I just finished a piece on what I call the “Rental Economy”.
Whether it’s a Cloud-based product like Office 365 or a (used-to-be?) hardware/infrastructure-related system like your business phone system, many businesses, Packet Fusion included, are now “renting” at least some of their business tools and services via an “As-a-Service” model.
Whatever you think of them, one thing that any “As-a-Service” vendor can attest to is that it’s easier than ever for our customers to switch vendors in this Rental Economy.
I might have 500 Mitel phone handsets in my building, but if they’re Cloud-based IP phones connected to your cloud solution, if I don’t like the service you’re providing me – if your call-routing is difficult to navigate, if your contact center staff are unhelpful, if your techs take a long time to fix my problem – I can switch to another Cloud provider next month with very little effort.
“If I don’t like the service you’re providing me… I can switch to another Cloud provider next month.”
So how do we keep our customers from jumping ship and going to our competitors in this Rental Economy?
You better believe it’s all about how you treat the customer at every interaction.
CUSTOMER SERVICE ON THE CUSTOMER’S TERMS
When we’re talking contact center, personalizing the digital experience should be a priority in your customer service strategy.
Even though many purchases and interactions occur online—through PCs, tablets, or smartphones—and businesses may never physically see their customers, there’s no reason not to give them the same personal treatment customers might receive in a brick-and-mortar retail environment through contact center setting.
Customers are clamoring for a high level of personalization and are demanding that companies cater to them with extremely sophisticated features, such as:
- Connect My Way: Allow customers to communicate with your business the way they want to. Whether it’s through voice, chat, email, text or even a fax, providing a variety of means to stay in touch with customers is critical.
- Know Me: Make sure customer service representatives have accurate information on a customer when they make contact. This could be through screen pops that draw information straight from the customer relationship management (CRM) system.
- Give Me Control: Self-service is all the rage, and with good reason. Empowering customers to look up information or reach out to a customer service rep (CSR) using IVR capabilities gives them the control they want and the help when they need it.
- Keep Me Engaged: Instead of dumping a customer on hold with the same tired music everyone has been hearing for years, let them choose their hold music or select other messaging and prompts while they wait for a live CSR.
- Send Me to the Right Agent: Use business rules and skills-based routing to ensure customers speak with the person that can best address their concerns and issues.
- Give Me Great Service: Multi-channel and multi-interactions, when used simultaneously, can help deliver top-notch customer care. An integrated system makes it possible to add email, social media, SMS and web chats to traditional phone calls to create a single view of all customer interactions.
- Always Improve: Through real-time monitoring as well as historical reporting, businesses can get a clear picture of their customer service success and, if needed, revamp and rethink their processes.
- Stay in Touch: By conducting follow-up surveys and offers and sending friendly reminders, companies can keep the dialog with their customers going to let them know they are still at the top of their priority list.
THE CUSTOMER’S CONTACT CENTER
In order to meet the requirements of the 9 commandments – and to be Rental Economy-shrinkage-proof – your contact center solution has to:
- Support whatever means of communication your customer wants to use to engage with your CSRs (this is #1!);
- Easily let you build the combinations of rules needed to personalize your customer’s experience (this is 1a!);
- Has to integrate with the other tools you use to create an excellent customer experience;
- Has to be scalable enough to handle future growth and integration with other infrastructure.
Is your contact center solution there?
If not, how many customers a month are you losing customer because of it?
If you’d like to hear more about the Customer’s Contact Center in the age of the Rental Economy, contact us.
As CEO of Packet Fusion, Matt sets the tone and vision for our company and our customers. His 20+ years in telephony gives him a deep understanding of unified communications and collaboration technology. He is an engaging presenter and has a knack for breaking down the often over complicated VoIP technologies into plain and simple English. Outside of PFI, Matt’s happy place is on the golf course or on a bike ride with his daughters.