Tag: University of Mumbai BMS Notes

Review of the Most Popular Data Analysis Tools for Your Business:

Data analysis is the process of working on data with the purpose of arranging it correctly, explaining it, making it presentable, and finding a conclusion from that data.

It is done for finding useful information from data to make rational decisions.

As it is done for decision making, it is important to understand the sole purpose of data analysis. The main purpose of data analysis is interpretation, evaluation & organization of data and to make the data presentable.

Data Analysis Methods

There are two methods of data analysis:

• Qualitative Analysis
• Quantitative Analysis

Qualitative Analysis: Qualitative Analysis is done through interviews and observations.

Quantitative Analysis: Quantitative Analysis is done through surveys and experiments.

Data Analytics Process

Data Analytics Process includes:

1. Data Collection
2. Working on data quality
3. Building the model
4. Training model
5. Running the model with full data.

Some tips to analyze the data are:

• Remove unnecessary data before the analysis.
• You should not perform the analysis on a master copy of data.

Data analysis is done with the purpose of finding answers to specific questions. Data analytics techniques are similar to business analytics and business intelligence.

Data Mining is about finding the different patterns in data. For this, various mathematical and computational algorithms are applied to data and new data will get generated.

Data Modeling is about how companies organize or manage the data. Here, various methodologies and techniques are applied to data. Data analysis is required for data modeling.

A click path or clickstream is the sequence of hyperlinks one or more website visitors follows on a given site, presented in the order viewed. A visitor’s click path may start within the website or at a separate third-party website, often a search engine results page, and it continues as a sequence of successive webpages visited by the user. Click paths take call data and can match it to ad sources, keywords, and/or referring domains, in order to capture data.

Clickstream analysis is useful for web activity analysis, software testing, market research, and for analyzing employee productivity.

two key problems that these data mining techniques solve:

• Predicting customer clicks to create data-driven customer personas, based on their behavior
• Segmenting clickstream data based on user profiles and the actions performed by these users.

Clickstream Data Clustering

Because of the complex nature of the websites and applications these days, it can be difficult to obtain similar clickstreams. Any given user can follow multiple different paths and click sequences. Thus, it can prove to be quite a task to analyze these large numbers of monitored clickstreams.

An easier option in such a scenario would be to group these clickstreams based on their similarity and user profiles. In this way, you can:

• Find customer segments, and
• Identify visitors that exhibit similar interests

Applications

Clickstreams can be used to allow the user to see where they have been and allow them to easily return to a page they have already visited, a function that is already incorporated in most browsers. Clickstream can display the specific time and position that individuals browsed and closed the website, all the web pages they viewed, the duration they spent on each page and it can also show which pages are viewed most frequently. There is abundant information to be analyzed, individuals can check visitors clickstream in association with other statistical information, such as: visiting length, retrieval words, ISP, countries, explorers, etc. This process enables individuals to know their visitors deeply.

Webmasters can gain insight into what visitors on their site are doing by using the clickstream. This data itself is “neutral” in the sense that any dataset is neutral. The data can be used in various scenarios, one of which is marketing. Additionally, any webmaster, researcher, blogger or person with a website can learn about how to improve their site.

The growing e-commerce industry has made it necessary to tailor to the needs and preferences of consumers. Click path data can be used to personalize product offerings. By using previous click path data, websites can predict what products the user is likely to purchase. Click path data can contain information about the user’s goals, interests, and knowledge and therefore can be used to predict their future actions and decisions. By using statistical models, websites can potentially increase their operating profits by streamlining results based on what the user is most likely to purchase.

Analyzing the data of clients that visit a company website can be important in order to remain competitive. This analysis can be used to generate two findings for the company, the first being an analysis of a user’s clickstream while using a website to reveal usage patterns, which in turn gives a heightened understanding of customer behaviour. This use of the analysis creates a user profile that aids in understanding the types of people that visit a company’s website. As discussed in Van den Poel & Buckinx (2005), clickstream analysis can be used to predict whether a customer is likely to purchase from an e-commerce website. Clickstream analysis can also be used to improve customer satisfaction with the website and with the company itself. This can generate a business advantage, and be used to assess the effectiveness of advertising on a web page or site.

Implications

Most websites store data about visitors to the site through click path. The information is typically used to improve the website and deliver personalized and more relevant content. In addition, the data results can not only be used by a designer to review, improve or redesign their website, but can also be used to model a user’s browsing behaviour. In the online world of e-commerce, information collected through click path allows advertisers to construct personal profiles and use them to individually target consumers much more effectively than ever before; as a result, advertisers create more relevant advertising and efficiently spend advertising dollars. Meanwhile, in the wrong hands click path data poses a serious threat to personal privacy.

Unauthorized clickstream data collection is considered to be spyware. However, authorized clickstream data collection comes from organizations that use opt-in panels to generate market research using panelists who agree to share their clickstream data with other companies by downloading and installing specialized clickstream collection agents.

Data reporting is the process of collecting and submitting data which gives rise to accurate analyses of the facts on the ground; inaccurate data reporting can lead to vastly uninformed decision-making based on erroneous evidence. Different from data analysis that transforms data and information into insights, data reporting is the previous step that translates raw data into information. When data is not reported, the problem is known as underreporting; the opposite problem leads to false positives.

