Your company is most likely already utilizing Business Intelligence (BI) – including data mining, querying, reporting and more – to help guide business-critical decisions in your contact center. Whether identifying new opportunities or cutting costs, BI provides critical, unbiased information leaders can use to move a company forward. What you may not realize, however, is how BI can also be leveraged to better understand customers in order to provide an improved customer experience.
According to a recent survey by The International Customer Management Institute, less than 50 percent of respondents said their contact centers were using business intelligence to measure improvements in customer satisfaction. This is a huge missed opportunity! Between your CRM and ERP systems, you have a data goldmine that, with minimal effort, can be used to move the Cx needle. Here are two things you can do today.
Empowering Agents
According to a recent survey by The International Customer Management Institute, 67 percent of contact centers use aggregated data to evaluate agent performance. However, more than 60 percent don’t proactively deliver customer information to their agents. Talk about a missed opportunity. For example, Grant has been both a personal and business customer with his bank for 10 years. When he calls to dispute a new fee for receiving paper statements, the agent informs him there is nothing she can do. As a result, Grant goes to his local branch and closes all his accounts. Consider how this costly situation could have been avoided. By having access to a full view of Grant’s information, the agent would have recognized him as a preferred customer who could be retained by waiving a $35 fee, making both Grant and the bank happy. When agents have a 360-degree view of customers, they can provide more personalized experiences and decrease the number of frustrated customers.
Managing Multiple Channels
The second missed opportunity in the above example relates to a company’s ability to understand the customer experience across all available channels. If the employee at Grant’s branch bank had known he had recently called and was still frustrated, he would probably have responded to Grant’s request to close his accounts much differently. BI insights can provide different groups, from sales and marketing to front-line staff, with the information they need to make the customer experience seamless regardless of channel.
Another aspect of the omni-channel challenge is its holistic impact on customer experience. According to a Harvard Business Review article, customer satisfaction is not usually ruined by one poor interaction, it is due to “the sum of cumulative experiences across multiple touch points and in multiple channels over time.” Therefore, if any aspect of your company – from service to sales – delivers a poor customer experience, you risk undermining the great experience provided elsewhere and losing valuable customers. Again, BI data can be aggregated and shared in new ways to ensure a consistent customer experience.
Providing stellar customer experience requires many things, and one of the them is the ability to take a fresh look at what you are already doing. BI is a perfect example. You already have the necessary data, all you have to do is share it. If you’d like to learn more, I’d love to chat with you today!
Related Reading:
- Making the Case for Investing in Customer Experience
- Are You Reaching Your Full Cx Potential?
- Three Reasons Why Your Cx Strategy Should Include Live Chat
