Contact center agents are generally the first point of contact with customers. There's a certain logic that pervades companies that results in blaming agents when customers decide to go elsewhere. The agent wasn't pleasant or helpful enough. The agent didn't communicate the offer correctly or follow the script. But, in reality, when a customer is ready to leave and contacts a business to do so, the outcome of that interaction usually has little to do with a specific agent's personality or level of knowledge. The key to keeping customers is understanding customer intent. But how do we truly understand and investigate customer intent? And how do we capture insights that impact our business? "Listening" is a great place to start.
Intent is present in every interaction, and in most cases insight into why a customer might be leaving is there too, but we can only benefit from that if we listen. Capturing our customers' true intent is the first step in optimizing Customer Dynamics and in ensuring that you not only keep your customers, but make them loyal and satisfied, even as you make your business more profitable and efficient – your organization's ultimate intent.
Author and advertising executive Steve McKee, in a recent
BusinessWeek article,
"How Not to Go Out of Business," calls on organizations to:
"Get to know your customers as well as you possibly can. Ask them what hassles and inconveniences surround the occasions when they do business with you. Find out what alternative solutions they may consider, what substitutes they sometimes choose, and what they do (and why) before and after they transact business with you. You can gather this insight through formal research methods or by informally observing, listening to, and having conversations with your customers."
Detecting important insights and spotting those customers at risk of churning involves a combination of listening and research. Leverage the call recording and analytics solutions you likely have in place today, and instead of monitoring just the basics -- service levels and regulatory compliance -- take it a step further and make an impact on your business by carefully listening to what the customer is telling you. How do you do that? Easier said than done? Here are two techniques:
- Leverage your quality monitoring process. Add a question to your evaluation form that tracks why customers leave. Don't use it for scoring purposes, but track it for 30 days and uee the information to take relevant action, such as coaching, updating agent scripts, fine-tuning processes and systems, etc.
- Leverage interaction analytics. Analyzing the dynamics of actual interactions with customers as they unfold can help identify customers at risk of churn in real time, expose root causes, and help you personalize retention efforts and offerings.
In a recent Forbes special report entitled, "Why Predictive Analytics is a Game Changer," Dave Rich and Jeanne G. Harris discussed the pitfalls of using intuition as the basis of decision making:
"In a tough global economy, sloppy decision making and 'going with your gut' can get you punished -- swiftly. That's why leading companies are increasingly turning to a new management discipline called 'predictive analytics' to compete and thrive. Rather than relying on intuition when pricing products, maintaining inventory or hiring talent, managers are using data, analysis and systematic reasoning to improve efficiency, reduce risk, and increase profits."
Analytics tools are at the heart of a successful program to optimize Customer Dynamics. The key is finding the tools that will capture intent and analyze interactions across all channels – Web chat, email, even social media – not just phone calls.
How complicated is it to listen to customers, recognize their intent, analyze interactions to reveal valuable insights, and apply those insights to impact business performance…and prevent your customers from defecting? In other words, how hard is it to take charge of your Customer Dynamics? You may be surprised – it's easier today than ever, particularly in the contact center, where technology for recording, quality monitoring, and interaction analytics is already standard. It's just a matter of hearing the customer's voice, not just looking for someone to blame.
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About the Author: Matthew Storm is the director of Americas marketing for NICE Systems