Say an individual interacts with five to 10 separate companies over the course of a business day. This could start with a call to the bank, and a lengthy hold time; a long wait in a fast food line, only to be handed the wrong order; or poor mailman delivery, as he is handed someone else’s mail by mistake.
But throughout that day, this person might also be exposed to much better customer service than your organization currently provides. And that positive experience may be enough to make this individual stop doing business with you.
Keep Your Customers Coming Back
At the end of the day, you need to make sure your business goes above and beyond in catering to every customer’s need. This is perhaps no more important than in the contact center space—an area that is constantly under the limelight when it comes to customer service. The facts say it all: eight to 15 percent of a company’s customer base is lost each year, 68 percent because of indifferent or negative phone treatment. Therefore, you will want to take every precaution possible to ensure that your contact center treats your customers with the amount of attention necessary to keep them coming back.
According to market research, customers typically tell twice as many people about a bad experience with customer service than they do a good one. Moreover, five to 10 people learn about a bad interaction through word-of-mouth. And communications vehicles like mobile devices and social media have expedited the process of word-of-mouth.
Caller Personalization Drives a Better Customer Experience
One of the best ways to amplify the customer experience is to adopt call personalization technology, which blends self-service with assisted service. When these elements are combined, the result is a completely personalized customer experience. Giving your contact center agents access to previous interactions with each customer and collected consumer data will allow your company to provide real-time, appropriate information during customer interactions.
In order to provide caller personalization, your system will need to have in place the proper routing infrastructure and applications to provide the ability to track customer activity across multiple points along the call, and tight integrations to the self-service and back office CRM applications. This means staying with a customer as the person moves from a Web chat to the phone or from email to live chat. Social media, in this regard, is just as important.
When you invest in the personalization of your contact center services, it means that with each call, you will worry less and less about the impression your company makes on your customers. As you work to reel in consumers to your company, personalization is the bait that makes a customer feel more like a part of your organization and less like a number in a database.
