TMCnews Featured Article

We like to call the contact center the public face of a company, and not without good reason. After all, the contact center delivers the primary connection between users and a company, whether it's calling into it or calling out from it. We also know that the contact center can get pretty intrusive when it's turning to cold calling techniques, but how can the contact center be better used as a relationship builder rather than a thing most would just rather avoid? A report from ETTelecom.com offers some insight on just how to pull it off.

The best solution here may ultimately be predictive analytics. Using predictive analytics provides one point that cold calling has often never had: relevance. No one wants a random call selling vinyl siding or window sealant or just about anything else that random calls tend to offer. However, that same random call coming when a person is looking at re-siding the house or shoring up the windows to reduce winter heating costs can be welcome by comparison. The only thing that separates the two is relevance, and it's a development that businesses haven't taken much opportunity to get.

Predictive analytics allows a business to better generate relevance by putting to use the huge amount of customer data that it likely has on hand. Businesses may well know when a customer's last order was, or what was ordered therein, and therefore, what's most likely to be ordered and when. For those businesses that don't already have this data on hand, getting it will be vital, and that's going to take a company-wide effort. Unifying information systems, bringing sales and marketing and all the rest together to break open traditionally-held information silos will be a tough measure, but one that can make the contact center a relevant, relationship-building machine rather than an annoyance that makes customers curse your brand name.

With the right level of data on hand, the contact center can then use tactics that are specifically tailored to each individual contact. Instead of having contact center reps reading the same thing from the same script to every customer, the company can make a pitch that's hard to pass up, because it works so well into what was already planned.

Relevance is the key to taking the contact center to the next level, making it a great way to deliver information about new products and services that customers will want to hear about. When the customer wants this information, that call becomes welcome. A welcome call is generally more gracefully accepted, and listened to more closely. The agent, meanwhile, doesn't have to listen to yet another person get angry for interrupting something the customer would rather be doing instead of listening to a sales call.

That value starts with relevance, and relevance starts with information. The contact center that puts relevance to work is the one that likely wins in the end.