Listen Up

If you’re recording conversations between customers and contact center employees and using the recordings to coach those employees, that’s great because the cornerstone of successful customer relationships is a knowledgeable and motivated agent. But your contact center isn’t the only department that can benefit from those recordings. In a recent online event sponsored by CRMXchange, six leading companies specializing in contact center monitoring, data analysis and e-learning showed that businesses can learn from and improve performance in multiple areas by leveraging the data gathered from a recording system.

“Our customers frequently share stories with us about other departments benefiting from the information in the contact center,” says Marlene Rosati, vice president of marketing for Eyretel. “For example, a technical help desk sends calls about problems with a specific product to their development team. This way the developers hear what the issues are directly from the customers and can create a fix that much faster.” It’s a win-win tactic: customers feel like their opinions really matter and the company can improve its products quicker.

Call centers also are a great source of information for sales and marketing departments because reps can learn firsthand exactly what customers want. “By capturing, evaluating and analyzing customer interactions in the call center, companies have access to the very richest customer insight imaginable,” says Jackie Wiedner, director of product marketing for NICE Systems. “And with all of this customer insight, organizations can better deliver what it is the customer really wants. This will lead to fewer customer defections and increase customer acquisitions.” A major telecommunications company, for example, learned that its customers wanted a simpler bill. Each month the contact center was inundated with calls from frustrated customers who could not understand their bills. After redesigning its bills, the company was better able to manage its call volumes and now is recognized as having the most easy-to-understand customer statement in the industry, says Wiedner.

Marketing departments also can benefit by monitoring the status of on-going campaigns and tweaking scripts accordingly. Operations can refine processes and executives can stay on top of conversations with their best customers, says Louis Boudreau, CTO at Verint Systems. In short, the benefits of leveraging the data gathered from call centers are enormous. Customers provide valuable information during each interaction, say the experts. Companies that capture and act on that information will be the ones building the strongest customer relationships.