VoIP Call Center

How to Indentify What Customers Want When They Dial into Your Call Center

By Patrick Barnard Group Managing Editor, TMCnet

As most people in the call center industry know, the key to delivering great customer service is being able to determine what the customer wants as of the moment they call.

Sure, your call center agents can be well trained on all the common “soft skills” needed to deliver good service via the phone or Web – and they can be intimately familiar with all of your products and/or services – but that doesn’t necessarily mean they KNOW your customers. Being able to deliver “personalized” service has become essential to retaining customers and increasing loyalty. Gone are the days when organizations can treat every customer the same way in the call center.

But how can you know what each and every customer wants as of the moment they call – and how do you deliver truly personalized service to each and every customer? The key to achieving that is to compile meaningful and actionable metadata on each customer, including their preferred modes of contact, among other information, and incorporating all that into a customer “profile” database which can be dipped into as of the moment that customer calls. This customer profile – which can be screen-popped to the agent’s desktop as soon as the call is connected – contains important information that can be leveraged to improve customer service. For example, they agent can see what, and when, the customer’s last purchase was – or what complaints the customer may have made about a particular product, or about the customer service they received, in the past. This metadata can then be leveraged to steer customer inquiries to successful fruition – and it can be used to create new cross sell or up sell opportunities that may not have otherwise presented themselves. This method for delivering personalized service has already proven its value in increased sales and conversions.

This building of customer profile data and its delivery to the agent desktop is really nothing new – but what’s happening now is that companies are looking to collect more data on each customer and expand the customer profile so as to have more information to work with.

In addition they are seeking better ways to determine what prospects want before they get on the phone with the agent – these are the customers for which no profile has yet been established. There are several new ways that organizations can capture pertinent information on their customers before they are connected – including collecting basic information by way of the IVR. Indeed there are several new technologies and strategies which organizations can utilize in order to determine quickly why someone has called – before they are connected to a live agent. This is what enables organizations to deliver better, and more personalized, customer service to prospects and new customers. 

During a recent free webinar, “Who’s on the Line: Identify and Value Unknown Prospects and Customers,” sponsored by TARGUSInfo, Dorean Kass, Director of Consumer Facing Markets for TARGUSinfo, and Ken Dawson (News - Alert), Chief Marketing Officer for InfoCision Management Corporation, discussed how identifying and qualifying “unknown” customers or prospects can help drive conversion rates, improve operational efficiencies, and increase revenue. Together they revealed strategies that help call centers understand who is calling and instantly identify high-value prospects, including frequent and big spenders; how to improve operational effectiveness by moving high-value prospects to the top of the call queue and routing them to most appropriate agent; how to boost order values by instantly pinpointing the most compelling cross-sell and up-sell offers; how to decrease average handle time; and how to automatically re-engage non-converting callers — within 24 hours — while their interest is still high.

In addition Dawson shared case studies of companies that gained an edge over the competition by leveraging real-time identification and scoring through InfoCision’s (News - Alert) unique capabilities.

If you’re looking for a new strategy to quickly identify what “unknown” prospects want when they call into your call center, so that you can turn them into new customers, be sure to download the archived version of this free educational webinar, which can be accessed here.

View All VoIP Call Center Articles »