Data reporting can be an incredibly difficult endeavor. Census bureaus may hire even hundreds of thousands of workers to achieve the task of counting all of the residents of a country. Teachers use data from student assessments to determine grades; cellphone manufacturers rely on sales data from retailers to point the way to which models to increase production of. The effective management of nearly any company relies on accurate data.

The manner in which reliability data is analyzed and reported will largely have to be tailored to the specific circumstance or organization. However, it is possible to break down the general methods of analysis/reporting into two categories: non-parametric analysis and parametric analysis. Overall, it will be necessary to tailor the analysis and reporting methods by the type of data as well as to the intended audience. Managers will generally be more interested in actual data and non-parametric analysis results, while engineers will be more concerned with parametric analysis. Of course this is a rather broad generalization and if the proper training has instilled the organization with an appreciation of the importance of reliability engineering, there should be an interest in all types of reliability reports at all levels of the organization. Nevertheless, managers are usually more interested in the “big picture” information that non-parametric analyses generally tend to provide, while not being particularly interested in the level of technical detail that parametric analyses provide. On the other hand, engineers and technicians are usually more concerned with the close-up details and technical information that parametric analyses provide. Both of these types of data analysis have a great deal of importance to any given organization, and it is merely necessary to apply the different types in the proper places.

Non-Parametric Analysis

Data conducive to non-parametric analysis includes information that has not or cannot be rigorously processed or analyzed. Usually, it is simply straight reporting of information, or if it has been manipulated, it is usually by simple mathematics, with no complex statistical analysis. In this respect, many types of field data lend themselves to the non-parametric type of analysis and reporting. In general, this type of information will be of most interest to managers as it usually requires no special technical know-how to interpret. Another reason it is of particular interest to managers is that most financial data falls into this category. Despite its relative simplicity, the importance of non-parametric data analysis should not be underestimated. Most of the important decisions that are made concerning the business are based on non-parametric analysis of financial data.

As mentioned in last month’s issue of the HotWire (“Data Collection”), ReliaSoft’s Dashboard system is a powerful tool for collecting and reporting data. It especially lends itself to non-parametric data analysis and reporting, as it can be quickly processed and manipulated in accordance with the user’s wishes.

Non-Parametric Reliability Analysis

Although many of the non-parametric analyses that can be performed based on field data are very useful for providing a picture of how the products are behaving in the field, not all of this information can be considered “hard-core” reliability data. As was mentioned earlier, many such data types and analyses are just straight reporting of the facts. However, it is possible to develop standard reliability metrics, such as product reliability and failure rates, from the non-parametric analysis of field data. A common example of this is the “diagonal table” type of analysis that combines shipping and field failure data in order to produce empirical measures of defect rates.

Call center customer relationship management (CRM) refers to a software tool that call center agents use to enhance the customer experience and increase efficiency. Call center CRM systems store records about customers, such as account information and contact history. Because they store history, they may be viewed as a case management tool. Agents use the information in CRM systems to personalize customer contacts and understand a customer’s history with the organization.

The call centre industry is a relatively new phenomenon. As many organisations are now providing customer service and support via call centres, due to the lower cost of operating, issues addressing the service quality are being raised. Call centres do not exist for the customer to physically interact with, apart from via the telephone, and are in effect virtual organizations. The nature of the service encounter between the call centre and customer is predominantly undertaken using enabling technology; the conventional speech telephone. Few organisations today really know who among their customers are the ones to focus on Customers are not created equal, yet the systems and services provided by many organisations seem to make exactly this assumption.

Call center CRM applications become more powerful in the contact center when integrated with call center technology. This allows, for example, a CRM screen to automatically pop up for the agent when a call is sent to them. This improves efficiency and allows the agent to focus less on data entry and more on helping customers with their issues. Other possible features of integration include automatically adding contact records (from multiple channels) to the CRM system and producing tie backs to call recordings so they can be listened to from within the call center CRM application.

The proliferation of cloud technology has made integration between call center CRM applications and call center software much easier than it was in the past. Companies such as SalesForce offer cloud-based CRM solutions that integrate seamlessly and painlessly with call center technology, such as NICE inContact CXone. Integration is key to driving customer experience success in the contact center.

Omnichannel Routing: routing and interaction management. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.

Automation & Artificial Intelligence (AI): Leading-edge, intuitive technology. It provides self-service, agent-assisted and fully automated alerts and actions.

Open Cloud Foundation: Enables rapid innovation with an extensible enterprise-grade platform that scales securely, deploys quickly and serves customers of all sizes globally. We guarantee an industry-best 99.99% availability and offer easy customization through RESTful APIs and DEVone developer program.

Providing a high quality of service to all customers is simply not economically logical, especially when you really don’t know the individuals value to your company. CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a worthwhile endeavor to ensure good returns on investment. In a CRM call center, customers communicate in multiple ways that include phone, e-mail, Web chat, personal sales representative, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and a host of others. This paper reviews the area in which CR functions could be outsourced, legal issues affecting enterprise customers for call center operations, new role of BPO and using BPO successfully in Customer Relationship Management.

CRM call centers help companies realign their entire organization around customers. And thus, is a strategic business initiative. Sales, Marketing and Service as well as other groups are connected and coordinated through the CRM applications. Before a call is made to the customer, all recent activity for that customer should reviewed to be informed of recent events. Then a sales strategy needs to plan based upon observed opportunities. The use of CRM software in the call center allows the assignment of a value to each customer if the culture supports that philosophy. With that feature, one can choose how to interact with that customer.

