The role of contact centers has evolved over the years, with the emphasis now on improving customer experiences and generating revenue for companies. It's not just about the delivery of customer service or cutting costs anymore. Rather, it's about building relationships with your customers and maintaining these relationships effectively.
A contact center is an important element in the customer’s journey. It helps customers from the minute they start searching for information about a product until the time they acquire and then use it to the end of its lifecycle. Throughout the customer’s journey, a contact center helps to improve customer loyalty, retention and advocacy, which effectively increase customer lifetime value.
Here are the steps contact centers usually follow to help companies attain the ultimate goal of increasing customer lifetime value and create customer advocates in the long-run:
1.Acquisition
Relevance and timing are two vital aspects of customer acquisition. Contact centers assist companies in acquiring customers by engaging them in their preferred channel at the right time as well as on the right device. Along with proactive engagement with the customer, companies must provide personalized offers that are based on customer profiles and their history of interaction. Both factors – relevance with proactive personalization and timing – lead to exponentially higher conversion when done right. Contact centers, when integrated with a CRM system, can help in delivering a high volume of personalized calls with top-notch quality. This goes a long way in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of sales conversions.
2.Growth
It's a no-brainer that satisfied and loyal customers drive more business.
“Customer satisfaction has a knock-on effect on a company, particularly in today's experience economy in which businesses are evaluated on the basis of their ability to provide excellent service.”
Contact centers have a critical role in ensuring customer satisfaction – they are the crucial link between a company and its customers. When integrated with good customer data and agent tools, every service interaction can be used as a sales opportunity.
3.Retention
A contact center is a very important component of a customer retention strategy, with customer retention having a direct impact on revenue. As a matter of fact, eight in ten customers will certainly consider switching over brand names due to one negative customer experience, according to the NICE inContact Customer Experience Transformation Benchmark study.1
Lost customers equate to lesser revenue. It also leads to higher costs; it is six to seven times more expensive to win a new customer as opposed to retaining one. Proactively working to solve consumer issues as well as personalization of experiences is only feasible with the right contact center technology. Technologically-advanced contact centers are able to provide omnichannel experiences that ensure customer issues are resolved quickly.
4.Advocacy
Customers are the most effective advocates to attract other customers. According to a Nielsen report, 92% of customers trust referrals from other people – even if they don't know them personally – over marketing content that comes directly from brands.2 Trust affects their purchase choices to a high degree.
“If contact centers provide exceptional service, there is a much greater possibility of converting customers to advocates. That's the sort of reliable advertising that really works to pull in new customers.”
Contact centers were initially seen as cost centers. But times are changing due to a shift towards an experience economy. Now, customer experience is the most important differentiator, ahead of product and cost. Contact centers that create the right experiences go a long way in increasing customer lifetime value.
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