
About Clicktools Ltd.
Clicktools is the leading provider of premium, Cloud-based survey software for businesses. Since 2001, Clicktools has helped organizations of all sizes and across industries improve customer experience. Thousands of marketing, sales, and support professionals worldwide use Clicktools to collect information through surveys, scripts, and forms; centralize the data in CRM; and act on insights to deepen customer engagement. Notably, Clicktools was the first survey provider to integrate with Salesforce™ and was an original member of the AppExchange®. The company is privately held with headquarters on the South Coast of England and a US-based office in Phoenix, Arizona. More at www.clicktools.com.