A contact centre is an important business tool, no matter what product or service you sell. You can try to save money and put a secretary or any other manager on the phone. But how can you be sure that the client’s enquiries would be addressed quickly and efficiently if you do not know the line loads, peaks and falls in client activity?
How can one be sure that a person unqualified in communication skills would provide a competent answer that will satisfy your client? The major principle of DirectCall is the strategic vision, when we plan the workload on specialists in advance based on the analytical data obtained earlier and, furthermore, when we can predict the basic requests that we will be contacted with. The basis for building a workable strategy is experience and analytics, as DirectCall has been on the market for 16 years and our clients belong to various groups from small companies to global brands.
It is also important to identify the business model of your company and the role of the contact centre within it. One might build a contact centre with 100% availability and the highest service level, but is it worth it? After all, it would be quite complicated and unprofitable task. Thus, we can build a strategy at the initial stage – from understanding what the number of calls is, what goods and services your company offers, what the type and frequency of campaigns/events etc. Hence, we figure out what objectives are met, what data is important for us to get from the client, how we collect data and what analytics we need to provide in the process of achieving particular business goals.
For instance, a company manufacturing hot sauces has several business goals: to expand the product mix, to increase brand awareness, and, as a result, to grow sales. To achieve them, a new sauce is introduced, not hot, but sour-spicy. The indicator, whether the consumer likes the sauce or not, would be the sales volume. What does the contact centre have in common with the above-mentioned objective? In practice, customers could buy it due to various factors (an interesting name, advertisement etc.) and the question is: would they buy the sauce again or would you have to produce it while sales fall?
The contact centre aggregates information that comes from customers along with feedback on the sauce after its purchase. Further, a pool of data is created from all channels that mention the new sauce and a “positive/negative ratio” analysis is done. Based on the analysis, the main points of concern and satisfaction are outlined in order to develop a strategy to achieve the business goal and to produce sauces that will be sold with even greater success.
An example from the field of the financial services. A client’s company owns a network of pawnshops, and a decision is made to launch a new format of stores selling equipment, which was pledged at the pawnshop and was not redeemed by its owner on time. The business faced the tasks that were necessary to be solved before the project was launched. These factors influenced on the investments’ amount and pay-out period, weighing on the ultimate success of the business initiative:
- Shop location
- Product mix
- Total area
- Logistics of the purchased goods etc.
A survey helped to address all the issues mentioned above, and it was carried out by the contact centre operators. A few short questions were put to clients who applied for secured loans. In a short period of time, a huge amount of information was collected and analysed. After thorough analysis, the company had a clear understanding of the project format and how the key processes should be built, and the project was implemented successfully.
The strategy and the contact centre are tightly connected, because it is the latter which is a huge accumulator of the customer experience. At DirectCall, we clearly understand how to work with data to develop strategies and to achieve business goals.