Holistic medicine for your call center; look at the whole customer experience.

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Holistic medicine is a big picture view – the emotional, physical, psychological and environmental factors that contribute to a patient’s overall health. Without considering all of these factors, a doctor may only solve part of the affliction without completely healing the patient. In your call center, the agents lacking a holistic view of a customer’s history may only solve part of the customer’s problem but not rectify the entire issue.

Think about how information in your company is heavily siloed by department which dictates that your call center agents have access to some of the customer’s history and information but not a holistic view of their entire interaction/relationship with the company. As we discussed last week, when Big Data is put to work in the right way it greatly benefits your customers and your brand. But when marketing, sales, online and other departments generate, collect and evaluate customer data but do not share it with the call center, the power of Big Data is undermined.

Your customers already think you are the master of Big Data, right? How often do you hear, ‘why can’t you see that on your screen? ‘ Customers get frustrated and call center agents fail when the customer intelligence data available is incomplete or not readily accessible to them during a call. It’s also easier to misdiagnose a customer problem, miss an up-sell or cross-sell opportunity, or even lose a customer if the agents are limited to a single view of that customer. Think about the times you’ve called about a product or service issue and how much better your customer experience would have been had they offered to upgrade your service because they could see your contract was about to expire. Or gave you a discount on a related product because they had access to your spending patterns. Or could see that you spend most of your time shopping online through their web site and then tweeting about your purchases, so you were informed about their Twitter service handle to use the next time.

It’s not difficult to see the great power in Big Data (even just bigger than what you have), so it’s time to focus on putting that power in the hands of your agents to impact customer experiences. Here are some recent customer comments that reflect how Big Data done right could have changed their customer experience for the better:

“I don’t understand why you’re emailing me service offers when I cancelled with you two years ago. Maybe if you had been this attentive when I was a customer, I would still be one.”

“Three times a week my cell phone rings about taking one of your stupid surveys. I wouldn’t mind taking a survey if you emailed me but I’m not going to sit on my phone and burn up my minutes. I’ve tried calling your customer service line but they tell me there’s nothing they can do about it because it’s their marketing department’s fault. Uh, yeah there is. Mark it down that this is a cell number!”

“It would be nice if you had tech support online. It’s really inconvenient for me to call your customer service line because I always have to wait to be transferred to tech support. If you have support online it would save your customers some hassle.”

“The last one that I had gave me a bunch of problems too. Why can’t we learn from that because I’ve given you one more chance, like you asked, and got a newer model. Dang, I’m stupid for trusting you.”

Happy Wednesday!

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Jodie Monger
Jodie Monger, Ph.D. is the president of Customer Relationship Metrics (CRM) and a pioneer in business intelligence for the contact center industry. Dr. Jodie's work at CRM focuses on converting unstructured data into structured data for business action. Her research areas include customer experience, speech and operational analytics. Before founding CRM, she was the founding associate director of Purdue University's Center for Customer-Driven Quality.

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