Every time someone calls your contact centre for the first time, you know nothing more about them than their phone number.
An IVR may help to perform some filtering, but you’re still in the dark with regards to where they came from, what they already know, and how they got there. Establishing this understanding takes valuable minutes that give a poor experience to the customer, and is exceptionally wasteful when scaled up.
Moreover, marketing teams could spend millions on their advertising, but the moment someone picks up the phone, all vital attribution is lost. An informed view on how they got there changes everything.
This is where call tracking has brought value to the contact centres of many of the world’s top brands and agencies, and it’s about to get a lot easier.
Call tracking enables contact centre staff to view a caller’s digital journey in real time, with any call or conversion data being fed directly into their CRM for actionable use. Agents will see which page the customer called from, key pages viewed that showed elevated propensity to purchase, and which keyword they used to find you. This gives call handlers the best chance of delivering a good Customer Experience, setting a new operational standard for customer insight in the process.
Powered-up contact centres
By baking a call tracking solution directly into your contact centre platform, every single phone agent will have the knowledge to refine their communications. This won’t just be of use to seasoned professionals, newer employees will have information at their fingertips that would give them an understanding of the customer’s needs that would usually take months of experience and intuition to build up. Accelerating these new hires to a more advanced level of skill (with the results that follow) will lower turnover and increase profit margins.
Unlock data for marketing
But not only does an informed picture of the customer journey benefit contact centres and their staff, it also provides marketers with a rich source of data that will give real world feedback to the effectiveness of their work. At Ad:Tech London in November, senior marketers from many sectors highlighted the importance of building a clear view of the customer journey, the type of view that this integration instantly provides.
Mitsubishi Nederland’s Willem Jan Oosteveld (General Manager Marketing & PR) stated “tapping into the audience effectively, and knowing what’s resonating with them across their customer journey is going to be crucial in building a successful funnel”. Reactive marketing teams will identify traits in the calls they want to receive, and optimise their activity across all channels based on what is driving high value calls.
Build smart, helpful websites
Meanwhile, web teams will use this call intelligence data to find support queries that aren’t being answered, or found, on the website and using these insights to build more useful and cost-efficient sites.
Making the connection
The relationship between contact centres and marketing departments is one that has vast potential, but is too often woefully untapped. A common anecdote I hear from contact centre professionals is that their marketing team launched a campaign on a Friday night, and the first time most of the contact centre heard about it was when they came into work and customers were asking about it on Monday morning.
Not only that, but the customers told them things about the campaign that would be very useful for the marketing department to know but there was no reliable way of feeding that information back. This will be more than just possible now, it will be straightforward, and done without the call agent needing to lift a finger.
The real winner…
Ultimately, the primary beneficiary of this joined-up view is the customer, who receives a more personal, efficient, and useful service. As contact centres learn what drives calls, and optimise their website to solve the most common issues, the customer will be able to resolve their problems quickly on their own.
For customers that still need to pick up the phone to the contact centre, they will now be reaching a team that have the bandwidth to patiently deal with complex issues, whilst simultaneously having an informed background on the customer’s journey that led to the call. As companies roll these changes out, this level of service and attention is going to become a norm that customers expect. The time for being clueless about your callers is officially over.