Reaching Out to Your Customers: Six Steps to Proactive Communications
17 May, 2011
By: Jim TannerEvery time you receive a voicemail alert that your flight has been delayed or your prescription is ready for pickup, you are reaping the benefits of proactive communications. Yet chances are that your contact center isn’t reaching out and touching customers in the same way as your airline or pharmacy. If that’s the case, you’re neglecting a key weapon in the battle to beef up customer service and thereby beat back the enemy (aka the competition).
As noted by analysts from Ovum to Gartner, outbound customer care communications can be an effective strategy for increasing customer loyalty and relieving budget pressures. Whether you’re notifying customers that an order has shipped, a bill is overdue, or a service call needs to be rescheduled, the fact that you’re saving them a call or an email can strengthen the glue that binds them to you. Contacting customers before they contact you also eliminates unnecessary inbound traffic and associated agent interaction costs.
This kind of outreach can likewise help businesses drive what the Wall Street Journal has called “customer service as a growth engine.” The newspaper has reported that companies like Walgreen’s, Comcast and American Express are upping their investment in customer service to boost sales, market share and competitive advantage.
One reason for the growing emphasis on customer care can be seen in Gartner’s forecast that fewer than 10 percent of brands will be able to provide meaningful product or service differentiation by 2020. In that environment, customer service may be the only differentiator left that can help promote customer retention.
And clearly it can. According to a recent American Express study, 91 percent of Americans consider the level of customer service important when deciding to do business with a company; 81 percent are likely to return after a good service experience; and 51 percent are likely never to do business with a company again after a poor experience. Adding proactive outbound customer care as a complement to your reactive inbound work can be one way to stay in customers’ good graces.
Six Steps to Success
While proactive communications services have been used by large enterprises like air carriers for a number of years, the practice is now trickling down to small and mid-sized businesses as well. It is also becoming more than a one-way notification system.
Technologies like predictive dialing, outbound IVR, email and to a lesser extent SMS, chat, pushed Web pages and social media can be used to initiate contact with customers, prospects and others who opt in for specific kinds of interactions.
In some cases, the process begins and ends with the alert itself – perhaps a red flag about an overdue rental movie, an overdrawn account, or a specific product on a customer ‘watch list’ that has just gone on sale. In others, the alert triggers a partially or fully automated response. A bank notice of insufficient funds, for example, might give customers the option to authorize a funds transfer with no agent intervention.
But before you get to that point, you need to lay the groundwork. For example:
1 – Identify use cases for outbound customer care in your organization. One way to get the ball rolling is to explore the possibilities with your agents, technical support staff and/or other teams. What situations have they run into where inbound calls could have been deflected by answering customers’ questions before they ask them? Then determine the frequency of those situations to zero-in on scenarios where proactive campaigns might work for you.
2 – Analyze your reporting dashboards for trends. Historical as well as current call patterns can also help shape proactive initiatives. When call volumes spike, what is the reason? Is there a back-ordered item that customers are inquiring about? A product with a faulty component? A new product that requires setup help or other technical assistance? In the latter case, for example, an outbound campaign pointing customers who purchased that product to a FAQ on your website will help offload inbound calls.
3 – Prioritize. Once you have a list of potential use cases, start with the one that will return the biggest dividends in terms of call center operations or customer goodwill, and/or that is the most easily achieved with today’s technology. Start with one process – typically the one that is causing your operation the most pain – and perfect that one before determining whether to add a second.
4 – Choose your channel. Even in today’s multi-channel world, where the proliferation of devices and technologies offers multiple communication paths, the voice channel remains the #1 method of communication between companies and consumers, with email the next most common. In part that’s because most contact centers don’t yet have the ability to run outbound campaigns via other means like SMS and chat. Even if it’s a voice versus email choice, however, the use case may dictate the channel. Time-sensitive information may be better delivered by phone, for example, while complicated messages may be more suited to email.
5 – Determine staffing requirements if any. Since some outbound communications will provoke an inbound response, you will need to factor that into your workforce planning. Also, if you are running other outbound campaigns in which agents are connected to customers once customers pick up the phone, a blended dialer can help maximize agent utilization by automatically moving staff from inbound to outbound call handling based on call volumes.
6 – Designate a person or team to track the success of each campaign. Depending on the specific initiative and the sophistication of your reporting systems, you should be able to create a dashboard view of the campaign that will tell you how many calls were connected or emails were opened; analyze historical data to determine whether inbound call volumes fell compared to the last time you had a back-order situation, and so on. To evaluate overall business impact, also look at enterprise data sources such as CRM systems and customer surveys. If you’re a pharmacy chain that notifies customers about prescription completion, for example, have your restock numbers decreased? The answers will help guide the next effort at proactive outreach.
Going the Extra Mile
When executed well, proactive communication initiatives can be an important adjunct to your inbound operations, a vital tool for managing the entire customer communication lifecycle, and a cost-saving strategy for call avoidance.
Most importantly, because it creates ‘news you can use’ touchpoints for your customers, outbound customer care can be a linchpin of your efforts to boost your organization’s customer satisfaction quotient. As we all know, it’s less expensive to keep an existing customer than to recruit a new one. If you’re looking for new ways to keep customers in the fold (and who isn’t?), proactive communications should be on your radar.
