In honor of Valentine’s Day, last week, CMSWire posted an article that likened customer relationships with personal relationships. The piece, How to Make Your Customers Love You This Valentine’s Day, took three best-practice tips for happy, healthy, successful relationships and applied them to customer relationships in the contact center. We encourage you to give it a read, it’s interesting how well they apply.
Just like in our personal relationships, there’s tremendous value to be had with the right “match,” and in this case, matching the right agent with the right customer. But obtaining this perfect match requires:
» Investing time in agents
» Looking at the customer holistically
» Prioritizing the customer perspective
Big data has a central role to play in making the perfect customer / agent match. A recent Forrester report on the future of customer service revealed two key things:
» Predictive analytics will play an integral role in helping companies recommend the right content to customers, and connect customers to the right agents in order to increase satisfaction.
» Customer service organizations will be investigating in methods to recommend agent “next-best actions” during the service resolution process to offer service tailored to the customer’s unique needs and past purchase history.
Contact centers collect tons of data from their customers, but whether it’s the first time a customer picks up the phone, sends an email or interacts with a customer service representative online, this data is typically stored in disparate systems. Linking data across contact center and business systems, and then analyzing this data across interactions, allows contact centers to make intelligent decisions about each customer engagement through analytics, leading to happier customers and better, more rewarding relationships.
