10 Ways to Boost Customer Retention

Came across a great read from CallCentreHelper.com on tips for customer retention.

There are many forces at hand trying to weaken your customer retention rates:

- Increasing competition
- Economy
- Emerging technologies
- Changing customer expectations

I've taken the liberty of rewriting their list of tips and condensing the article down to some strong bullet points.

Adopt two or three of these ideas for a boost in customer retention:

- Prep the customer for what's coming next, prior to tranferring to another agent

- Add space in your CRM for interesting notes about the customer. Hobbies, Kids, Music, etc.

- Provide a comprehensive yet abbrieviated recap of what's been discussed.

- Compile an easy-access list of save opportunities for different categories of customers and calls.

- Use analytics at hand to anticipate customer behavior based on experience and trending.

- Music on hold keeps the customers tapping their feet as they await pick-up.

- Be consistent in all channels: phone, email, web chat, social, etc.

- Place a higher value on FCR (first call resolution) as opposed to AHT (average hold time).

- Share successfull calls/stories among agents

- Let the customers know how happy you are to have solved their issue or answered their questions.

You can read the entire article from CallCentreHelper.com in its' original form here:
http://www.callcentrehelper.com/ten-tips-to-improve-customer-retention-16719.htm

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• Five Critical Mistakes Chief Customer Officers Say Must Be Avoided (customerthink.com)
• Retaining customers in competitive world! (trak.in)

8 ways Speech Analytics can help your organization ramp up call center quality

It's a given that Speech Analytics has good buzz, but let's step back a second before we assume everyone understands what Speech can do for you.

Different people interpret Speech technologies in different ways. Speech is being used in more and more diverse applications every day.

For purposes of this post, we're speaking of Speech Analytics for the call center, where recorded calls are indexed by a speech engine and then made available for search and reporting.
Here are eight ways Speech Analytics can impact your quality process, in no particular order:

* Improve agent script adherence: Modify imperfect agent processes by quickly finding instances where agents have used slang ("Umm", "Err", "Yo", etc.)

* Flag important calls for evaluation: Highlight calls where customers have mentioned a competitor's name.

* Fine tune your training programs: Identify trends in the types of calls your center is receiving: are they sales calls or support calls? Allocate your training resources appropriately.

* Increase First Call Resolution (FCR): Find out which callers have called in about the same issue more than once.

*  Reduce Average Handle Time (AHT): Discover process improvements as Speech Analytics reveals new insights into how agents respond to common questions. Some agents may be making the same mistakes over and over again. A simple speech search on the response will show exactly how many times it was used.

* Identify trends in customer displeasure: By grouping together keyword phrases which may indicate displeasure ("I'm not happy", "not working", "your service sucks") and instantly see how many calls match this category.

* Ensure compliance: Create a search using agent-trained trigger phrases such as "credit card number" or "social security number" to identify calls where sensitive data may be spoken and recorded. This has direct impact for Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance in particular. Someone tasked with removing these types of media or the specific data in question will appreciate a view where they can just see a list of calls which match this particular query.

* Fine tune your marketing campaigns: By creating search categories using your product names, brand names, ad slogans, and other keyword phrases, you can analyze emerging call trends on what's hot and what's not among all of your campaigns.

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