Get it right first: the 4Cs that your customers expect

The always-on world has transformed how users connect with each other, and with you. When users want to get in touch at any time, anywhere in the world and on any device, how does you contact centre meet this need? And how do you do it in a way that makes you stand out from the competition?

There are four key areas that have to be tackled: meet the 4Cs of the contact centre.

1) Consistent customer experience

Increasing customer satisfaction levels is the number one priority for enterprise contact centre decision makers, according to Ovum – even ahead of increased revenues and cutting costs. That makes more sense, as most consumers say that they will judge a company by their interactions with the contact centre..

Thanks to social media, an unhappy customer is now likely to broadcast all your failings, virtually instantly. Whilst a good experience may not always deliver a loyal customer for life, a bad experience will certainly lose you a customer, and has the potential to damage your reputation online.

Research indicates that more than 50 percent of in-house customer relationship managers find it a challenge to consistently provide a winning customer experience, across all channels, especially with budgets becoming flat or shrinking.

The solution? An industry-wide move to the flexibility, cost-efficiency and global reach of cloud-based contact centres.

In India, the largest public sector bank, State Bank of India, has invested in an omni-channel contact centre for its wealth management services. This enables its high net worth individual (HNI) customers to remotely connect with their Relationship Manager by voice, video, IM and co-browsing, to seek expert advice anytime, anywhere and any channel.

2) Customer segmentation

For increased customer satisfaction firms need to know their users. Different customers have different needs and establishing those needs to segment customers is not done by passing them around as many agents in the call centre as possible: according to Tata Communications research, 73 per cent of users said they were unlikely to return if passed between multiple contact centre agents.

What’s needed is help to develop an accurate profile of individual customers across all channels, analysing trends in order to identify specific revenue opportunities. This involves integrating CRM or database systems with details of transaction history for automatic filtering, prioritisation and forwarding to the best suited, available agent to serve.

3) Consolidation

The thought of setting up a new contact centre is daunting. How do you manage multiple vendors, with varying levels of service? How can you shorten lead times? How can you provide a follow-the-sun service while meeting demands to cut customer service budgets through consolidation? The answer is to give someone else the challenge and go with one global service provider offering end-to-end accountability.

4) Control

Traditionally, to have control of contact centres, companies opted for on premise systems. Perversely, that often meant a lack of control: As there was no overall visibility, it was not possible to optimise performance, such as knowing when and where to direct calls.

Today, with increased outsourcing, it’s even more important to have the flexibility and visibility to manage workloads across in house and outsourced delivery centres.

Get it right — By integrated its private cloud client solutions with unified reporting and management portals, one major insurance company was able streamline this control. This provided a single view across all digital communications, enabling them to retain control without compromising security.

So how do you get it right? The easiest way to meet the 4Cs is by using cloud. With a Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) you will have global reach and assured service levels.

As you’ll see in the next blog this is part of a transformation to all things digital.

For more information about deploying your contact centre in the cloud, visit: www.tatacommunications.com