Why It’s Time to Look Again at Local Retail Calling

Ever since Obama showed how targeted local outreach can deliver huge campaigning benefits, businesses with store networks have been experimenting with empowering retail store staff to call their local customers.

Having spent the last year driving a landmark project to support Retail stores contacting customers in their catchment area  for one of the UK’s leading telcos, I can confirm that it’s a customer contact initiative whose time has come. Retail store calling to generate in store quality appointments can generate significant revenue uplift and the technical barriers that previously held local initiatives back are now a thing of the past thanks to intelligent data and hosted CAM technologies.

What we found was that customers respond very positively to calls from local store staff – providing the contact is timely and relevant. It didn’t seem to matter that the customer may have originated from the digital or central inbound channel. Context is everything, so it’s critical that Retail store customer calling programmes take advantage of the same data and campaign monitoring that’s already powering your outbound programmes. If the integration’s not there, local initiatives can quickly falter – particularly if the right outbound contact management and monitoring isn’t in place.

The trick is to use a hosted solution that can be accessed easily by in-store staff using tablets or laptops. An effective CAM solution will then take care of customer record store catchment allocation, secure record access, the full audit and tracking of calls, IP telephony, call recording and in-store appointment booking.

From a customer perspective, the whole experience was seamless. We only reached out when we knew that customers would be receptive. The initiative effectively served to nudge them into doing something they were probably already thinking about. And because we had built a store appointment booking  function into the solution, we were able to book customers in for account reviews at their local stores where they didn’t have to wait. Almost invariably customers liked this pro-active approach, came into the store with a positive attitude and, because everything was really easy, they were ready to take immediate decisions about the next stage of their contract. The solution took care of SMS & Email appointment reminders with store direction and maps.

In-store, the experience was also good, with our retail staff really taking to the programme. They knew which customers were coming in as data was specifically triggered due to a customer event. Consequently, in-store staff were able to come up with exactly the right packages in time for customer appointments. Customers also felt much freer to discuss other aspects of their digital lives, with many opting for additional devices or related services – a level of engagement that we would have been unlikely to achieve through traditional contact centre channels.

What we proved was that Retail store calling to local customers can prove a highly effective weapon in addressing high churn segments. We also confirmed that customers liked the proactive contact, and being able to address their needs in a face-to-face environment.

Entrusting the ‘last yard’ of communication to local employees clearly helps out in terms of local engagement – however it couldn’t have worked so well without an underlying intelligent data strategy. We found C-Centric’s hosted C-CAM platform gave us the customer data management we needed, along with the monitoring and reporting that allowed us to control the process from an end-to-end perspective.

To learn more about driving your local Retail Calling strategy with intelligent data and CAM monitoring, please download the new report that I’ve authored with C-Centric that sets out how getting Retail store calling up and running is much easier than you think, and deliverable within weeks.

Latest articles: