Customer Retention Strategies Powered by Cloud Contact Center Software

A lot of businesses think they need to spend all day getting new customers.

However, according to Harvard Business Review, “Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.”

That means more time should be spent on making existing customers happy and excited to continue doing business rather than hunting for new customers.

And that’s exactly what we’ll show contact center managers how to do today.

But not in terms of sales or marketing…

We’ll dive into how cloud contact center software provides managers and agents the strategies and tools that keep customers happy and relationships strong.

3 Ways to Use Cloud Call Center Software to Retain Customers

42% of customers will stop using a brand after just two bad customer service experiences.

If contact centers want to keep customers, they have to make sure every single customer interaction is outstanding, needs are met quickly and that in the end, the customer walks away delighted.

Which brings us to our first strategy…

Create and Update Customer Profiles

One of the surefire aspects of great customer service is knowledge about the customer themselves. That knowledge can be used to solve problems more quickly, to create quick connections with the customer, and to anticipate their needs.

It’s frustrating to have to repeat information over and over again. Giving agents the ability to store information and bring it up when they need it helps them avoid angering the customer.

To do this, contact centers need a unified agent gateway or interface that integrates previous interactions with agents that the caller has had, previous issues solved, relevant personal information, IVR selections, and so on.

This allows agents to deliver a personalized experience – and time isn’t wasted mulling over the same old questions and answers.

Reduce Customer Effort

Customers would rather do as little work as possible to get their problem solved.

Wouldn’t we all?

Which means customers need more ways to serve themselves instead of waiting on service from contact center agents.

Enter the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system.

The IVR system works like this:

A customer calls and the IVR intercepts the call, presenting the caller with an automated menu of options they can use to pay their bills, check their account balances, transfer to a specific department, and so on.

The customer need only punch in the appropriate numbers on their phone to begin solving their own problems.

The more effort a contact center can help customers reduce, the more loyal those customers will be.

Connect Customers to Agents Best-Suited to Meet Their Needs

When customers call, they expect to have their issues handled quickly.

We usually call this the first call resolution (FCR) rate – the number of times a caller’s needs are met by the first agent they interact with.

The higher the FCR rate, the happier the customer, in general.

But how do contact centers make sure customers get what they’re looking for the first time they call?

Route the customer to agents who are best-suited to meet their needs.

That’s where an automatic call distribution (ACD) system comes in.

It allows you to route incoming calls to agents in a variety of ways, from first agent available to the next agent in rotation.

But for the purposes of customer retention, the optimal strategy is skills-based routing.

Skills-based routing is when the ACD systems, with the help of the IVR, determines what the caller needs help with and transfers the caller to an agent most skilled in that area.

When a customer speaks with an agent who’s well-versed in the issue they want solved, it’s more likely the customer’s issue will be solved on that very first call.

The Key to Customer Retention Strategies

The strategies we’ve laid out here just scratch the tip of the iceberg for all the ways contact centers can retain customers.

There are many more ways to do it.

And while the strategies we gave you today are certainly powerful and should definitely be implemented, they’re going to fall short if contact centers don’t have a crucial technology that makes every customer retention strategy work.

A technology that informs a manager’s next moves…

That gives them deep insights into their customers…

That allows them to better manage their call center and the agents within…

We’re talking about business intelligence.

And if contact center managers want to:

• Track employee behavior and improve it.
• Better understand customers and how to please them.
• Root out inefficiencies in the office and streamline the organization.

Then Get a free copy of our Business Intelligence Brochure and see how powerful BI is today!