It’s hard to read about our industry lately without mention of the word multi-channel. We all know that channels of communication are changing and the influx of email, click-to-chat, and SMS activity has been the talk for quite some time now. However, one of the most overlooked aspects in each channel is personalization. While some channels are easier to personalize – by soft skills, agent type, coaching and more – other channels that are text-based and lack two-way dialogue can be on one hand, short and to-the-point. On the other hand, they can be robotic, impersonal and drive traffic to higher cost methods of communication such as a branch walk-in or a phone call. Let’s get personal for a moment:
What is the customer’s preferred channel?
One of the most creative ways to be personal with your customers is to reach out to them by their preferred methods or be available to them in their preferred method. But how do you know this? Often the traffic from your website, their history of communication and even their own words will tell you. “I really wish I could do this online“ is just one of the phrases that users of analytics track to determine the types of activity that may be best suited for web and mobile devices. And if the patterns of your customers aren’t lining up with your corporate strategy for channel management (i.e. drive customers to cheaper channels) then it’s time to investigate tools that capture customer intent to personalize the channels you encourage, and often force, your customers to use.
How do I insure that all channels have a personal touch?
It would be easy to answer this question with, “just ask them.” However, watching and listening to the interactions occurring on the phone, email or chat are ways that sources of customer dissatisfaction can be monitored. Most speech and text-based analytics solutions today do nothing more than identify words spoken. But new analytics solutions identify dissatisfaction and tie what’s communicated to the root-cause of their dissatisfaction. This allows agents to use new words and phrases that make a customer feel special, drive them to buy more and get them to stay around longer.
What tools can the agent use to deliver a personalized touch?
At NICE, we see thousands of customers each day use quality monitoring to evaluate the detail and the soft skills of agents in all channels. While most organizations use coaching as the next step hoping that the agent will improve, companies today are realizing the power of real-time contextual information on the agent desktop. How does this look? The old methods offer a traditional up-sell attempt or even scripted empathy. New ways offer a personalized recommendation of a product or service based on demographics, buying history and even the words the customer chooses during the interaction. We can coach agents to recognize these patterns and hope they will deliver the punch line, or take a personalized touch and present more than mundane CRM information on the screen. Let’s give our customer-facing personnel the offerings and next-best-actions for even greater success.
Matthew Storm is the Director of Innovation & Solutions for NICE Systems. Matthew has over 14 years of experience in the contact center industry and got his start in the contact center industry back in the 1990s while working for Dell Computer, where he implemented solutions for workforce management, recording, analytics, predictive dialers and CRM.