The Secret Power of Successful Marketing in 2021: The Contact Center

If you could pick any superpower, what would it be? I know, I know, you’ve probably been asked this a hundred times as a cheesy icebreaker. While I’m partial to teleportation, most marketing professionals I know would give up chocolate for the power to read minds. After all, marketing is all about understanding the customer: how they feel about a brand or its products and services, how they’re reacting to a certain campaign, or how they think you stack up against your competition. Tapping directly into a customer’s brain would help drive the smartest marketing strategies based on otherwise unattainable empathy.

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What those marketing professionals may not know, however, is that they don’t have to be mind readers to get these insights. Your customer’s voice is already available through your contact center. The contact center hears directly from customers every day and can provide these voice-of-the-customer insights to marketing (and other departments), allowing them to understand what customers are thinking without having to read minds.

I get it, marketing teams and the contact center haven’t always worked closely together in the past. But smart teams today understand that plowing down these silos is worth it in the name of a successful, connected enterprise – especially as customer experience continues to grow in importance.

The importance of CX and the need for insights

The customer’s experience (CX) with your brand is more important than ever. Over and over we see stats about how loyalty is driven by CX. Behaviors have changed, especially after the pandemic, and customers are willing to jump ship to other brands if their needs aren’t met. And those needs don’t just mean product, price and service. According to a 2020 Calabrio study, customers expect their needs to be met with empathy and understanding. While the contact center must directly respond to these demands in their interactions with customers, it also challenges the marketing team to consider fostering empathy in their campaigns.

So, what does this all boil down to? Companies need to consider the complete customer journey; viewing the customer through a solitary lens is no longer enough. By collecting insights from the contact center, marketing teams can see the bigger picture on meeting customer needs and pivot if warranted. 

Implementing data-driven marketing

Okay, now that I’ve got you thinking about reaching out to the contact center, what kinds of insights can they help you with? Today’s contact centers often use a cloud-based workforce engagement-management solution. This advanced software can include speech, text and desktop analytics that can parse out words and phrases from any customer interaction, helping you zero in on what your customers are telling you. With artificial intelligence, analytics can even determine the sentiment behind each interaction, allowing you to understand how people feel when talking about various aspects of your brand. These solutions drill into the “why” behind the “what.” But just because the data is there doesn’t mean you necessarily have the time or know-how to find and start using it. That’s why Calabrio is excited about our new Enterprise CXI solution. Enterprise CXI dashboards are built into Calabrio’s Advanced Reporting business intelligence platform. Relying on our analytics technology, they package up all that voice-of-the-customer data and present it as actionable, out-of-the-box dashboards catering to marketing, finance, sales and more.

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In a recent study, Calabrio found that the top three requested insights from the contact center are information on customer satisfaction and sentiment related to the brand, customer problems or needs, and the most-demanded products or services. Enterprise CXI shows how often customer interactions are on brand, how brand messaging is impacting sentiment (good or bad), and shows you which off-brand phrases are being talked about that might require intervention. It also helps you more fully track the reach of your campaigns. You may already know about customers who called in and made a purchase based on a given campaign, but what about those who don’t buy? Tracking the frequency with which people talk about a campaign can give you a better idea of your reach, and sentiment analysis can show you how people feel about a given campaign. 

For a real-world example of how the contact center can help across the enterprise, look at Calabrio customer Greenpath Financial Wellness. They found that the pandemic resulted in a different mix of service inquiries from their customers – more people calling about missed rental payments and looking for counseling, and fewer calling about other services. Thanks to the relationship between marketing and the contact center, the marketing department was able to quickly act on this information and fast track a campaign that led to a 300% increase in the use of their rental payment counseling service.

Flexing some new collaboration muscles

I know, collaboration across departments – especially with the contact center – hasn’t always been the norm. Some of my contact center customers even say they’ve felt like they are perceived as a necessary evil. But smart companies realize that thinking needs to change to stay competitive in today’s CX-focused landscape. The contact center is the place where customers interact with a brand in an unfiltered, unprompted way. With today’s analytics and voice-of-the-customer technology, those interactions represent a goldmine of opportunity to inform strategy.

It’s time to flex those collaboration muscles and work together across departments to drive world-class customer experiences. Cloud-based solutions make it easier than ever to share data across departments, and a pre-built solution like Enterprise CXI can take the mystery out of how to package that information into actionable insights – no superpowers required.

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