Customer Service: How to Succeed With Customers at Every Point of Contact
All businesses, including retailers, which offer and effectively manage a variety of contact channel choices stand to make huge gains in customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as revenue generation. Meeting the multichannel challenge means providing highly customer-focused strategies, applications and platforms, as well as call-center agents equipped with the training and tools they need to provide consistent service across all contact media.
For retailers (or any organization that combines contact centers with on-site locations such as stores, service delivery facilities, etc.), a multichannel strategy should ensure that every contact a consumer has with your organization is optimized for the customer experience — and for the business' strategic customer relationship management (CRM) goals. To that end, there are two areas where retailers can concentrate their focus: interactive voice response (IVR) and websites.
Revisit Your IVR
While IVR was probably the first tool in many organizations' multichannel strategy, it's become a hated (by consumers and businesses alike) necessity. Today's IVR technologies, however, have reached an astounding level of personalization.
Inbound calls can now be segmented by customer account based on the number the customer is calling from or a telephone number account designation, offering information based on previous customer activity and preferences.
This offers a more intelligent and personalized experience for customers. For example, if they've recently placed an order with you, customers might be given an option or set of options related to tracking or changing that order. IVR can also be more proactive, with outbound messaging that keeps customers informed about order status and changes. It also can be used to administer customer satisfaction surveys regarding orders or customer experiences.
The takeaway is that IVR technology has advanced to the point that it can once again hold a primary place in your organization's multichannel strategy, showing customers that you know who they are, what their preferences are and that you value their continued patronage.
Treat Your Website
Like a Call Center
If your business has a multichannel strategy in place, you probably already use your website to capture customer data, and then use that information to provide highly personalized service during future transactions. Details about account histories, product and service preferences, past service problems, etc., are often already stored in powerful databases. This data enables call centers to create customized web pages for individual customers.
This intelligence can be used to enhance web self-service, as well as email; live, web-based support; and traditional phone transactions. Call-center agents at these companies receive relevant response suggestions and view other key alerts right at their desktops to help them provide personalized service to all current customers, regardless of how they've chosen to contact the call center.
Retailers can incorporate these tools into their point-of-sale systems, allowing them to capture the same data which feeds into the overall database of customer preferences and experiences. Having this information about activities through other channels also uncovers strong opportunities for cross-selling and upselling. Once you have information about your visitors, knowledge management tools can then allow agents to access information and respond to customer inquiries.
These suggestions aren't meant to be cut and pasted into email responses (or even repeated robotically via telephone) to customers. Rather, they take relevant pieces of information and incorporate them into responses to ensure that each customer receives personalized service. The same goes for retail sites, where visitor knowledge can even be paired with customer data from a CRM program.
Common Elements
of Multichannel Success
Multichannel strategies and offerings may vary among industry type, product/services offered and corporate culture, but the approach to satisfying online consumers among the most successful companies is similar. Retailers can use these common, winning approaches to bolster their multichannel offerings:
• Offer dynamic self-support options. The best self-support tools enable customers to quickly find answers and information while dramatically reducing the number of routine requests that call-center agents must field. These include continually updated and information-rich FAQ lists, highly interactive search engines, and personalized online accounts.
• Give customers access to agent-assisted multichannel usage tools. Organizations sink large investments of money and resources into their multichannel strategies, and that includes their efforts to drive customers to channels outside of the call center. Live-agent assistance can help push customer confidence in self-service channels with advanced web chat applications as well as "click-to-talk" applications, which provide real-time support to online customers.
To enhance the quality of live, web-based transactions, top call-center providers couple their chat and click-to-talk applications with dynamic collaboration (co-browsing and form-sharing) tools.
Take advantage of tools that help you respond to all email inquiries efficiently and correctly. Specialized email management systems can automatically — and evenly — distribute customer email inquiries among a call center's agents. Call centers typically use a system's auto-reply feature to confirm that a message has been received and to let customers know the expected turnaround time for a full response (the best e-support providers respond to each email in less than 24 hours).
• Employ solid workforce management practices for all channels. Top call centers work hard to ensure that the right number of e-support agents are in the right places at the right times. This includes accurate forecasting for online customer contact volume, and scheduling the appropriate number of staff to meet your call center's service level/response time objectives.
Successful call centers carefully track how many email and web contacts they receive each day, as well as when such transactions occur and how efficiently they're handled. Doing so enables the call center to uncover essential historic buying trends on which they can base solid staffing decisions.
In addition, top call centers keep close tabs on any special events (e.g., a new marketing campaign) that are likely to affect email, chat and other web-based contacts, and then staff accordingly.
• Institute formal "e-monitoring" procedures to ensure that agents and systems are effectively handling online customer transactions. Supervisors and managers in top multichannel call centers regularly evaluate agents' email and chat responses for accuracy, spelling, grammar and personalization, and provide agents with the feedback and coaching they need to continually improve.
In addition, contact-center agents should receive detailed reports that help to provide a more holistic view of online customers' experiences with the company. Such reports show how long customers had to wait to receive an email response or to resolve an issue via chat, as well as shed light on the effectiveness of self-support tools on a website.
• Continually measure online customer satisfaction, and act on your findings. Leading multichannel call centers not only monitor how they handle online customers, but they ask those customers for their opinions and feedback via post-transaction surveys.
Carefully analyze the information and suggestions received via those surveys and feedback methods to make strategic changes to improve your web-based services. Data mining tools can help identify trends and pinpoint problem areas, especially when paired with an individual or team whose primary responsibility is customer satisfaction measurement and evaluation.
Layne Holley is the director of community services at the International Customer Management Institute (lholley@icmi.com).