The Road Less Traveled 

Before making another move, you make sure to take a picture of the other driver’s insurance information. You open your insurance app and click “I had an accident.” Within a few seconds you reach a representative. Your identity and location have already been verified via the app, and the representative has this information. You explain to the representative what happened and then send them the pictures of the other driver’s license and the damage, along with any other necessary photos that they need. The agent collects the sensor data log from the car computer, which has been linked to your phone. They can identify the location of the closest tow truck and tell you, “It will be there in 2 hours. I can send you a pizza while you wait, would you like a diet or regular drink with it?”

Which experience would you prefer to have: the longer inquisition, or the shorter, pleasant and knowledgeable interaction? What would your customers prefer?

Now imagine how this could work for a sales prospect rather than a customer. By taking the context of where they came from on your web page (or email campaign) you can know why they are calling, what item they are calling about, what property they want to view, even what advertisement they are responding to. Thus, their experience will be better, perhaps even the “red rose” type of experience. Let’s look at how available technology and processes can make the call center experience stand out.

Making it possible

Only in the last few years have browsers been uniformly capable of handling these kinds of situations. First you need to realize that every customer call starts with a reason and a context of why they are calling. This can be because of an advertisement, some content on your website, or an email campaign; something triggered them to want to call either to ask a question or to place an order. How they call will make a big difference in what you can keep of that context, and what you are throwing away. Under traditional methods, you would either try to know who is calling (but not why) based on caller ID tied to a CRM record. If you want to know why a customer or prospect is calling, you need to assign a different phone number to each page, advertisement, campaign or other outreach program. To know both for a prospect, you need to use a large pool of phone numbers, and assign one per prospect.

As you can see, these can be complicated and expensive, and only have limited granularity. This will not satisfy the “why I called” that customers are looking for in their call center experience. For this, you need a more flexible and powerful solution. One example was described in a recent Pipeline article, Simplifying Click-to-Call:

“Web-to-Call provides data and context. Tools such as Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and others provide us with robust insight into how customers use our websites. You are able to track and 'paint' customers and visitors to analyze their usage pattern, assign tracking codes to them and optimize their customer experience. By enabling similar functionality for voice calls, you enable new insights into usage. Perhaps most importantly, these new insights enrich your understanding of your sales and help you accelerate them.”

Using such technology as web-to-call helps your agent know why the person is calling even before they have connected, fulfilling the desire of that 50 percent of prospects (or customers) by delivering the experience they expect. The other 50 percent get a better experience than they imagined possible: their desires are known, met, and exceeded. Now imagine how they will respond and how it will improve that NPS score.

There are other advantages to these kinds of calls. The average call involves at least five minutes of context before the agent can understand enough to help. The right technology can reduce the time an agent is on the call asking those context questions, saving around five minutes per call. Each agent can handle more calls per shift, potentially reducing the staff required for a shift. Not only are you saving agent time, but you are also saving cost. At $1 per agent per minute, this is $5 saved per agent per call.

Then there is the reduction of costs on toll-free expenses by shifting to high-definition web calls. And the best part is there will be no need to change your existing systems or retrain your staff.

Finding the red rose for your customers

By looking at your existing processes and how prospects find you, how you acquire customers, how you support them post-sales, and how you get follow-on sales, you can give the digital equivalent of that red rose. This is possible while improving your customer experience, increasing NPS scores (and thus referrals), and reducing costs.

Hasn’t technology come a long way since creation of the first call center in the 1960s? Imagine all the red-rose experiences now possible in the era of digital CX.