Contact centers are often perceived as an additional expense for the business. Still, they play an important part in attracting and retaining customers. Improving their experience and loyalty with the brand impacts revenue growth in the long-run.
For this week’s post, we focus on finding out what industry experts think about turning contact centers into profit centers — and what is the best way to go about it.
Nate Brown
Founder of CX Accelerator
Those who view the contact center as a cost center are missing a huge opportunity. Data from Insight Squared shows that a customer who is happy will spend 5x more with you over time versus a customer who is stuck. Not only that, but customers who can trust a brand to provide great customer service are far more likely to act as a brand ambassador, bringing new customers to you! Things like live chat can go a long way to create the friction-free experience we all desire.
Sue Duris
Director of Marketing and Customer Experience at M4 Communications
The answer is an emphatic YES. First I believe any customer advocacy programs start in the contact centers and with that so does customer marketing. You are building loyalty and advocacy here so as you are developing relationships, perhaps there is a product or service that would help the customer be MORE successful than they already are. In the B2B world, that has to be top of mind – how do I make the customer’s life more simple and help them be more successful. But your intent can’t be incremental sales, it has to be how do I improve the customer’s experience and help them? Trust me, they can tell when you are BS’g them. So, be genuine. Do this, and your CLV will skyrocket.
Ian Golding
Global Customer Experience Specialist at Customer Experience Consultancy Ltd
Over the last 25 years, working across multiple countries and sectors, I agree that few organizations recognize the real value a contact center operation can have in delivering BOTH profitable growth AND cost reduction. As a critical element of any customer journey, inbound contact centers are a hugely rich and valuable source of information to determine where in the journey repeatable errors are being made. However, rather than focusing on using the insight that the reasons for contact generate to eliminate the ROOT CAUSE of these repeatable errors, too many have focused on the cost of managing the quantity, length, and quality of calls. Effectively using customer contact as a way of eliminating ‘random customer experiences’ AND developing deeper relationships with customers that improve their perception and the financial performance of the organization at the same time SHOULD be a ‘no brainer’!!!
David Henzel
Serial Entrepreneur, Founder of Managing Happiness
LinkedIn | managinghappiness.com
I couldn’t agree more with the concept of turning the contact center into a profit center. I believe that having a customer success mindset and selling with your customer’s interest at heart, rather than selling just to sell and hit quotas, will bring so much more value to both your customers and to your business. It’s my mantra – whatever you do, do it out of love, not out of fear.
By implementing this exercise with your customer experience team you will automatically improve the quality of the communication with customers, increase customer loyalty and overall success of your business.
Mark Colgan
Chief Revenue Officer at TaskDrive
In my opinion, if you want to turn your contact center into a profit-generating channel, you have to provide proactive support. Proactive engagement with customers increases user experience and revenue. Some studies show that almost 50% of customers favor companies that have proactive support. So, it’s a good idea to train and educate your CX team about the importance of proactive engagement. Some parts of this can be automated with chatbots, but the team should be ready to take on some complex inquiries and questions.
You need to understand the different stages of the customer journey and dedicate more support to those steps (or pages) where customers will likely have questions about your product or service.
On the other hand, having a reactive customer support process in place is also a must. Because customers expect an answer within the first 10 minutes. So, if you respond to the first contact on time, there is a 4000% chance that they will end up in your pipeline and close.
