Speaking to customers used to be easy. There was a time when regional banks once knew the names of everyone in town, their birthdays and their favourite drinks on a Friday. And not so many years ago, a big advertising campaign with a small inbound contact centre to fix any small issues, was considered a good business communication strategy.
It’s not so easy any more. It won’t surprise anyone that social and digital channels have completely changed the way we speak to customers. But what may surprise a few people is just how wide-reaching data-based communication is.
Of course data is important, that’s how we adapt our marketing, social and media campaigns. But what about your contact centre?
The contact centre is often the overlooked part of your customer engagement channel, which is crazy given the exponential growth of cloud contact centres in Australia. In the increasingly digital world customers live in, online web chat and inbound contact centres can be the only ways customers actually speak to brands.
So, how does data fit in? The growth in cloud contact centres has not only helped businesses run their contact centres more cost effectively but also smarter. By having the contact centre run through an online system, everything from call time, to call sentiment, to questions asked can be tracked, analysed and made available. This in-built data tracking and analysis quickly becomes incredibly powerful when used correctly.
The best way to use this data isn’t by showing how great your contact centre is, but by using it to tell a broader customer engagement story. Recent research shows there is a growing convergence of the c-suite, which isn’t due to cost cutting but to the growing importance of a single customer view and sharing insights across functions.
Imagine being able to show your head of marketing call trends from your contact centre that demonstrate a demand for a new product, who then matches this to a focused marketing push, that then helps the head of sales target an engaged market. Suddenly you have gone from using data to prove your section’s value in isolation, to showing how crucial you are to overall business success. Your next budget conversation with the CFO will be that much easier when you can demonstrate the bottom-line impact you have, all due to smart analysis of the data already at your fingertips in a cloud environment.
On an even smaller scale, by constantly analysing data coming through your contact centre you can quickly do everything from updating call scripts to reflect issues, to redirecting resources to meet growing demands.
The power of data in customer communications comes down to how smart you are with the data. It’s all currently available, it’s just time to get better at using it.
About the author
Julian Sinclair is the Head of Global Sales and Marketing for ipSCAPE. He is responsible for all sales and marketing functions to support ipSCAPE’s global leadership in omni-channel cloud-based contact centre solutions. His email is julian.sinclair@ipscape.com.au