CRM helps the company identify most valuable customers and understanding their lifetime values. Using CRM, the call centers design the organization systems and service to best meet the needs of customers and maximize their value. CRM is intended for long-term relationship building. Besides capturing the different forms of customer interaction, CRM allows you to capture and store all available customer information in the central history database. This allows agents the ability to pull up a customer’s entire history while the two interact. Communication and service are more effective and efficient. Most CRM products also track trends in purchasing and customer feedback.

Outsourcing CRM Function

Call centers connect your enterprise, its goodwill and operations, to your prospects and customers and, if you wish, even influencers of consumer behavior. Any high-volume consumer industry can benefit by outsourcing call center functions. These might include, for example:

• Health care
• Automotive
• Retailing
• Services to the household, such as oil and gas deliveries, electrical utilities and telecom providers
• Consumer electronics
• Wireless communications
• Financial services, including banking and brokerage
• Insurance
• Travel and hospitality
• Media

Scope of Services

Since a call center can deliver any type of services that are capable of being done by telephone, enterprise customers need to classify the possible scope of services. This classification will suggest the key parameters for defining and achieving the intended goals of the call center. The following list is only an indication of some basic classes of outsourced call center services.

Customer Service and Support: This type of service can be as simple as advising your customer about the information he needs from your data base, such as account balance, unpaid amounts, deadlines and credit balances. Or customer service can involve a complex decision tree involving a script that you prepare to determine your customer’s needs, complete an application or request for change of information, and execute your customer’s orders.

Technical Support / Warranty: In helping your customers solve problems relating to your products or services, you want to be able to resolve all problems in the first call. Achieving high first-call resolution rates with lower per-call handle times can make a significant cost difference. To some degree, you remain responsible for success because of the way in which you plan the interaction based on manuals, scripts and decision trees. Technical support (or “telephone help desk”) can provide invaluable in retaining customer loyalty and avoiding costly product returns or service cancellations.

Sales, Bookings (travel reservations) and Customer Retention: Your telesales department needs to convert inquiries into sales, and to retain customers upon expiration of subscriptions or upon other termination events in your customer relationship. Telesales are useful both at the beginning and the end of your customer relationship life cycle. As a tool for proactive outreach, customer retention programs can help sustain your bottom line.

Marketing Surveys and Research: Outbound calling can identify potential customers, identify an existing customer’s interest in possible new products or services from your company and conduct inquiries about consumer preferences as to pricing and features of existing and new products. This can help your market positioning, promotional campaigns, product design, pricing and sales approaches. Outbound calling can also be used to clean up duplicates or stale information in your “old” databases, validate existing information, for “data base scrubbing.”

Customer care departments take care of different functionalities, whether the task is servicing customers or providing information on some small subject matter. With so much of work available in hand, it becomes difficult to manage call traffic during peak hours. Assuring that each time the call lands at the right party is a way to manage difficult tasks and in order to reach the optimum level of customer satisfaction, it becomes mandatory for call centers to manage their call routing strategies.

Routing strategies have led to a lot of intriguing questions like, How do you transfer your customers’ call to the right person as quickly as possible? How do you take care of the long hold time, customer frustration or defection of your customers to competition? How do you ensure first call resolution?

Call routing is an important part of any efficient customer service strategy. By directing calls to the right department on the first go, the level of customer satisfaction increases with overall reduction in the operating cost. However, call routing is considered as a strategic tool in the business environment, if done properly and efficiently.

Call Routing Strategies to Improve Customer Experience

Routing By IVR: Call routing by IVR is among the most common and the most famous routing methods followed by organizations. IVR allows customers to interact with the organization through telephone keypad or speech interaction. The IVR systems can respond with prerecorded or dynamically generated audio to further direct users on how to proceed for their query. Routing through IVR is most demanded in lead generation businesses and contact centers. This strategy is especially good for lead generation businesses and call centers.

Direct Routing: Organizations looking towards building direct relationship with customers or having a basic approach to customer service are mostly involved in direct routing strategies. Customers are provided with the direct number of the particular department they intend to call. For example: If a customer wants to speak to the sales department, there is a direct number for the sales department. Likewise, there are different numbers for different departments. This ensures that the first connect is to the right department, thereby welcoming more sales closure and higher success rate. But usually the wait time in this strategy is longer if the agent or the rep is busy on another call.

Skill-Based Routing: Selecting this strategy for your organization may save customers from long wait time or frustration during service calls. The customer experience can be improved by matching the highest skilled agent available to handle each call. A successful skills-based routing strategy increases agents’ efficiency by allowing them to use personal knowledge and experience to answer customer’s query. This reduces the average call handling time per agent, leading to higher first call resolution with improved customer satisfaction rate.

Routing by Caller ID: This routing strategy allows you to put some intelligence in the routing system. The phone numbers of certain customers can be recorded as per the urgency of their subject matter. Each customer can be allotted a unique caller ID. Whenever the customer calls, the call gets automatically routed to the most appropriate agent depending on the last conversation or recorded information in the CRM. For instance, if the contract of a certain customer is expiring; the next time the customer rings the department, the call can will directly land to the agent who specializes in retention of existing customers.

