3 Ways Hiring a Call Center Can Help Increase Revenue
It has long been understood that hiring a call center helps provide connection and effective problem-solving with customers, boosting consumer satisfaction. But hiring a call center can be a significant investment. Is the cost of hiring a call center worth it? Can a call center help to boost revenue in addition to customer satisfaction?
Below are three ways a call center can help generate revenue and secure customer loyalty.
1. Positively affecting repurchasing rates
A well-run call center has the ability to seriously increase customer loyalty, and a poorly-run one can be a serious liability. A call center is the public, personal face of your company, and ought to be viewed as a source of competitive advantage, rather than just a cost center.
Take, for example, a Purdue University study that found that the average repurchase rate for products that work is 78 percent. But the repurchase rate significantly increases to 89 percent when customers encounter a problem with a product and reach a successful resolution through a call center interaction.
Conversely, when customers have a negative call center experience, repurchase rates fall to 32 percent. Clearly, positive call center interactions can be a strategic method to boost revenue when customer concerns are effectively resolved.
2. Constant flow of customer feedback
Perhaps under no other circumstances does a company have access to such a constant flow of customer feedback and intelligence than through call center interactions. Hiring a call center gives a company the advantage of first-hand ideas for improvements on products and processes, brainstorming for new products and even competitive intelligence.
The key to capitalizing on this information is having a process in place to share the actionable data received to other departments of the company. This may even be implemented through a manual process. As messy as it sounds, even something as simple as manually transmitting intelligence gathered through customer interactions can be highly effective.
Looking for top trends in customer complaints and collecting new-product reactions can be an invaluable source of understanding when even a simple data collection and dispersion process is in place. When such a vast amount of customer feedback reaches the proper departments, not only will customer needs be directly addressed, but ultimately, products and processes can be adjusted to positively impact revenue.
3. Satisfied customers in real-time
The personal interaction call centers facilitate with customers provides opportunities to up sell and cross-sell. And recent cutting-edge technology in the call center industry allows for customer service phone agents to do so more effectively than ever. New technology using real-time guidance and real-time speech analytics allows phone interactions to be handled in real-time, rather than being a reactive process.
Workforce optimization solutions through real-time prompts utilize predictive analytics, decision engines, business rules, and workflow to give way to smarter call agent interactions and enable agents to consistently take the right actions to address customer needs. The next-best-action capabilities of real-time software draws on the data from the customer’s account and utilizes the context of the conversation to guide phone agents to resolve issues and up sell products at appropriate times. Customers are more than twice as likely to take up a new offer from a call center that uses real-time prompts.
With positive personal interactions, invaluable customer feedback, and advances in technology companies large and small can turn to call centers to increase revenue.
