Improving call center performance can help prevent churn

When it comes to the way people communicate, talking on the phone and even sending emails are becoming passé. Today, it's about text messaging, social media and website interactions--communication mediums that give consumers more power to find products, troubleshoot problems and even air their complaints about a particular company.

As such, any company that uses contact centers to keep their customers happy must evolve, said Lisa Abbott, senior product marketing manager for Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent division that builds software to manage customer interactions across a multitude of mediums.

"Research has shown that a customer will interact with a company over many different channels, but what really hurts the customer experience is if there isn't some way to track what they are doing within the company," Abbott said. "Customers tend to reach out in many different ways. They may be interacting with a brand on their mobile phones, but then they should be able to click that and reach out to a contact center agent with visibility into what they have just been doing. Everything should be able to carry over."

Today, many customer contact centers tend to be stuck in the siloed approach, whereby a call comes into the contact center but that agent doesn't know the customer has already spent a significant amount of time troubleshooting on the company's website. The customer is then forced to recount and most likely retry solutions to a particular problem. Abbott estimates that just 20 percent of customer-facing companies integrate the phone with the Web. The number is significantly less when it comes to integrating even more communication platforms such as text messaging and social media.

For the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the U.K.'s leading charity that specializes in protection and cruelty prevention, implementing the Genesys cross platform allowed the agency to provide a way for children and juveniles to reach out to the center in a new way--online. Moreover, the combination of solutions from ProtoCall and Ciber married with Genesys enabled the charity to build a case notes system automating the case management process.

"Volunteers now have all case information at hand when they're talking to someone in need, which enables the counselors to be more effective in identifying how they can progress the case and deliver the necessary help," said Rose Slater, senior business partner with NSPCC.

Cross-platform contact centers, however, have much bigger implications for businesses in terms of customer retention and brand building, said Anandan Jayaraman, chief product and strategy officer with Connectiva Systems, which specializes in revenue management solutions for the telecom industry.

For a cut-throat industry such as telecom, operators are keen on deploying solutions that enable them to proactively identify the negative experiences of their customers and stop potential churn by reaching out to the customer with credit, for instance.

"For U.S. providers, for example, there is a pattern that customers have when it comes to announcing their intent to leave," Jayaraman said. "They may go to the website for better plans that they can move to, and they usually make a call to the call center to complain about high bills or even hint they are leaving. In 60 percent of the cases, these two things happen."

When it comes to social media, word of mouth takes on a whole new meaning as disgruntled customers typically post their frustrations on Twitter, Facebook and user forums. Jayaraman said companies such as Comcast are focusing on gathering information from public social networking sites and using it for proactive resolutions.

Abbott said the problem with such a scenario, however, is that often marketing people who are monitoring social media begin playing the role of customer service agents and respond in a siloed manner, by which the customer contact center isn't aware of the marketing department's actions.  

"This is bad for the customer experience as you're forcing marketing people to act in a role they are not trained for," Abbott said. "We bring the ability to go out there and monitor what is being said, analyze, categorize and determine what information is out there about your brand and then prioritize it and send it to the proper resource. That means the marketing people get what is important to them and the customer service people receive what they need. There needs to be an integrated approach and a closure in the gap we are seeing."

Forrester Research has been advocating this strategy for some time. The firm argues that the benefits of implementing this cross-platform strategy outweigh the costs when it comes to areas such as reducing the cost to market and selling products based on taking advantage of community input or providing more relevant information for search engines.

"There are multiple scenarios in which a company might choose to implement online communities for one reason and later leverage the platform to take advantage of additional uses and business opportunities," wrote Forrester Research in a report. "By adding additional communities, the company might derive incremental additional value from the original investment for only modest additional costs. Although we will not quantify the monetary value of these options, understanding that the social networking infrastructure is a platform that can be expanded over time clearly adds benefits above the direct ROI."