Your Next Quick Win

Everyone knows that outbound teams always complain about the data they’re given to use, but maybe it’s time for organisations to actually pay attention to what they’re saying.

Agents immediately understand when they’ve been given a poor quality contact list, and they know that they’re going to end up dealing with the problems they can generate in terms of unsuccessful calls and increased pressure from clients. Despite these inevitable outcomes, too many organisations persist in buying poor quality contact lists and hoping for the best.

Surely customer data is too important and valuable a resource to dilute by repeating this cycle? Instead of wasting money on bad data, isn’t it time that organisations actually spent more time listening and acting on the volumes of useful information that customers are already giving them?

 

Listen to what your customers are saying

While it might not be immediately obvious, most organisations with multi-channel customer engagement programmes are already sitting on a wealth of detailed customer information. The trick, of course, is knowing where to find it.

Whether it’s your online channels, your retail network or the contact centre, your customers and prospects are probably already engaging with your business. By adopting an intelligent data strategy you can work to first identify and then activate previously untapped in-house data sources to create new – and higher quality – acquisition or retention opportunities.

It may be that a customer has already been on your website and left a unique identifier such as a postcode. They may have revisited your site from the same IP address, or simply called in to one of your contact centres using a repeat phone number. Alternatively they might have been in one of your stores and tried out a QR code. Whatever the data sources, when collected and analysed intelligently, you can move quickly from having a 0% profile build to a much more usable and actionable customer contact.

 

Working to complete broken customer journeys

Usually these traces of data are the result of broken customer journeys. That’s why it’s not enough just to harvest the data, we should also be working to help people complete those interactions.

For example, if you spent some time looking on a holiday website but didn’t take your research further at that point, the smart thing for an organisation to do would be to capture your details and reach out and see if they could help you.

This kind of intervention can really succeed when it’s clear that the organisation has understood the customer’s initial goals, picked up on this and then taken it to another channel to try and complete the original online journey. As ever, the focus needs to be on reducing customer effort.

Often all that’s needed is a better understanding of how your data needs to flow between your digital and outbound operations. One organisation that can really help you do this in a non-intrusive way is C-Centric, the integrated data specialists, who work alongside your data and contact centre teams to identify the right data for your campaigns.

 

To learn more about how a more intelligent outbound Big Data approach can improve results and reduce customer effort, download the report that I’ve just written with C-Centric.