Database Integration Routing: Service calls are very crucial when it comes to retaining customers. By integrating the call routing with the customer database, agents can easily look up at the history of the previous conversations and can accordingly take smart and useful decisions. For example: if the caller is an existing customer, route the call to the support department. If the caller is a new customer, route the call to the inquiry or sales department.

Business Rules Routing: Keeping specific business objectives in mind, organizations can align their routing strategies with their business goals. Once the ACD and other applications are in place, organizations can use their routing strategy to their specific business needs. For instance, customers with higher value can be routed to a premier agent. Accordingly, a frustrated or an angry customer attempting to discontinue the usage of a particular service can be transferred to the retention department. Obviously, the strategy being used overe here depends on the specific business goals.

Multimedia and multimodal routing: Being consumers, we interact through various channels with our different suppliers. Some suppliers respond perfectly at a particular channel and some do not. The critical routing challenge many organizations now face is how to route multimedia transactions across multiple customer contact channels. The situation gets worse when  multimedia extends its capabilities to multi-modal routing, where a consumer might be calling or texting from a particular device or from a remote location. For eg: Suppose a customer is calling from his ABC phone, the solution has to be process oriented and at the same time the customer ID should be able to map the CRM history of the customer giving each and every detail about the ABC phone helping in the real time decision making. Here, for sure the technology plays an important role but an organization must keep their resources intact to support such new generation of multimedia and multi modal customer transactions taking place.

Percentage Based Routing: An efficient call center manager ensures that the workload is fairly distributed among all the agents. The manager can see on his dashboard the total percentage of calls received per agent and then can accordingly design the routing strategy to minimize the long wait times.

Service and Sales are two very diverse organizational functions. Traditionally, each function needs a different set of core competencies.

The new-age contact center breaks this convention. It has the unique ability to equip and empower a contact center agent with selling skills and techniques that enables him to cross- sell and up-sell products in addition to handling a service call efficiently.

This article underlines some key tips and techniques that can convert the contact center into a Sales Center of Excellence.

There is a rising need across businesses to convert the regular order-taking contact center to revenue-generating profit centers within the next few years. The customer contact center is thus, evolving from being a plain vanilla customer service center to the more advanced, more valuable revenue generating center. The service call, which is the lifeline of the customer contact center, provides immense potential to initiate a sales cycle. Companies are, therefore, making efforts to leverage this channel to provide a next level lift in revenue generation.

In a customer contact center, every customer call is an opportunity which can be effectively leveraged to initiate a sale. The call center agent has the full attention of the customer when he calls in for resolving a problem or a query. It is, therefore, obvious that leveraging inbound calls is a far effective and efficient medium to initiate a sale rather than an outbound sales call.

Consider this: The largest generation today, Generation ‘Y’ with a population of 100 million represents an annual buying power of $1 trillion.

Buyers within this segment of buyers are tech-savvy, indulge in online research before buying and expect expert help when they are ready to buy.

One can thus imagine the potential buying traffic that for various reasons could get diverted to the contact center and generate sales opportunities. However, converting these opportunities into sources of real revenue is where the real challenge lies.

Transforming the regular contact center into a revenue generating Sales Center of Excellence (CoE) requires a methodical and a well-planned approach. The WNS approach to building a Sales Center of Excellence involves:

Understanding the customer life-cycle

Helping the client identify the sales maturity model of the contact center

Suggesting ways and means and charting out a well-defined roadmap to convert the contact center into a Sales Center of Excellence and reduce the Total Cost of Ownership considerably.

Here are 10 tips that can transform the regular contact center into a Sales Center of Excellence:

1. Revamping Your Hiring Engine: Your employee recruitment process should be focused on identifying, selecting and hiring candidates who share a good number of behavioral traits with current strong performers within your contact center. Some of the traits could be:

Interpersonal skills: It is important that a sales person feels natural interacting with people with an ability to adapt to a variety of situations and different personalities

Resilience: The power to pursue objectives with self-motivation and patience

• Capacity to inspire trust
• Ability to quickly identify the critical issues during a conversation
• Ability to negotiate confidently
• Passion and enthusiasm
• Integrity and honesty
• An interest in learning new things

2. Training Contact Center Agents to Sell Effectively: Sales people are not born, they are trained. Training must become a priority to reinforce the sales culture in your contact center. Your contact center agents must be sensitized about being able to effectively use up-selling and cross-selling techniques, for example, offering a new product / service while providing support for an earlier version, or cross-selling an additional product or service. A great service call can become a good sales call, if the contact center agent can put forth a sales-closing question. Introduction of industry / domain interface in training is also an important facet to build a confident pool of resources who could sell better. Training should not be restricted to contact center agents only and must be extended to team managers too.

3.Power Scheduling and Prioritizing: The best agents in your contact center should be earmarked and deployed to attend calls during sales peak times to effectively handle customer queries and at the same time make a sale. Introduction of advanced workforce management solutions is a must to be able to forecast sales peak times and schedule call-handling by the best agents in the call center. In addition, contact centers must also deploy an intelligent call-routing technology with the ability to ‘power prioritize’ calls basis agent and customer profile. Planning and scheduling not only enhances the chances of cross-selling and up-selling, but also bolsters the ability of the contact center’s ability to take care of customer enquiries in a timely manner.

