Go BackMaking the emotional connection with customers
Customer loyalty is the make-or-break for most businesses. If customers do not keep coming back to you, and are not advocates of your organisation, then churn will become increasingly damaging. Mark Turner, Vice President and Managing Director, Genesys UK and Ireland, identifies how a dynamic contact centre will increase customer retention. Developing loyalty through the contact centre will also ensure sustainable profitability for the business.
Customer service is the largest single influence on consumer loyalty. Genesys research has shown that 46 per cent of people in the UK feel that service is their number one driver for loyalty, compared to only 33 per cent who felt that product quality was key. So if you can achieve both excellent service and product quality, then your business will have high loyalty, and help drive profits up!
Contact Centres are striving to achieve that 'traditional' feeling of customer satisfaction, and so it is important to analyse how customers feel about contact centres, and identify what it is that they dislike in order to see how we can stop them becoming frustrated and less loyal as a result.
Customer Frustration
The research identified that there are three main areas of customer frustration in the contact centre: Hold times, IVRs and call transfers. Businesses need to be aware that these areas can cause a great deal of dissatisfaction amongst customers, and ensure they work to avoid it. It's worth looking at each of these areas in detail, because there are ways to do each of them well, so they enhance the experience for the customer.
Hold Times
We all know that a great enemy of customer satisfaction is hold time. In fact, long hold times are a prime cause of customer frustration for 66 per cent of people in the UK. As there are different stages of the interaction where hold times occur, contact centres need to look carefully at these stages, recognise that different actions may be required and put in place the appropriate solution. Initial holding, while waiting for an agent, happens in a lot of contact centres, but what if you were to create an automated introduction? This would ensure that no customer would immediately enter a queue, with the added benefit that you can capture important identification and verification information, taking a burden away from the agent when they are connected.
The second kind of hold occurs during an interaction, where the call needs to be transferred to another agent. With automated identification services, you can capture information about the customer and what it is they require, resulting in less need for transfers. This information can run through a skills-based routing engine to find the right agent, equipped to handle the enquiry correctly, first time.
These two actions cut down hold times, or give the impression of shortened hold times, and will help to reduce customer frustration. An additional tool that can be used to eliminate hold times altogether is to provide a virtual hold. Offering a customer a call-back service at a time where the contact centre is at full capacity gives the option of waiting on the phone, or being contacted at a time when an agent becomes available, without losing their place in the queue.
Poorly designed IVRs
IVRs themselves do not frustrate people - they never have. Research in 2005 showed that almost 80 per cent of customers accept voice self service as an alternative to a 24-hour agent service. But 70 per cent of people do get frustrated by IVRs that have too many or incorrect options within them. The problem that contact centres face is, therefore, not a customer one, but a design one. Creating a simple-to-use voice application not only stops you from creating frustrated customers, but forms an important part of a dynamic contact centre operation that will increase customer satisfaction, agent productivity and overall bottom line growth.
Customers that use voice IVRs and are happy with it, will be satisfied with their experience, and will use it again. This means that they will rarely need to interact with your agents - enabling your agents to focus on other customers that cannot use the IVR, or to focus on other revenue generating activities. Reducing the burden on agents will create a great number of opportunities for the business to boost revenue.
A word of warning though: however well designed the IVR, customers must not feel forced into using it. Research shows that 86 per cent of UK customers feel that they have no choice but to use the IVR option, and of those, 80 per cent react negatively. Part of the design process must include consideration of how to make the IVR option seem like an opt-in for callers.
Call Transfers
Contrary to expectations, it is not call transfers that frustrate customers, in fact 91 per cent of UK callers would like to be transferred if the person they speak to next is better able to help them. What frustrates customers - 62 per cent of them in the UK - is having to repeat information. If they go through an automated ID&V process at the beginning and give all of their relevant information, then there's no need to repeat it when they get through to an agent. This let's the customer know that the business values their time, and they have not wasted it in the IVR. If the caller has to be transferred later in the call, agents should ensure that the same processes apply, and customers do not get frustrated that they have wasted time with your business.
Information sharing is the key to success. The contact centre needs to become truly dynamic and utilise all of their resources effectively. Information can be screen-popped to an agent's desktop before they receive the call, showing all the information that the customer has given. Any re-verification steps should be made as short as possible. With other processes such as skills-based routing in place as well, transfers should be cut down, and with screen-pops throughout the enterprise, when transfers do need to happen, they can be executed seamlessly.
The Next Steps - Making the Emotional Connection
Traditional customer satisfaction issues have been on the radar for several years, and several forward-thinking companies have made great in-roads into addressing these issues successfully through the deployment of a dynamic contact centre approach. This enables them to optimise the blend of people and technology to create a seamless process for managing customer interactions. And managing those interactions well means that whenever a customer chooses to contact your business, they go away feeling satisfied and will return.
Repeat business is not really customer loyalty, it is a customer using you because they don't feel there is another company able to do it better, but as soon as one comes along, there is a genuine threat to their custom. The customers that we all want, are those that will promote your business to their friends, and to people they meet - an active advocate for your business can become one of your greatest sales tools. People like this do exist, but why are they so enthusiastic? The answer is that they have a formed a strong emotional connection.
Giving the customer what they want without being asked
The quickest and most effective way to create a stronger, emotional connection with the customer is to give them what they want and what they need, without them having to ask for it. Genesys research shows that a staggering 83 per cent of customers in the UK approve of pro-active communications through the phone, email and SMS to keep them updated on service delivery, products and services that may be of interest to them. Customers actually want you to sell to them, but only what they feel is 'right for them'. And understanding 'right for them' means profiling customer data to establish what your customers would be interested in. Once you have determined this, those customers are willing to listen to you.
Doing it with limited resources
But now you need to exploit the opportunity you have just created by incorporating outbound activity into your contact centre, but this generally means more staff, or less time answering calls. Matching staffing patterns with call volumes (and budgets) is hard enough at the best of times.
The answer to these problems is a dynamic contact centre approach, which enables you to create a single dynamic pool of employees to meet the varying needs of your contact centre. Having back-office staff is essential, as is having a capable agent pool. However, there is no reason why the two sections of the business have to be mutually exclusive. By blending the two together, managers can have greater control and flexibility of their workforce, and create the time that they need to create these revenue generating activities. At times of high call volumes, calls are pushed to back office working, where a SIP-linked system, connected to the main telephony system, enables the staff to become agents. At times when call volumes drop, to ensure agent productivity levels are retained, the same staff can be pushed back office tasks from a single task folder. Alternatively they can spend this time on calls that have come in and introduce cross- and up-sale opportunities, or they can dial out, and make those essential outbound calls to customers.
In this dynamic environment, jobs are managed according to customer needs, the productivity and efficiency of the contact centre is dramatically improved, satisfaction increases because customers don't have to hold or be subject to unnecessary transfers, and those essential pro-active contact and cross- and up-sales opportunities are created. The end result is dramatically improved customer service, the largest single influence on consumer loyalty, and therefore, on the bottom line
