Why the contact centre should be the axis of any customer-centric business

Five Rules for integrating a contact centre effectively

Once the preserve of the contact centre, customer experience has become the focus of the modern marketer.

In 2013 a Forrester Report called on brands to ‘Build Seamless Experiences Now’. It argued that, by failing to deliver a seamless dialogue across multiple access points, brands are degrading their value and eroding customer loyalty.

This need to deliver a seamless dialogue has ensured that marketers’ priorities have changed and increasingly they are looking to technology to help; Gartner predicts that by 2017, the CMO will spend more on technology than the CIO.

Yet marketing technology alone will not address the shift to multichannel customer communications.

By rights, the contact centre should be the axis of the customer centric business model. It is the most common two-way touch point customers have with most businesses. Yet, in most organisations it is disjointed with the rest of the business, sitting apart in a separate silo, perceived as a cost centre that exists purely to manage incoming customer enquiries and complaints.

This needs to change and encouragingly many forward-thinking brands are already taking the lead here, by integrating marketing with the contact centre.

The graphic below illustrates our vision of how the contact centre should sit at the heart of the customer-centric universe.

Source: The Marketing Led Contact Centre Manifesto

In our model of a customer-centric universe, the contact centre works in harmony with your marketing strategy so that:

Marketing campaigns are integrated with customer communications - with inbound and outbound calls, email and social media all working in unison to create a seamless customer dialogue;

• The contact centre is able to respond to incoming contacts generated by marketing campaigns, as well as providing the resource for outbound telemarketing campaigns to ensure increased Return on Investment for every marketing pound or dollar you spend;
• Communication is personalised to the customer’s needs and preference, delivering an outstanding customer experience that contributes to building long-term loyalty and ultimately increasing sales.

So how can you achieve this vision? The five rules below, taken from our

downloadable manifesto on ‘The marketing led contact centre’ should offer a useful starting point.

Rule One: Blend inbound and outbound

Two buzzwords that no marketer can ignore are agile marketing, which is all about being flexible to respond to the demands of the market and the customer, and inbound marketing which acknowledges that ‘push’ forms of marketing are just not enough any more - today’s customers have to be drawn in rather than disrupted with messages.

Most brands run advertising and marketing campaigns that actively invite customers to contact them directly, but unless brands are able to respond to customer communication, the conversation remains very one-sided. So while an outbound contact centre strategy may be the most obvious to align with marketing, it is also important to integrate inbound too.

In addition, a customer that has already voluntarily made contact with your business is naturally, going to be far more open to receiving a call than one who hasn’t. And speed matters here, research shows that if you can call a prospective customer within five minutes of them making an enquiry you are as much as 100 times as likely to reach them and 21 times more likely to convert. Statistics like this highlight the real value of a marketing led contact centre.

Rule Two: Communicate how and when your customers want

Most brands have now begun to adapt to the demands of the multichannel world.

But it’s not enough to adopt these channels, you must also know how and when to use each channel, and tailor your use of them to your customers.

For instance, if you receive an email enquiry from a potential customer, we know already that calling them straight back gives you the best chance of contact and conversion, but what if you don’t reach them, or it’s the middle of the night? A poorly timed call from the contact centre can damage marketing’s efforts in nurturing a potential customer.

In those cases, why not encourage your contact centre to put a workflow in place that schedules a call back the following day at a time that is likely to be convenient for them? Your contact centre might also be able to text them first so they are ready for the call. And almost certainly your contact should be via their mobile number, if you have it, rather than the landline. 

Rule Three: Run a data led contact centre

As Smart Insight’s own Managing Digital Marketing in 2015 research suggests, becoming the lifeblood of modern marketing, allowing marketers to understand customer behaviour in ways that were just not possible in the pre-digital world.

And it is this data-driven world that offers perhaps the biggest opportunity for the contact centre and marketing departments to work together.

Contact centres have been capturing and analysing data for years, but traditional contact centre metrics are all about driving costs down, rather than increasing customer satisfaction.

By working with their marketing colleagues, contact centres can take a more sophisticated approach to data that brings benefits to both departments. This collaboration will not only lead to better understanding of customer behaviour, but also allow the contact centre to adopt more intelligent work flows that deliver outstanding customer experiences.

Even better, they can analyse the effectiveness of these work flows and fine tune them; as every contact centre manager or marketer knows, an incremental improvement can have an exponential impact when you are dealing with huge volumes of customer interactions.

 The first step towards using data to improve customer experience is to apply KPIs that focus on this objective as well as the usual contact centre objectives of driving greater efficiency and marketing objectives of helping feed the sales funnel.

Rule Four: A/B test everything

The other side to modern data led marketing is the ability to test everything constantly for effectiveness. Almost all marketers will be aware of A/B and multivariate testing; running two or more variances of a message, creative or even a different colour button on a website to determine which customers respond best to.

This approach is perfectly suited to a contact centre, yet perhaps due to lacking the technology or just a focus on other objectives, it’s rarely been implemented. Now however, innovative brands are utilising A/B testing in their contact centre and experiencing the rewards.

There is almost no limit to the types of tests that can be undertaken in the contact centre. Your usage just needs to be aimed at determining how best to take the personalised approach to multichannel communication we mentioned earlier.

Not sure how much time to give between initial email contact and a call back? Run two versions of your call flow simultaneously, each with a different time period between email and call back, then see which gets the best call pick up rate.

Another area where A/B testing has real value is call scripts. Similar to the marketing approach of tweaking copy on a website, tweak the wording in a call script and run two or more versions to see which customers respond best to. The same can apply for the written copy used in email or scripts for IM. The more you test and tweak the more effective your contact centre will be. Once again the lessons can be mutually beneficial; is a specific message doing well in your call scripts? Then try it in your email marketing.

Rule Five: Treat all channels as equal

Marketing and the contact centre are now dealing with numerous channels and sources, and with a large customer database this means data-points are often multiplied several times over, making it hard to keep track.

Your next customer could come from an online affiliate, a marketing email, a promoted post on Facebook, or one of your agents making a cold outbound sales call. It is vital that you monitor how your channels are working together to deliver leads to the business and incentivise your agents, in the same way you do every other channel.

This is where your marketing attribution comes into play, by analysing sales sources and rewarding accordingly. Your contact centre could potentially be one of the strongest sales channels you have, and should be measured on the same basis.

In a business where marketing and the contact centre are working together harmoniously, customer experience becomes the number one priority. Even more importantly it will become embedded in your culture, ensuring that your business becomes truly customer-centric.

Thanks to David Ford for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. David Ford is Managing Director of Magnetic North. You can follow Magnetic North on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.