Contact centers, as well as sales and marketing teams, have struggled for years to see inside the customer/prospect’s mind to understand their hot buttons, preferences, buying triggers and so on. Some organizations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars commissioning big research reports to give them these answers. The results, however, are always limited at best. This is due in large part to the fact that most organizations have various, disconnected databases containing disparate pieces of intelligence on their customers.
Most customer service teams, for instance, typically only look at contact center data – call recording, speech analytics, ACD/IVR, support tickets, etc. to create a picture of their customers. This is backward-looking, however, and only provides minimal useful insight.
Some businesses invest in multimillion-dollar, big-data business intelligence solutions to expand their customer purview. Fortunately, there is a better way. It involves looking both backward and forwards to understand customer journey history, buying propensity and channel choice. With this intelligence, combined with AI and machine learning, businesses can anticipate what the next best action is with each customer/prospect to maximize the potential of every inbound/outbound conversation.
Unlike traditional customer intelligence solutions that promise a holistic view of the customer but only provide a 270-degree view at best, we are talking about a 450-degree view. That’s right, a holistic view of the customer’s past as well as predictions for future engagement. Thus, a complete 360 with and additional 90-degrees for anticipating forward-looking intelligence.
This concept will change the way businesses view customer intelligence. It is no longer good enough to know one’s customers. We must now, in these tumultuous and highly competitive marketplaces, understand our customers and then accurately anticipate how best to engage them.
This works by combining contact center data (as described earlier) with enterprise data such as CRM, ERP, billing, sales, marketing, fulfillment, and so on. Until now, no contact center analytics solutions sought to bring these disparate data sources together. By doing so, the aggregate 450-degree extended view offers an unprecedented customer profile which helps agents better connect with customers on a deeper, more emotional level. This is where customers open up and become more susceptible to upsells/cross-sells. The result is hyper-personalized service and much higher sales closure rates.
450-degree views of customers and prospects are very much the wave of the future, and with select solutions already on the market, that future is now.
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