Using the data they gather from consumers, call centers can help transform brands.
Gone are the days when call centers can afford to just be “transactional” organizations. In fact, if we take into consideration the rise of CRM and data analytics tools, they have no legitimate excuse to be stagnant. These technologies, which allow them to extract consumer insights, must enable them to be dynamic and relevant especially in terms of business growth.
But are today’s contact centers on the right track?
Typically, customer service managers use data gathered from transactions to improve their daily operations. It’s a commendable effort, primarily because this paves the way to customer centricity. However, what most entrepreneurs don’t realize is that customer data has the power to transform not only call centers, but also entire brands.
To fully utilize every single bit of information gathered from customers, contact centers must share it with the brands they cater to. They must then make sure that it reaches the brand’s various departments. By widening their access to customer information, you can build a 100% customer-centric organization. This ensures that all business decisions made by your employees and leaders are driven by insights gained from your target sector.
To guide you, we listed three types of consumer insights that a contact center must share with other departments, and why they must be shared.
1. Sales trends
If you want to create a customer-driven sales strategy, listen to call center transactions. There are plenty of sales-related information that you can gather from them to help your brand create powerful marketing strategies.
At their most basic form, these pieces of data would start out as:
• product availability inquiries,
• promos that consumers often ask about,
• successful or unsuccessful telesales, and
• inquiries about product features and other existing offers.
To turn these raw details to sales-related insights, you need to interpret them in a way that takes the customers’ preferences into consideration. After doing so, you can then understand:
• your customers’ motivations for buying a product,
• why customers turn down upsell or cross-sell offers,
• when a customer is most likely to buy, upgrade, or downgrade, and
• the moments when product demand spikes.
All these are useful consumer insights that can help a brand create effective sales strategies, so contact center managers must relay them to the product marketing or the advertising team. Ideally, they must also be involved in gathering, analyzing, and interpreting the data, as they’re the subject matter experts.
2. Product or process problems
This is another one of the main reasons why customers seek the help of a call center. It’s also why you must make the most of the information they provide during transactions.
Of course, brands strive to provide smooth and problem-free product or service experiences to their customers, but glitches are not completely avoidable. The most that companies can do is continue to enhance the functionality and features of their products, but without an insight-based roadmap, this is an impossible task.
From customer transactions, you can discover:
• the product- or process-related issues customers usually encounter,
• when they usually encounter them,
• the product(s) with the biggest issues, and
• the causes of these problems.
The primary department that would benefit from these insights is the product development team. However, depending on the nature of the customer issues, you may also pass on these data to tech specialists. Aided by firsthand information gathered from end-users, brands can easily identify the root of these problems and ultimately improve the customer experience.
3. Negative and positive feedback
As your frontline representative, your call center absorbs all kinds of brand feedback, both positive and negative. Compliments from customers would tell you that your brand’s strengths and what you’re doing right. Criticisms, on the other hand, would point you to weaknesses that you may not be aware of. So, all in all, these types of consumer insights would facilitate performance improvement.
As a whole, customer feedback is an important resource because it would tell you whether your buyers are happy with the products and services they’re getting. Feedback would also tell you what you must do to build a meaningful relationship with your market and how much effort you need to exert to make that possible.
This particular type of contact center information can affect multiple departments and processes in your company. Ideally, all key decision makers must be able to access these sets of data—from your marketing team, to your product development and tech specialists, and even the company’s executive management.