You do a lot for your customers. You make it easy for them to reach you in multiple channels. You train your agents about products and better communication. And yet, when customers move from one channel to another to get help, they end up frustrated and ready to abandon your company.
Like 88% of businesses, you probably believe you deliver excellent customer service, but only 8% of customers usually believe the same. And those that disagree? 85% of them retaliate against a company that didn’t meet their needs, reports VentureBeat.
We’ve seen it happen with companies who do everything right, but miss one crucial element: transferring customer data between channels.
How to Improve Customers’ Channel Hopping Experience by Taking Control of Your Data:
When you don’t ensure customer data is accessible in all touch points, you end up treating each contact as a brand new request, even if it’s made by a customer who recently got in touch with you several times.
Here’s what to do to improve:
Know Their Names and Basic Account Information:
According to ContactBabel and Uniphore’s US Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide 2015, when customers call you from the same phone they used to try and solve the problem themselves (via company app, IVR, etc), less than 50% of companies automatically transfer customers’ names, let alone account information (39%) or location (19%), to agents. This means customers waste time, you increase average handling times, and other customers wait in longer lines than needed.
Know What They’ve Already Tried
It gets worse when companies have no record of what customers have already tried. Only 13% of companies record browsing history, says ContactBabel’s Guide. This requires customers to repeat their entire process from scratch, and some of them don’t explain it clearly.
Misunderstandings abound, and if customers perceive it as bad service, they’ll walk. According to a Bain & Company research, even though most customers say they change providers due to price, the true reason for switching is often poor service.
But finding a new provider takes effort and sometimes risk. Customers who already took a gamble on you want you want you to solve their problem – fast – so they can happily go on with their day.
Know Who Owns What in Your Company
Channel hopping means customers often interact with multiple departments. As ContactBabel’s guide points out, social media is often handled by marketing, self-service by IT and inbound calls by the contact center.
It’s our responsibility to ensure that anyone who interacts with customers has all the data they need to help customers overcome any challenge they experience relating to our products. Customers contact us because they care. Provide them with a frictionless experience and see retention rates increase.
[About the author]
Dylon Mills is the Director of Marketing Content Strategy & Development at Uniphore. As such, Dylon’s main responsibilities are to strategize, create and deliver content for Uniphore’s product portfolio that align with the global Go-To-Market strategy, corporate positioning, and marketing campaigns. Dylon’s prior work experience includes Product Management at one of the top Fortune 500 Technology companies, Symantec Corporation. Outside of work, Dylon enjoys problem-solving and any project that includes building/tinkering with tools. Dylon holds a BS Consumer Economics from the University of Georgia.