How strong is your partnership with your contact center leadership?
Not that long ago, strong, strategic collaborations between CMO and Customer Care were rare. While the marketing role was focused on everything related to attracting customers and driving sales revenue, the contact center was perceived as a cost center.
Keeping these two functions in their separate silos was never a good idea and, over the past several years, many brands have come to recognize that their contact centers are at the very center of solid customer experience, sales growth, and long term retention. Today, in the wake of the pandemic, there is a greater need than ever for CMO’s and Customer Care Leaders to break down those final barriers and work together.
But for many, that’s easier said than done. Or, as Ravitjeta Sidda put it in a recent article for CustomerThink, “there is a huge difference between [truly] collaborative leaders – and marketers who operate mostly within their group without… joining forces with groups like customer care, IT, HR, etc.” Sidda goes on to name three crucial opportunities for CMO’s and Customer Care to build strong collaborative partnerships:
- Reach beyond surveys and learn from actual customer interactions
- Leverage inbound calls as a critical customer retention channel
- Develop next-best offer strategies based on the needs and wants of today’s customers
He details why these collaborations are so powerful and offers up simple tactics to jump start better partnerships. This article resonated strongly for me because Sidda’s take on this subject strongly echoes what we’ve been doing at Skybridge Americas for more than a decade.
If you’re ready to take your customer experience and retention programming to the next level and would like to know how Skybridge Americas can help you get there, please reach out. We would love to talk!
You can read Sidda’s article below:
How CMOs Can Collaborate With Contact Center Leaders To Boost Customer Success
By Raviteja Sidda
At first glance, chief marketing officers (CMOs) and contact center leaders may seem to have little in common. The CMO generally focuses on driving growth, brand engagement and customer retention efforts (which have become a higher priority as of late). The contact center leader, on the other hand, focuses on customer service management, service cost management and customer satisfaction metrics.
But increasingly, CMOs are making it a priority to work closely with contact center leaders because of the growing importance of customer experience (CX) management in driving revenue. Most customer-centric CMOs are aware of this fact. The results show that 34% of U.S. CMOs have cited improving CX as their biggest concern.
However, when it comes to collaborating with customer service teams, there is a huge difference between collaborative leaders and marketers who operate mostly within their group without running collaborative projects by joining forces with groups like customer care, IT, HR, etc.
Three Scenarios Where Call Center Collaboration Will Pay Off For CMOs
Even though the individual goals of the departments may differ, there are several specific ways CMOs can collaborate with contact center leaders to fine-tune their customer success strategies with better customer engagement, improved customer experience, and lower customer churn.
- Create deep understanding of customer behavior from unstructured customer interactions
CMOs must rely on the voice of their customers to understand their wants, needs, and wishes. The current method of gathering this critical piece of information from surveys is insufficient in more ways than one — for example, limited sample size and no current view of the state of the customer. In contact centers, speech and text analytics can be used to mine millions of customer interactions to better understand customer behavior. Marketers can utilize this vital source of data to develop advanced behavioral intelligence for better predictions about drivers of additional purchases from existing customers, and customer churn drivers from expressed needs of customers using a large volume of calls. - Use inbound customer care calls as a proactive retention channel
AI and advanced analytics can analyze past interactions to predict a customer’s next action, including purchases and cancels. Marketers can use this knowledge to proactively reach out to customers with the right offers at the right time. A high-impact use case for this approach is to identify at-risk customers automatically through interactive voice response (IVR) and route them to specialist agents for proactive engagement and a highly effective offer presentation.
Read the entire article here >