4. Intelligent Incentivization: Sales incentive compensation management is increasingly becoming the key decisive and motivating factor in influencing the contact center sales force to sell and make an impact on business performance. WNS recommends an outcome-based incentive structure with incentives for sales on high margin products, cross-selling of bundled products and revenue generated per transaction.
5. Valuing Feedback: Your contact center agent is your strongest link with your customer; and it pays to inculcate a practiced and sustained behavior of collecting, respecting and valuing the agent’s ideas and feedback.
6. Monetizing Customer Wait Times: Customer wait times on IVR can be effectively utilized by running special promotion announcements when putting the customer on hold. This can be supplemented by fast-tracking customers for ‘deals of the day’ on Websites.
7. Integrating Customer Contact Center with Your Website: Integrating the customer contact center with your website with proactive Web chat options is a great way to improve online customer acquisition and retention. With an advanced Web chat option, one can expect approximately 50 percent reduction in shopping cart abandonment rates.

8.Integrating Social Media with Contact Center: Monitoring your brand on social media and integrating yourcontact center to support customers over social channels and helping key buying decisions of your customers is emerging as a great strategy to ensure better ROI on your social media investments.

9. Ensuring Better Insights with Analytics: There is a growing need to drill out actionable insights from data collected from contact centers. Analytics has the power to fuel sales by providing actionable insights for better customer recovery, loyalty management, product improvement, campaign management and so forth. Speech Analytics platforms are increasingly being seen as a ‘game changer’ for the contact center-sales center segment of business. New approaches in analyzing CSAT and NPS could also be deployed to improve quality of the feedback mechanism.
10. Continuous Benchmarking & Improvement: While, continuous benchmarking should be a contact process to acquire / develop technology that complements and supplements sales within the contact center; use of Six Sigma methodology should be used effectively to improve quality of query handling and enhancing sales.

Web self-service is a type of electronic support (e-support) that allows customers and employees to access information and perform routine tasks over the Internet, without requiring any interaction with a representative of an enterprise. Web self-service is widely used in customer relationship management (CRM) and employee relationship management (ERM).

Web self-service is an online facility that allows users to perform routine tasks over the Internet without the assistance of a support agent such as accessing information like bills, changing profile information or even doing basic troubleshooting for devices and services. When the specific users of a Web self-service portal are employees, this facility is called an employee self-service (ESS) portal, and they can often do things like check their own attendance, request resources, request vacation leaves and even file complaints without the need to contact the manager or an HR representative. If the Web self-service portal is meant to serve customers of a product or service, then this service is called a customer self-service (CSS) portal. Depending on the kind of product or service, customers can do things like checking the remaining balance of their data or mobile plan, paying bills, editing profiles and even accessing knowledge bases for troubleshooting and usage of a device or service.

The definitive feature of a Web self-service portal is the lack of a human agent who interacts with the user. This usually eliminates confusion and frustration on the user’s end as he/she does not need to interact with someone. It can even help an organization save money and retain customers, depending on the quality of the portal.

When the support is specific to online employee interactions, the practice is known as employee self-service (ESS). When it is specific to customers on the Internet, it is called customer self-service (CSS).

For employees and customers, self-service offers 24 hour-a-day support, and immediate access to information without having to wait for an email response or a returned telephone call. Ultimately, the success of Web self-service depends upon the quality and quantity of information available and the ease with which it can be accessed.

Deploying Web self-service applications benefits a company in a variety of ways. The most prominent motivation is the lower cost, as compared with telephone or email service delivered by a company representative.

A more controversial enterprise benefit of self-service is the ability it affords the company to gather personal information about the people who use it. Tracking and analysis software may be used to create a pseudonymous profile of the user for research and targeted marketing purposes.

Benefits of Web-Based Self-Service

When you empower your customers to resolve their pain points, you improve your chances of boosting customer loyalty and advocacy. Additionally, there are a number of benefits that result from web-based self-service which positively impact your business’s bottom line.

1. Save your customer service and support reps valuable time.

When you readily provide answers to your customers’ frequently asked questions and information about how to resolve their own, your reps will have fewer calls, tickets, and emails to respond to.

This saves them valuable time by allowing them to focus on the customers with complex problems instead of those with issues that could be solved with the help of some type of self-service support (e.g. knowledge base article or automated chatbot).

2. Reduce your customer service and support costs.

Web self-service helps you drive customer service and support costs down, too. When you provide the answers and support your customers seek in a way that teaches them, they will be able to solve their problems without the help of reps. Additionally, they’ll learn how to consistently mitigate their challenges on their own time and in turn, you’ll avoid managing a large team of service and support reps that you need to hire and pay.

3. Drive traffic to your website.

Whether you have a self-service portal, help center web page, or both, your business’s web-based self-service will be connected to your website. That means, when someone wants to access your self-service, you gain traffic on your website. This increases the chances of them learning about your products, buying the latest version of your service, contributing to your customer-based community, clicking your CTAs, and following links to your social media sites.

4. Empower and educate your customers.

Empowering and educating your customers will naturally happen when you provide them with web-based self-service this is because you’re allowing them to find the answers and support they need, on their time, without having to speak to a rep. By doing so, you show your customers that you’re their advocates, which helps you build strong relationships and a sense of trust between your brand and customers.

