An Investment in Customer Service is an Investment in the Future of Your Business

If we look at the current state of customer service and compare it to where we want to be, we find dissonance. We see callers contacting customer service with increasingly complex questions, which can lead to a lack of first contact resolution if the agent is not well prepared. Inadequate problem resolution drives increased customer effort, which then becomes a loyalty issue. In a highly competitive market, increased customer effort will push your customers to other retailers who make it easier to do business. With the need for customer service to drive loyalty and neatly handle increased complexity, customer support teams must critically consider which tools to use to best support the agents.

With customer service as a critical element of a thriving business, successful agents need support to understand and facilitate the customer journey. Analytics tools play a significant role in this understanding, and the size of that role is increasing every day. Without analytics, you can make every effort to discern the "why" of it all, but you're only seeing one piece of the puzzle. On the other hand, having ready access to a suite of analytics tools allows you to delve into, and solve for, the root cause of bumps in the road.

Customer service is an investment. When you invest in analytical tools to ensure business leaders have the resources necessary to make informed decisions, or better support your staff, your customer service arm becomes that much stronger. A well-built program can and will leverage quantitative and behavioral metadata from disparate data sources, allowing ready insight into any stressors in your customer’s journey. 

Investing in Your Team

My experience in the eCommerce industry started eight years ago, when I joined eBay. During my tenure at the company, I had the unique opportunity to develop a voice analytics tool and program. Over the course of a year, we managed to save a significant amount of money for the company by identifying behaviors that could be remediated on an agent level in their CS organization. 

As I looked to grow my career, I searched internally, which led me to my current role at Radial.

Radial Customer Care is a Contact Center BPO specializing in premier customer support for retailers, brands, and eCommerce companies. We deliver high-touch, seamless services driving the highest customer satisfaction rates in the industry. As eCommerce has evolved, Radial has sought to invest and innovate with new offerings to meet increasing customer expectations, with the intent of reducing friction and therefore disloyalty. Our clients are among the most brand-recognized retailers in the industry, including Fanatics, Adidas, Rue La La/Gilt, Keurig, Michaels and many others. Placing an emphasis on the customer experience and journey is our greatest priority each day.

As Radial’s needs evolved across time, we found our existing solution did not enable the level of performance or insight that we required to drive the customer experience. In late 2016, a strategic decision was made to migrate to Calabrio in the cloud, allowing us to not only leverage and incorporate existing organizational data and systems, but enable a more flexible solution set aligned with our business needs.

Deploying Calabrio has enabled Radial to take its analysis to an entirely new level—and we are just scratching the surface. With our new ability to integrate custom metadata into the user interface, Calabrio has enabled us to leverage data from disparate data sources, and unify them into one powerful analytics engine. Our ability to also integrate chat and email data ensures that we have insight into a customer’s journey across all channels, and integration of customer experience data allows us to understand pain-or-success points with less heavy lifting. In short, we can more quickly identify pain points and correlate the customer experience to the agent experience and customer journey. 

Empowering Insights

Calabrio’s UI has also enabled us to expose analytics findings to strategic subsets of users, which has hastened our time to action. No longer do analysts need to always analyze and serve findings to the business; rather, we can create and share dashboards that empower the business to act on their own, and engage in the success of their teams with new insight. 

Above all, Calabrio has helped us hone in on the customer journey with a level of intimacy that we've never had before. Pulling together data from disparate systems has allowed us better insight into the customer journey, and support agent readiness. In turn, we can improve customer loyalty, which allows us to be an elite provider for our clients and their customers. Additionally, Radial’s active vendor/client partnership has led to the birth of new functionality. Calabrio has always prioritized our needs and collaborated with us to make sure the platform is executing based on our vision. Features include table stakes offerings such as voice and text analytics, but also advanced technology offerings such as Sentiment Analysis, Transcription, and Desktop Analytics. These tools have enabled us to support and trend new client deployments, and identify productivity opportunities, while continuing to identify business decisions that have an impact on customer effort and loyalty. 

A final thought to share is that this foundation—the bedrock that the future of customer service will be built on—is repeatable. When pitching to executives, you need to frame it as exactly what it is: an investment. Don't sell the features of an asset like Calabrio. Sell the raw, tangible value that it will unlock. Talk about not just the data, but what the data will ultimately allow you to do. Focus on the return on investment from things like performance enhancements and superior visibility. Do a proof of concept if you need to. Once executives see what Calabrio can do, they'll wonder how they were ever able to survive without it.