3 Tips to Drive Customer Engagement and Loyalty

Steve Bell at Talkdesk looks at how contact centres are embracing their role as a strategic asset to drive customer engagement.

Historically, contact centre strategy has centred around quickly responding to support requests while containing operational costs. However, contact centre strategies are adapting to the need to do more with less.

Organizations are re-evaluating their current systems, processes, and resources to maximize their efforts and achieve their goal. Contact centres are a strategic asset filled with untapped potential to drive business growth.

How Does the Contact Centre Contribute to CX?

Contact centres impact CX, but they aren’t typically measured on this impact, so there’s been no way to measure improvement or success, and no accountability ensuring contact centres are aligned to strategic business goals.

However, organizations are quickly learning that customers value exceptional experiences in every industry — in financial services, health care, and retail this is more perceptible than ever.

In fact, if companies don’t ensure their contact centre is aligned and set to achieve their CX strategies and goals, they’re at risk of losing customers.

Perhaps that’s why we’re seeing 75% of customer experience leaders rate increasing customer loyalty and retention through the call centre strategy as a high priority, with the influence of the contact centre on customer (or patient) experience increasing over the next two years.

By understanding the impact of the contact centre on CX, companies can get buy-in across all departments to strategically position, equip, and measure their contact centre as a customer engagement centre.

Drive Customer Engagement and Loyalty Through the Contact Centre.

Companies are learning to thoughtfully, proactively, and predictively engage customers on their terms to continue being the brand they love. To effectively engage customers, you must:

Measure Customer Engagement and Loyalty Metrics Through Your Contact Centre.

While these metrics may vary from organization to organization, you have to ensure the contact centre has insight and is accountable to the metrics that lead to successful customer engagements. Examples of customer engagement and loyalty metrics include:

Customer engagement scores

• Number of interactions on social media (comments/likes/reposts).
• Number and sentiment of direct messages on social media.
• Clickthrough rate (CTR) on texts and emails.

Customer satisfaction

• Net promoter score (NPS).
• Average CSAT.
• Number and rating of product reviews associated with customers.
• First call resolution (FCR).
• Volume of inquiries related to products bought (by product, by customer).
• Return rate.

Customer loyalty

• Loyalty program sign-ups by agent.
• Loyalty lifetime earnings (e.g. points or coupons related to a loyalty program) by customer.
• Loyalty redemption rate.

Prioritize Retaining High-Value Customers.

Proactively send rewards, offer first-priority routing, and match them with your top-tier reps. Be proactive — convert customer intent into action. 52% of customers say necessary information was not provided to them proactively.

Proactive outbound engagement is about the constant nurturing of customers after a purchase, to ensure continued satisfaction, provide ongoing value, and prevent problems before they arise.

When customers browse your website or use your mobile app, proactively message them to capture and convert leads. Identify key conversation points, such as competitor mentions, common objections, and more, to understand customer needs and market trends.

Treat customers as individuals by personalizing their experiences with your brand. Meet and exceed expectations, through any channel, by applying the accumulated data you have on them to customize their experience and even anticipate their needs.

Meet and Exceed Expectations With Data.

Data within a contact centre can be pivotal in driving a more proactive customer experience. Consider the number of customer interactions – (across multiple channels) – that live in a contact centre daily. Gathering data is essential, but it’s the value of the data, and what it could mean for the business, that is critical.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is integral to contact centre transformation from reactive to proactive. AI enables companies to proactively deliver customer service with personalized recommendations and tailored interactions, when and where the customer wants them.

Data within a contact centre can be pivotal in driving a more proactive customer experience. Consider the number of customer interactions – (across multiple channels) – that live in a contact centre daily. Gathering data is essential, but it’s the value of the data, and what it could mean for the business, that is critical.

Modern cloud contact centres offer AI tools that can help explore why customers are calling. With this data, companies can better understand the needs of customers, and then proactively address those needs, delighting the customers, and driving efficiency and a positive impact on the bottom line. This can deliver value across the entire organization from the contact centre agent to C-suite leadership.

With AI and machine learning natively incorporated, as well as off-the-shelf API integrations to connect all core systems, cloud contact centres pull customer data from every interaction they have with the company and centralize it in the contact centre.

Most contact centre solutions offer expansive automated reporting features, historical and real-time analytics, performance analytics and some offer predictive analytics for recommendations and proactive engagement.

With so much customer data in one pane of glass, cloud contact centres have the technology and data required to improve outcomes like customer lifetime value, revenue generation, employee engagement, innovation, and collaboration, transforming the contact centre from a cost centre to a growth centre.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Talkdesk – View the Original Article

For more information about Talkdesk - visit the Talkdesk Website

Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.