Direct mail and Call Centers

Building a business strategy aligned to customer needs ensures better acquisition and retention rates. Most call centers operate around the clock and can quickly increase customer satisfaction levels through effective call handling. Finding the right opportunities to sell products that are beneficial for customers is simplified with accurate information related to a customer’s products, preferences and interactions.

Call centers often receive high volumes of incoming calls and managing interactions with their associated activities and tasks can create work overloads and impede internal communication. Also, navigating between numerous screens while interacting with a customer can reduce efficiency and first call resolution ratios.

Providing call center staff and their reporting managers with the right CRM tools for facilitating interdepartmental coordination, real-time pipeline visibility, a centralized solutions database and actionable intelligence improves overall performance and accountability.

Recommendations

• Choose a CRM solution that is scalable and can adapt easily to your company’s growth
• Ensure user interfaces are not crammed with information making it difficult to pinpoint vital data during a call. Use fields that can compute data, display linked values and populate dynamically to reduce timespent during a call on generic activities and updations.
• Streamline the lead conversion process to decrease turnaround time and rework by mapping fields and sharing customer information with all related stakeholders in real-time.
• Ensure all customer information is available centrally through integration with all customer touchpoints for clear visibility of lead, opportunity, competitor and case pipeline. Track performance through forecasting tools and real-time dashboards.

First Time Resolution (FTR)

The single biggest driver for customer satisfaction is higher FTR rates, this has the following benefits-

• Efficient use of agents’ logged-in time
• Customers’ invaluable time and effort is saved
• Positive feedback from customers is warranted

The key to increasing FTR rates is to empower customer service executives with complete customer information, employing intuitive call scripts and a sufficient knowledge base, resulting in higher customer satisfaction levels.

Average Handling Time (AHT)

TAHT is the average duration of a transaction, typically measured from the initiation of a call and includes any hold time, talk time and related tasks for a transaction. It is dependant on factors like-

• How long does it take to retrieve information?
• Number of applications to switch between for accessing all relevant information?

With CRM 360° view of customers, access to related records and information is simple and quick. Agents can easily dispense additional information stored under workspaces or the document management system, thereby delivering a consistent user experience and increasing efficiency.

Quality Monitoring (QM)

Perhaps, an indicator of customer satisfaction greater than “How quickly?” is “How qualitatively?”. QM is used to measure the quality of service provided by an agent over a call. Quality ratings are dependant on factors like-

• Compliance with script
• Soft skills
• Product knowledge
• Active listening

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

SLA is the contracted delivery time for a resolution and is crucial when analyzing call center performance. It often has a direct impact on customer satisfaction. Meeting SLAs are dependant on factors like-

• Time duration for providing a resolution
• Relevance of the resolution provided

Can facilitate achieving SLAs through conditional alerts, dynamic field visibility and by performing vital escalations. Our CTI integration ensures that call center efficiency is at its optimum and that resolutions committed to customers are also honored.

Accuracy Rates

It is often seen that in order to reduce AHT, agents miss capturing vital customer information causing incomplete and inaccurate profiling of customers. Improving Accuracy Rates is dependant on factors like

• Easy-to-use interface
• Pre-populated information
• Reminders and notes

Increase call center productivity

• Use a balance score card approach through CRM to track the overall performance
• Monthly break-down of data to take insightful decisions.
• Bucket your calls into predefined categories.
• Increase inter-department co-ordination.

Reduce call center costs

• Save training costs by using call scripts and sharing training material through CRM.
• Average handling time can be reduced by call routing and case assignment through automated skill-based rules.

Increase customer satisfaction

• Service experienced by a customer can either reinforce or revoke the prior impression held by the customer towards the company. Hence, consistency across touch points becomes imperative – use ‘call scripting’ to deliver a quick and consistent customer resolution.
• Quick access to customer’s data helps in resolving issues faster.
• Pre-populated records when executing call scripts help increase accuracy and rapport.
• Access to social network profile information helps understand customer expectations and preferences.

Process understanding & correction

• CRM helps you analyse and build an effective process.
• Record valuable customer feedback on calls.
• Avoid duplicity using CRM, update records when executing a call script and simultaneously create activities.

Boost revenues

• Capitalize on satisfied service interaction to cross-sell and up-sell.
• Data on products with customer currently increases lead conversions for new products.

Increase agent productivity

• Use ready-to-send templates and increase efficiency.
• Deploy actionable knowledge banks and solutions templates to enhance productivity.
• Use the call script scoring engine to decipher relevance of leads.