Attracting new customers is good for business, but retaining customers is even better. It costs one-fifth as much to retain a customer as it does to obtain a new one. In most organizations, 80 percent of profits are generated by 20 percent of their customers — the ones who are most loyal.
Retaining customers requires a multipronged strategy involving personalization, loyalty programs and a top-notch customer experience. Organizations should try to anticipate their customers’ needs and make it easy for them to resolve any problems. The contact center lies at the center of these efforts.
The contact center is the central point of interaction between the customer and your organization. Those interactions play a key role in shaping the customer’s perceptions. Every positive experience has an impact on customer retention.
Here are four tips for optimizing the contact center to maximize customer loyalty.
Embrace an Omnichannel Approach
Most customers still contact businesses by phone, so hiding your phone number and forcing customers to use chat may not be a good idea. That said, a growing percentage of customers use chat, email and other channels as their first means of communication. If all these communication channels operate in silos, you won’t be able to deliver a high-quality customer experience.
An omnichannel contact center integrates these interactions. Each customer communication is routed to the most appropriate agent. Customers can start with a chat and easily move to a phone call for more complex issues. As the customer moves among the various channels, their information moves with them. This creates the kind of experiences that promote customer loyalty.
Integrate Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management (CRM) software is essential to any customer retention strategy. CRM platforms track vital customer data and information about individual interactions. When agents have access to the information, they can respond to requests more effectively and deliver a personalized experience.
Agents won’t be as efficient if they have to access a separate software platform. When CRM tools are integrated with the contact center, customer data can be delivered along with the call. The agent will have all the necessary information within one interface.
Train and Monitor Agents Effectively
Agents will need training to deliver highly personalized service. They will need to understand your customer retention strategy and have greater knowledge of your organization’s products, services and policies. They will also need a degree of empathy to understand customer issues and determine how to resolve them most effectively.
Contact center managers will also need the ability to monitor interactions and intervene as needed. Integrated collaboration tools enable managers to coach agents through issues using chat or even join calls if appropriate. Monitoring also allows managers to gauge the effectiveness of training programs.
Track Key Performance Indicators
You need to track key metrics to fine-tune your customer retention strategy and maximize success. Contact center analytics tools collect and analyze data, providing valuable insight into key performance indicators. These tools are valuable for assessing agent performance and customer satisfaction.
Some tools analyze basic metrics such as call handling times, while others collect and assess the results of customer satisfaction surveys. More sophisticated tools use artificial intelligence to analyze the voices and speech of both customers and agents to understand customer sentiment. Real-time analytics tools can alert managers if a call is not going well so the manager can take appropriate action.
How Verteks Can Help
Verteks has decades of experience delivering enterprise-class contact center solutions and integrating them with business software. Let us help you optimize your contact center to support your customer retention strategy.
