Five Times You Wish You Had a Call Center Platform

Staying in contact with customers regularly often proves challenging. Keeping the business running smoothly day-to-day requires a great deal of tasks—so much so that customer service can sometimes become a low-priority item. Add the “on-demand” element, and the difficulty increases.

Customers want answers, solutions, products, services, et cetera, and they want them all now. They desire to be your one-and-only VIP. They long to be that one customer who gets the inside news, product updates, and appointment reminders before anyone else.

While it might seem like an impossible task, you can help your customers’ VIP status dreams come true with cloud-based, VoIP call center technology. Armed with it, you can meet their needs and solve for problems in any number of contexts, including these key applications.

Surveys

National political races and local school board campaigns get heated, and opinions alter seemingly overnight. The staunch supporter unexpectedly changes positions. The neighborhood that lovingly plastered lawns with signs in July takes them down mid-October because of a city representative’s misconstrued statement.

Regardless of the situation, your organization needs up-to-date information on the heartbeat and temper of constituents. A cloud-based call center platform helps fill the need by automating surveys and connecting polling agents with interested parties. You can even use the platform to offer surveys across a number of communication channels, which could increase response rates.

Appointment Reminders

Patients may take an appointment card home with them and tack it to the fridge, but they could still forget about an upcoming visit or the need to get lab work done prior to it. Sending them a reminder via text, email or telephone call serves them and ensures your organization meets its health outcomes standards and regulations.

Without a call center platform, the work must be done manually—an impossible task unless your clinic only has five to 10 patients per month. Even then, keeping track of their records and data requires a finely tuned system that can handle and disseminate patient information updates.

A call center platform makes the most sense. It can manage any number of physicians, physician assistants, dieticians, general practitioners, dermatologists, et cetera, et cetera, and all, not some, of their patients.

Information Notices

Customers enjoy receiving timely information about products and services that matter to them. For example, a retail customer might like an email or text that says an item on her wish list is for sale or about to be retired, permanently. A customer who purchases landscaping services might enjoy an email, text or call about getting the yard ready for winter.

Either scenario provides opportunities to serve customers well and increase profit margins. Both aims can be accomplished with cloud-based call center technology. By integrating CRM tools and other software with your call center solution, you can create a holistic view of customers, enabling ever-more timely and relevant messaging that drives people to act.

Emergency Notifications

When emergencies such as an outbreak of meningitis on a higher educational campus occur, it’s critical to get the word out immediately to all parties involved: students, staff, guests, professors, service personnel, first responders and parents.

Just thinking about the sheer scale of communications needed, even if you operate a small school, can be overwhelming. You can’t manage it all manually, particularly when parents start calling with questions.

You need a system, and a cloud-based call center platform provides exactly that. It enables you to blast out emergency notifications across communication channels and to prepare for an influx of inbound calls.

Subscription Renewals

Subscriptions can prove vexing to customers and customer service agents. When one expires, the often surprised and sometimes frustrated customer calls in. The agent is left the dilemma of dealing with said customer and what the record indicates: the delivery for the Sunday edition of the local newspaper ended on such and such a date. Would the customer like to renew the subscription for a nominal fee?

Your organization can avoid the situation—and deliver an experience that delights subscribers and customer service representatives—with automated subscription renewal reminders. The work could be done across communication channels, meaning you could assign outbound calling initiatives when necessary, as well as seamless and simple renewal prompts via text or email. Either way, you win by keeping existing customers happy and loyal.

While these scenarios can seem relatively basic, sometimes they need that smidgen of attention to make them shine and perform better. Using cloud-based call center technology to perform other functions besides subscription renewals, appointment reminders and emergency notifications can help your organization scale and outperform even minimal projections.

To see what else a cloud-based call center platform can do for your organization, check out our “Implementing TCN to Increase Profits” eBook today!