Where’s my order? What’s my tracking number? How do I order spare parts? When will the service technician arrive? These are all common questions lobbed into customer service centers. Your contact center is a living knowledge base where your agents not only cover common questions, but also provide expert-level answers to the complex questions your customers ask. The expertise your contact center agents developed answering these questions combined with your contact center teams’ ability to deliver empathetic and efficient customer experiences opens revenue generating opportunities for your business.
Here are 4 scenarios where your contact center provides opportunities to drive revenue.
Reinforce Efforts to Prevent Out-of-stock Situations
This 2023 study by the IHL Group indicates out-of-stock situations result in $1.2 Trillion in global lost sales for retailers. Whether your retail stores hold inventory to stock their shelves, or you’ve expanded their role to mini distribution centers with forward-deployed inventory to service your regional omni-channel customers, inventory shortages and out-of-stock situations occur unexpectedly. Every out-of-stock situation your agents prevent through proactive outreach to your store managers prevents lost sales and ensures customer satisfaction with their local store. Contact center agents and support staff often have direct access to corporate inventory, supply chain, and manufacturing line data via their ERP tools. If your contact center does not have outbound dialing or other outreach capabilities today, consider adding outbound capabilities as part of an overall plan to monitor store and distribution center inventory changes. Trigger fail safe tasks into new agent queues focused on inventory follow-up, so your agents reach out to store and distribution center managers and planners to verify stock on hand and arrange for replenishment.
Detect Customer Struggles and Offer Live Help
A recent survey of 1000 B2B buyers indicates 33% of those buyers experience online order errors. How does your company detect and resolve online B2B order issues to retain these customers?
Order validation algorithms using serverless technologies provide rapid, low cost detection solutions to identify unrecognized parts on customer orders, suggest similar replacement products using vector search queries and prompt your agents to offer the customer live in-line, in-context chat to ensure your buyer’s issue is resolved.
Whenever your customers dwell in an area of your website for a long period of time, when they fail to submit a web form correctly, when they abandon a chatbot conversation, or when they rapidly click between two to three pages within your site, your customer is struggling, and your agents can help. Modern Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions provide agent co-browse capabilities to let agents see the same view of your website or mobile app that your customer sees. Pair agent co-browse capability with mobile app and web site instrumentation to detect customer actions such as excessive page dwell time, rapid successive page bounces and multiple video skip forwards which indicate your customers are struggling to obtain the information they need or potentially make a purchase on one of your digital properties. Detect these struggle events using website and mobile app instrumentation then trigger your contact center into action. Agents engage the frustrated user using live chat and co-browsing to assess the situation, provide resolution and even offer an additional discount or upgrade to entice the customer to complete their purchase.
Monetize Your Knowledge Workers’ Combined Expertise
Consider the amount you’ve invested to build a skilled contact center workforce that provides rapid problem resolution, expert-level product guidance and concierge-level handling of logistics challenges. Now consider the subject matter experts (SME) such as application engineers and solution engineers within your company who often engage at a moment’s notice to diagnose and resolve customers’ technical challenges and their design issues. The combined expertise and experience of your senior contact center staff and your SMEs offer a unique premium service to your market. Many CCaaS platforms provide full API integration into software applications your employees already use so there’s no need for them to learn new tools to service clients who want your company’s consulting expertise. Instead, knowledge workers you designate receive in-app alerts to assist clients with architecture and design questions based on that knowledge worker’s expertise. To ensure you make the best use of your clients and your employees time, you can integrate your learning management system or employee skills database expertise rankings into your CCaaS routing algorithm ensuring new requests route to the best-skilled, available employee.
Provide Services to Your Dealers, Franchisees, and Stores
Your store managers, dealers, distributors and even franchisees all incur significant monthly overhead to support and operate their businesses. Services your contact center consistently delivers at scale may address some of their overhead needs and lower their overhead rate. For example, your agent forecasting and shift scheduling expertise and application knowledge helps dealers who must schedule salespeople, service technicians and warehouse staff. Instead of every dealer sourcing and learning a separate employee scheduling service they source and learn from your team. Your contact center staff’s expertise also offers the opportunity for consultative sales of add-on services such as extended warranties or pre-paid maintenance. Senior contact center agents facilitate delivery of these services. They know the intricacies of the plans, and they see how these plans benefit consumers when product issues arise. This enables your senior agents to easily build credibility and advise customers on their warranty or maintenance plan purchase. Using video contact center features, you can engage these senior agents with prospective buyers at your branches and dealerships to answer customer questions and address concerns that may be blocking a purchase.
Taking the next step
I hope the options presented in the blog post such as preventing out-of-stock situations at a local store, assisting struggling online customers to complete purchases and packaging your team’s knowledge into expert-level consulting services pique your interest and spark conversations about monetizing your contact center. Your contact center’s capabilities enable you to prevent lost revenue and drive new revenue for your business. Take the next step. Perform a capability analysis of your contact center then assess your company’s revenue challenges against those capabilities. You will likely identify several capabilities that directly address your revenue challenges. If you need help with that analysis or want to discuss alternatives, please reach out to me or contact Perficient.
