Those publishers and service managers looking for efficient ways of setting up their phone centers, while still providing premium customer service, will be interested in this report released by research firm, Ipsos for Habeas, Inc.. The firm surveyed several consumers and asked them about their preferred way of communicating with businesses. An overwhelming amount said they prefer email over any other form of communication - traditional or web.2.0.

As I say to center managers all the time, your eTeam will not only prove to be very profitable (lower cost per interaction/sale), but it will also answer the communication needs of your customers.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Call Center, Contact Center, Customer Communications, eCommunications, eTeam, Preferred Methods of Communications

In my travels, I usually take the time to speak with publishers and newspaper/magazine directors about industry related news and their business as a whole. Due to my background, we often end up speaking about the future of their call centers. As their call volume decreases and their phone centers turn into greater cost centers, many are wondering what their next move should be – outsourcing or downsizing. In these conversations, I encourage leaders to look at the areas their contact centers are involved in. Are the center agents touching all possible verticals? Is there activity that can be offloaded from commercial sales reps to improve larger advertiser average spend quotients? In most cases, it is discovered that their centers could take their availability and apply it to small business advertising acquisitions.

Small business retailers often remain untouched by outside sales staff because they represent either seasonal advertising dollars or smaller overall revenues. The truth of the matter however, is that these businesses represent the long-tail portion of revenue advertising dollars that publishers leave on the table.

In a recent study performed by AllBusiness.com, it was confirmed that small retailers independently thought that online advertising was out of their reach:

• 20% of small retailers thought Internet marketing was too complex
• 15% thought they did not have the resources to maintain an online campaign
• 25% thought Internet advertising would be too expensive
• 28% of retailers said they would change their mind on Internet advertising if someone took the time to explain the benefits.

Given the results of the survey, it is clear that small business retailers could prove to be a very lucrative part of a publishers business. If newspapers and classified magazines can find interesting ways of coupling print and Web advertising packages for small businesses, they would be directly answering a void existing in the ma and pop business realm. Not to mention that by having contact center agents perform the prospecting and sales process, the cost per acquisition would remain low.

As a publisher, if you are concerned about increased idling time of Contact Center agents try exploring other ways they could add to your bottom line, with addressing the needs of small business advertisers as one of your options.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Call Center Optimization, Call Center work, Small Business Acquisition

When the buzz acronym CRM comes up in conversation, people tend to think of applications and software build, to aid commercial sales representatives manage their professional accounts. Common vendors such as salesforce.com or even mySAP CRM often come to mind. But thinking of CRM in such a one dimensional way has caused some managers to scoff at the idea of customer data management, when asked. Stating costs as a factor (“CRM is not in the budget this year”). Others say they have asked to get CRM software for the organization, but are waiting for committee approvals. What ever the hold up on formal CRM, it is my belief that you have no excuse to not mine the data your private customers provide on a daily basis. We too often forget about the valuable customer data contact centres gather, through their end call dispositions.

Finding ways to better serve our larger spending clients, always seems to take precedence over truly analyzing what our private sellers and buyers (volume) are interested in. When you dissect the silly reality, the laws of consultative advertising and selling tell you that putting your private audience last is indeed backwards. Without your private audience (volume), you would have no large commercial advertisers (revenue).

Gathering data to better understand the minds of your private reader is easy, once you have a contact centre that is capturing end call disposition information. Using the excuse that waiting for a CRM tool is the hold up, doesn’t hold water. Both organizations using automated scripting tools and or manual data capture, can perform a level of private audience CRM. Most centres make it mandatory for agents to disposition the results of every call they take and if you are not in your centre, you really should start to. I know in a manual environment, there may be concern that this may take away from productivity, but I encourage you to block times where you enforce this or segment the agent groups so there is at least some type of data coming in on a regular basis. By not collecting the data for action, you are muting the voice of your customer.

End call dispositions, if formatted right, can give you better insight into:

• Conversion numbers
• First call resolution factors
• Customer objections
• Error loads
• And a sense of customer retention levels

Gathering the data is only step one in understanding the private audience CRM. From there:

• Review the data on a regular basis - what your customers are telling you is key.
• Circulate to senior leadership and in-house marketing departments, what the top 5 customer comments are per month – you want exposure into your centres to allow others to see the types of calls that are handled. I would also encourage you to include a quick snapshot of centre performance on the ‘top 5’, so it looks like a dashboard of some sort.
• If you are in the situation where CRM does exist in your organization, explore the possibility of exporting feeds from your scripting database to your CRM application. This will automate the analytics of end call data collected from the contact centre.
• Share data with your commercial clients. This will show them that you as a newspaper or magazine care about their marketplace relationship, with your product and its readers.
  

Not to take away from the effectiveness of a well defined CRM tool, but contact centres communicate with the largest customer pool your company has and holds a lot of your company’s public value in their interactions. If there is anyway to speed up private customer data analytics in your organization, I would explore it.

written by Beverly Crandon