5. Allow for account personalization.

Customers can personalize their account settings in their portals via your website (if you offer self-service portals to customers). Whether it’s their account details, payment method, or overall plan, this information is customizable and viewable within their self-service portal. And depending on the type of self-service portal you offer customers, it might even welcome each customer by their first name when they login to their account.

Account personalization helps self-service systems understand how they can best help specific individuals based on their preferences. For example, a portal may pull up a customer’s previously viewed, or most frequently viewed, resources upon login for quick access to relevant support materials.

Now you might be thinking, “This sounds great, but how do I actually implement web-based self-service for my customers?”. We’ll review the answer to that next.

A script is a written guide produced for agents to assist them with call handling. While they have traditionally been printed booklets, scripts are increasingly incorporated into CRM systems and appear as on-screen prompts. Their content ranges from material that agents are expected to recite verbatim to suggestions on how the agent can maximise interactions.

A call script, a written script entailing correct wording and logic aids, assists an agent in handling a contact. It also assists in the maintenance of focusing on the content of the contact.

Call scripts guarantee consistency across the call center and allow agents to act more naturally and listen to customers as they know they don’t have to worry about remembering what to say next. Call scripts can be easily integrated with telephony and IVR systems in order to provide the agent useful information about the customer and tailor each interaction accordingly.

Scripts are most commonly used by outbound agents in situations where a successful phraseology has been established. This is especially true of cold calling, which often involves skills that are hard to master, like objection handling.

While incoming contacts are sometimes scripted, the inability to predict a customer’s needs makes it harder to produce relevant materials.

The benefits of scripting

Where scripts are deployed, agents are usually graded on script adherence. Adherence is very simple to measure, making the quality control process quicker and easier for coaches to perform. In environments which do not use scripts, coaches must invest time developing more nuanced measures for judging call quality.

Scripting material also guarantees that agents deliver the same service in every interaction. Historical sales data can indicate the points in a conversation at which up-selling is most likely to be successful, and that lesson is passed on to all agents.

Alternatively, some centres use scripts for training only. Agents work from a script until they are familiar enough with the expectations that they no longer need it. They can also work collaboratively to improve processes; by allowing agents to annotate an online copy of the script and then reviewing the suggested changes, development areas can be defined.

Scripting also aids compliance by ensuring that the messages businesses are legally obliged to deliver are delivered with perfect consistency. Some CRM systems will not complete a transaction until it is confirmed that terms and conditions have been read and understood.

Scripting of parts of a call for compliance

In some contact centre environments only parts of a call are scripted for compliance purposes. One of the classic examples of a compliance script is:

“Your home is at risk is you do not keep up with repayments on your mortgage”.

Issues with scripting

Customer service is increasingly seen as a brand differentiator, which undoubtedly benefits from the hiring of talented agents offering a personalised service. While scripting parts of interactions will make agents’ work easier, relying heavily on prepared materials has been shown to reduce engagement.

Scripts may also leave agents less able to adapt to change or help customers whose needs are outside the common experience. Contact centres increasingly seek to vary the duties their agents undertake, recognising that too much repetition limits an employee’s enjoyment of their work. Even minor variations in how information is delivered can contribute to the agent’s sense of autonomy in the workplace.

It also benefits the customer, who experiences a greater sense of value when dealing with a representative they perceive as responding to their situation naturally. Personal investment and spontaneous conversation are the elements that can take interactions from being serviceable to being memorable.

Customer Service Benefits of Call Scripts

There are several reasons companies choose to integrate the use of call scripts into their agent’s day-to-day requirements. If you are considering using call scripts, here are some of the benefits they offer if used properly:

Minimize Human Error

Nobody is perfect but call center scripts can get your agents pretty close! These scripts are a great reference tool to use when agents feel stuck when talking with a customer or just need a refresher on the processes set in place for your calls.

Promote Consistency

You’ve heard the phrase “consistency is key,” and that is completely true. One of the major advantages of call scripts is that they keep the conversations with your customers consistent across the board. It ensures that customers receive consistent responses no matter which agent they are speaking with.

Create Confidence

Agents are more confident when handling a customer’s problem knowing that they have a call script to rely on if they get stuck. Instead of worrying and anticipating how they are going to help the customer, agents are more relaxed and are able to really take the time to listen. Since your call center agents are essentially the face or in this case, the voice of your companies brand it is important that they are confident.

Monitor Call Quality and Performance

By reviewing how your top performing agents handle your calls, you can incorporate some of their best practices into your call center scripts and teach lower performing agents on how to increase their performance. With all of your agents performing their best, it will lead to an overall better experience for your customers.

Integrate Your Systems

Call scripting is easy to integrate with your hosted PBX system and your IVR system so that your agents can easily access customer information and respond to the specific customer needs accordingly.

As a call center manager, you can use call center scripts to get rid of your customers’ perception of this tool. The easiest way to do this is by using call scripting intelligently to increase your customer satisfaction.

A remote call center agent stationed at home or at a satellite center, who connects to the “real” call center using a PC and softphone. The key characteristic of a cyberagent is that the person’s statistics, performance and real-time status be completely transparent to the supervisors at the main center. The fact that they are stationed remotely should be completely irrelevant from the supervisory point of view, which includes the ability to monitor and record calls and screen activity.

