Migrating to Multichannel Contact Center Key to Customer Retention, Loyalty

Due to the down economy, companies everywhere are cutting staffing in their call centers. At the same they are striving to maintain, if not improve customer service, as they are desperate to hold onto the precious few customers they have left.

Indeed, customer loyalty is more important than ever -- but in this age of the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies, it is more of a challenge than ever. Just one bad service experience and you could lose a customer to a competitor forever. What’s more, with social networking sites like Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter, blogs, wikis, message boards and even YouTube, consumers can freely air their complaints about your company’s bad service, causing further erosion of your customer base and damage to your brand.

So how can businesses do to reduce the cost of serving their customers, while at the same time improving customer service and loyalty? Many of them are finding that they can achieve both by investing in contact center and CRM technologies that work in concert together to both automate and personalize the customer experience.

This includes the integration of new communications channels, such as email, Web chat and text messaging, in the contact center, to give customers more choice in how they communicate with a business. It also includes Web and phone self-service solutions, which not only reduce the need for costly live support but also enable customers to carry out their own, routine, transactional or informational interactions more quickly and easily. And perhaps most importantly, it includes integration of these systems with CRM and other back office systems – thus enabling a business to leverage customer data to “personalize,” and bring more intelligence to, the customer experience.

Obviously such technologies require some investment – but many businesses are finding that today’s contact center technologies offer a fast a measurable ROI – and in addition they often discover that these innovative customer service solutions don’t cost as much as one might expect.

During the recent free webinar, “Back to Basics - Low Cost, High Efficiency Multi-Channel Customer Service,” sponsored by FrontRange Solutions, Randy Jessee (News - Alert), senior voice product manager, discussed how companies can improve customer loyalty and increase wallet share with multi-channel enabled customer service. In great detail, he covered the advantages of providing a comprehensive customer focus to help companies retain and grow more profitable customers.

Attendees of this informative webinar, which was presented on Oct. 1, learned about the many benefits of multichannel and voice-enabled customer service, including:

--Supporting customers with an integrated CRM 360 view

--Automating communications with customers to promote loyalty

--Case management workflow and knowledge management

--Leveraging account and contact management functionality to build relationships

--Communicating with customers across all methods of communication, such as, voice, web and email

--Adding a personal touch with voice enabled systems

--Managing customer service activities from problem capture through to resolution

--Cross-sell / Up-sell additional products and services for an extra revenue stream

--Managing the customer service business with powerful dashboards and analysis

 

To access a free copy of the archived version of this informative webinar, click here.