PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED TO TMC NET’S CALL CENTER SERVICES
According to Customer Think, call center performance can be improved by simply applying competitive analytics to both inbound and outbound calling. It’s quite simple, really. Understanding your demographics and what works best with that demographic will close the sale and keep customers satisfied. It will also keep the average handling time down, proving efficiency in the sales and customer service processes.
Routing the customer to an agent, who is most likely to understand the need at hand, also creates efficiency and resolves the issue most effectively. In the case of a sales agent, the call may be routed to those who are most likely to upsell a product or service to each individual customer.
As marketers use data analytics to streamline and simplify marketing initiatives, call centers can duplicate similar structure using real time data and applying the most effective plan of action in optimizing operations. This can improve productivity and help an organization to maximize sales and service quota. Daily and weekly sales goals may be continuously exceeded through the ability to understand and apply detailed analytics data to each call session. Many call centers are instituting knowledge bases into their systems for this reason.
Business intelligence data helps major enterprises institute better decision-making processes and allows them to take larger leaps of faith through educated risks in the marketplace. For businesses to succeed, it is becoming quite clear that this methodology is applicable to any stage in the customer experience and yet can impact the overall operations of the organization — one call at a time. It is almost necessary in increasing stagnate performance for some industries and to reach new positioning in the marketplace.
Many businesses are overlooking this opportunity when strategically planning their sales and customer service cycles. Either they are quite oblivious to this process, or they are meeting budget issues when implementing analytics data into the process. Many businesses simply can’t afford the technology necessary in implementing a data analytics structure or the systems to store this information within. Those who do invest need to translate collected data and leverage it into growth and expansion initiatives.
Many small businesses hinder their potential with a lack of IT experience in analyzing the collected data. The ability to single out the most beneficial data is a skillset that many professionals will need to be trained to understand. Hiring a professional to train sales and customer service teams in identifying qualitative and quantitative data that will require additional budgets that many businesses struggle to expend.
Through this, the cycle of declining business and an unsatisfied customer base continues to unfold. As innovation evolves the customer experience, those who are not adopting these technologies will find themselves left behind. And, their customers will move on to a new business that seems to understand their direct business needs.