Contact center workforce performance programs help achieve significant improvements in service quality and operational efficiency. In addition to ensuring that the right number of agents are performing at the right time, an effective call center workforce management solution will balance three often conflicting demands, service delivery optimization, lowering operating costs and reducing turnover of agents. Call center workforce management solutions also help to improve customer experience management and significantly improve customer support.Basic functions include the forecasting of contact arrival patterns using historical and other information, creating scheduling assignments based on those forecasts, and providing reports on forecasting and scheduling accuracy. Many systems also offer an expanded range of features such as: skill-based and multimedia contact scheduling, intraday reports, agent self-service capabilities, performance tools, schedule adherence monitoring and time-off administration.

Workforce optimization software can help companies of all sizes improve best practices and achieve significant improvements in service quality and operational efficiency. These solutions also aim to improve service delivery, lower operating costs and increase overall agent retention.

Fundamental necessity of effectively managing your service workforce includes the forecasting of contact patterns using historical data. Many systems also offer an expanded range of features including skill-based and multimedia scheduling, intra-day reporting, agent self-service capabilities, schedule monitoring and time-off administration.

Workforce Management Features:

• Improve workforce efficiency: Reduce labor waste, maximize agent scheduling efficiency, match scheduling with skills and requirements, and improve forecast accuracy while maintaining or improving service level objectives.
• Empower your agents: Improve the agent experience by giving your agents a voice in their work schedule. Enable agents to manage preferred hours, include temporary adjustments, offer scheduling and vacation bidding and auto-approve requests.
• Gain confidence in your forecast: Understand the historical accuracy of your forecasts and gain confidence to take action on intra-day adjustments and future schedules. Improve accuracy with automatic tracking aids, receive email notifications & alerts, adapt quickly to unexpected changes.
• Simplify long term planning: Ensure adequate staff is available when needed and proactively plan for any conceivable volume-impacting events. Accommodate unlimited events, leverage “what if” scenario planning, precisely align future staffing needs.

Relationship marketing should not be confused with transactional marketing. It’s not about selling or promotion. It’s about building customer loyalty by understanding and responding to their needs. And, it’s about showing them that you value their business and trust.

Relationship marketing involves finding ways to make two-way communications between you and your customers easy and beneficial. It requires tracking customer activities and providing information, offers and incentives that are tailored to them.

With more and more marketing tools and techniques at the disposal of business owners, relationship marketing is taking on a greater role as they look for ways to distinguish themselves and create memorable and meaningful customer experiences.

Loyalty programs, referral incentives, even seasonal discounts to current customers all go a long way toward building a relationship that stretches beyond the transaction. Offering rewards, helpful tips and specials enables constructive one-to-one relationships that help you create a great experience for your clients and lay the foundation of long-term brand loyalty.

1. Offering returning customers a discount on services.

Everyone loves a good deal. Therefore, when a customer returns to you, it is a good idea to reward them for coming back. This doesn’t have to be a huge discount; it can just be a percentage off of their bill. However, simply acknowledging that you appreciate their business and are thankful they are coming back to you is a great way to encourage loyalty.

2. Giving rewards for references.

Giving your current customers rewards for referring other customers to you is yet another way to show your current customers you appreciate their business. It also helps build up your customer database quickly.

3. Offering updates.

On your Facebook or Twitter page, you can post updates about your business and even your personal life. if you are comfortable with that. This will make your customers feel like they know you. They will have the inside scoop, a behind-the-scenes look at what you are dealing with on any given day. As a result, you suddenly become more human to them. This is important because appearing as a human in their eyes instead of a big, cold, heartless company is key to relationship building. Consequently, it’s crucial to personal branding as well. Updating your social-media accounts or website is a great way to humanize yourself.

4. Really caring about your customers.

Your customers will see through any fake expressions on your part. Therefore, when you aim to build relationships with your customers, be sure that you actually do care about their well-being. By treating your customers well, you will be amazed at how willing they become to support your business.

Building relationships and personal branding are intertwined. You simply can’t have one without the other. Your work to build lasting relationships with your customers will pay dividends in regards to the growth of your personal brand.

Going above and beyond

Going the extra mile creates a positive and lasting memory for your customers. Delighting your customers beyond expectation builds loyalty. Fans who are more than happy to refer your business to their friends and family.

Here are eight simple ways you can add an “extra touch” to your customer experience if within your means:

1. Offer multiple forms of communication; email, telephone, live chat, Twitter, etc
2. Offer custom solutions based on their needs
3. Offer discounts or store credit for their next purchase
4. Include handwritten notes when shipping products
5. Respond personally to social media comments
6. Respond to reviews (both positive and negative)
7. Be proactive in asking for customer feedback
8. Say thank you

Invest in a CRM

Customer relationship management software (or CRM) allows you to record engagement data and collect information about your customers.

A good CRM should include basic customer information (such as contact details), as well as purchase history and interactions with your brand, sales teams and customer support.

This is the true benefit of relationship marketing. It’s not a tactic to generate more customers. It’s about fostering lifelong relationships with customers who trust you. Follow these principles, make them a core part of your business, and you’ll attract lifelong customers:

• Get to know your customers by running events and meeting them face to face
• Reward loyal customers with discounts, and consider building referral programs
• Create useful and interesting content to deliver more value to your audience
• Provide a delightful customer experience, and go above-and-beyond to make them happy
• Implement a CRM system to manage and keep on top of your customer relationships

In short, relationship marketing is about adding value, even when you’re not talking about your product or service. Adding value, and connecting with your audience directly, is how you build a strong brand.

