Call Accounting Featured Article

Call Accounting Helps Retailers Maintain Omnichannel Customer Excellence

  By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

When it comes to implementing an omnichannel customer experience, many retailers struggle, and for good reason: they have more touchpoints than other types of organizations. Customers don’t consider the contact center and the retail space to be separate places when it comes to their overall customer experience, but in reality, they are usually physically and technologically separated by a large gap. A company may strive to service its customers well in the contact center in every way, only to lose the plot entirely with a single bad in-store retail experience.

Customers are used to dealing with contact centers: they know the drill. Call, self-route through the IVR, queue and wait for an agent, explain the problem, provide account information, wait for a response. The methodologies aren’t so predictable in cases where customers need to call a retail store: wait for someone to answer, ask a question and…be put on hold indefinitely. Phone (News - Alert) systems in retail locations simply aren’t built to track performance indicators like call abandonment.

One way to overcome this gap in service quality is with a call accounting solution optimized for retail, such as ISI (News - Alert) Telemanagement Inc.’s Infortel Select solution. Metric tracking coupled with business intelligence can help companies understand things like call abandonment rates, call transfers, adequate staffing levels and telecom usage optimization.

Call abandonment. Infortel Select tracks abandoned calls and provides ring-time summaries, ring-time detail, and daily or weekly metrics to show the level of responsiveness when a person is answering the phone. It also provides dialed number identification which allows companies to capture the phone number on an abandoned call and re-establish communication with the customer.

Staffing levels. Using a call accounting and business intelligence solution, retailers can track the abandonment rates of specific departments, allowing managers to determine if the department is understaffed or if calls should be transferred elsewhere. Traffic analysis reports can determine how many calls each department receives and the average duration of each call, allowing companies insight into its current workforce and how it’s meeting customer needs.

Call transfers. Excessive call transfers between departments can indicate a need to re-allocate resources. Call Redirection by Hour reports identify calls that were forwarded to either voicemail or another extension, allowing companies to determine how often customers are reaching live workers rather than recordings. The Transferred Calls Summary and Transferred Calls Detail reports present a detailed picture of each transferred call, including where a customer call originated, where it was transferred to, and whether the transferred call was answered. Using this information, managers can determine where customer calls are bottlenecking and adjust staffing levels (or staff training) to alleviate the problem.

A good call accounting solution can be used across retail locations (helping with telecom bill allocations) to give retailers the missing piece they need to build true omnichannel customer relationships of high quality. It doesn’t make sense to build up quality in your contact center only to leave customers in a black hole each time they call your retail locations.