A critical success factor for any Marketing team is achieving a clear line of sight into customer needs and preferences, which gives businesses the ability to make proactive, informed business decisions. But with customer behaviors rapidly evolving, it’s important to continue asking those fundamental questions – Do I know my customer? Do I know what their problems or pain points are? Do I have a firm grasp of my buyer personas? What’s often the case is that we may think we know the answers to these questions, but in reality, your customers’ problems, preferences, and reasons for contact may have changed. So, what if you had a real-time data source that provided you the answers to these questions (plus a few others) and it came directly from your customers? Sounds like a dream marketing tool. The truth is, the dream can become a reality and it starts with your call center. Your call center serves as a critical touch point that creates and nurtures customer relationships with your brand. Tapping into those critical interactions through a quality monitoring program allows leaders at all levels of the organization in all departments, especially Marketing, to glean valuable customer insights. Let me explain.
Every day, your call center agents interact with your customers, listening to them explain what they like and don’t like about your product, how they feel about the price, the value they place on the product as it relates to the price, and so much more. The key is whether or not your company is using a quality monitoring program that can capture that data, analyze those tremendously valuable insights and convert customer feedback into a true business advantage. While many companies utilize quality monitoring programs to boost agent performance and overall customer experience, the impact of having a quality monitoring program reaches far beyond the call center. Every marketing department has a vested interest in the implementation of a quality program and the information that can be mined to effectively drive Marketing strategies and initiatives.
What makes a quality monitoring program and more specifically, an omni-channel monitoring program, even more important, is that marketing departments often have responsibility for managing the social media contact channel. The Northridge Group’s State of Customer Service Experience Report found that 77% of customers use social channels as much or more than they did one year ago. Yet brand responsiveness remains surprisingly low. About one in five consumers (21%) never receive a response when they contact a brand via social media or text. Not only do marketing teams need to monitor to ensure a timely response and encourage their customers to interact and share feedback on social media channels, but they can also leverage the customer insights provided through quality monitoring to target these same customers in several ways:
Design and Update Promotions and Pricing: When interacting with call center agents, customers share a tremendous amount of information about the brand, likes and dislikes of the product, and the value they see in relation to the product price. Having an active quality monitoring program allows marketers to gather real-time data from customers to better design promotional materials and, once released, make immediate changes to pricing or promotions being advertised. Collecting and utilizing customer data is efficient in eliminating potential customer complaints and is a cornerstone to building a successful marketing campaign that targets customers’ desires effectively.
Align Social Media Campaigns with Customer Needs & Wants: Think of all the people who have a smartphone. There aren’t many without one. With the popularity of smartphones and mobile apps, the ability to reach companies through social media has soared. In Northridge’s State of Customer Service Experience Report, 85 percent of customers reported using social media to share a negative or positive message about a brand. Marketing strategies drive positive interactions with customers and have the ability to go viral, which can provide a tremendous boost to the company’s exposure and bottom line. Marketers can use a quality monitoring program to leverage data shared by customers on social media to design social media campaigns that customers support and favor.
While quality monitoring programs are typically sponsored and supported by the customer service teams, Marketing should be clamoring and pushing hard to implement a comprehensive omni-channel quality program. The insight they can receive directly from their customers is just too valuable to ignore.
Click to learn more about Northridge’s omni-channel quality monitoring program.