Customer Profitability Analysis is a tool from managerial accounting that shifts the focus from product line profitability to individual customer profitability. Activity Based Costing looks at the various cost drivers to accurately isolate costs and determine a product’s profitability. In contrast, Customer Profitability Analysis is a method of looking at the various activities and expenses incurred in servicing a particular customer. In other words, it focuses on analyzing profit per customer rather than profit per product.

Customer Profitability Analysis (in short CPA) is a management accounting and a credit underwriting method, allowing businesses and lenders to determine the profitability of each customer or segments of customers, by attributing profits and costs to each customer separately. CPA can be applied at the individual customer level (more time consuming, but providing a better understanding of business situation) or at the level of customer aggregates / groups (e.g. grouped by number of transactions, revenues, average transaction size, time since starting business with the customer, distribution channels, etc.).

CPA is a “retrospective” method, which means it analyses past events of different customers, in order to calculate customer profitability for each customer. Equally, research suggests that that credit score does not necessarily impact the lenders’ profitability.

Application of Customer Profitability Analysis

From the given example, the customer profitability of the Individual segment exceeds the SME segment. This insight then supports the company in its strategic decisions. It can shift its focus towards attracting and retaining more customers from the more profitable Individual segment. Alternatively, it can look for cost reduction approaches for its SME segment. Potentially, it can work to redesign its purchasing process in order to reduce the frequency of visits or orders. Otherwise, it can look to charge its customers for additional service visits to shift the weight of the cost from the company to the customer.

Objective

The main purpose of CPA is to provide to organization management with the understanding of each customer profitability. Grouping this information into customer profitability segments, allows the companies to take different, targeted actions and strategies against different profitability segments, having as a target increasing the company’s total profitability. Those companies that understand which customers are more profitable and which are not are “armed with valuable information needed to make successful managerial decision to improve overall organizational profitability”.

CPA allows businesses to take the following key strategic decisions:

• Identify customers’ profiles
• Differentiate customer service activities depending on customer profile (e.g. highly-profitable customers could receive more attention, to ensure high-level satisfaction and loyalty, in order to protect continued business relations);
• Differentiate marketing strategy, depending on customer profile (e.g. implement more aggressive and expensive marketing strategies to high-spenders, while limiting the marketing costs against customers, who spend little and show few signs of spending more in the future);
• Take actions, to maintain or increase customers profitability, including turning unprofitable customers into profitable ones (e.g. decreasing cost to serve, of looking for ways to increase revenue, up to ceasing business relations with unprofitable customers to cut the costs).

Revenue associated to the customer

Revenue differences across customers may differ due to various reasons, including:

• Differences in price charged for a unit a product or service to different customers
• Differences in volumes sold to different customers.
• Differences in product or service specification delivered to different customers.
• Other one-time events, such as bonus events, not directly related to a particular sale transaction.

CPA requires a company to associate all company’s revenue to different customers (sources of revenue), in order to find out revenue associated to each customer. Companies most typically have no trouble finding out the amount of revenue attributed to a particular customer; thus, article will not cover this aspect.

Costs associated to the customer

Customers differ in costs they generate by using company’s resources in a different way. These reasons may include:

• Different amounts of marketing costs may be necessary to strike a deal with different customers
• Differences in used distribution channels / logistics by different customers
• Differences in customer service required by different customers
• Differences in volume of products purchased (production of large volume of a product for a single order can be cheaper that production of the same amount, divided into many orders, requested by many customers)

Limitations / implementation barriers

Using CPA is associated with some difficulties & limitations:

• Most importantly, CPA is a backward-looking tool, meaning it analyses past events, providing results, based on which companies are making their strategic choices. Past however may not always be the determinant of the future, and decisions made based on past events only, could be incorrect if market conditions, or business strategy change;
• The cost of acquisition and customer service may be difficult to measure;
• Performing ABC or other methods of attributing costs to customers, CPA calculations, outlining distinct strategies towards different groups of customers, communicating internally and implementing those strategies can be a large undertaking for an organization in terms of the resources used and the costs to complete the initiative, requiring specialized knowledge and appropriately developed accounting systems;
• People often feel threatened by change, do not understand it, and are opposed to it within a company (e.g. Commission salespersons will try to protect customers even though they may not be profitable to the company).

Overcoming limitations

There are various strategies which could be used to minimize limitations / implementation barriers to introduce CPA, including the following ones:

• Management needs to be sensitive to required change within the organization and be sure that employees are included in the decision and change processes. Management should seek to ensure employee buy-in, to minimize resistance towards change;
• Management needs to properly set internal incentive model, e.g. rewarding salespeople on the basis of customer profitability, as opposed to revenue generated by the customer;
• To minimize the limitation resulting from the fact, that CPA is a backwards-looking tool, a company could additionally consider implementation of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). CLV is a forward-looking customer profitability estimator, taking CPA as a starting point for calculation. CLV could be used for forecasting of future customer profitability (based not only on historical events, but also proposed marketing strategy, trends in customer behavior, etc.).