Effective Customer Engagement Requires Robust Quality Monitoring

The world is more technologically complex than it used to be, particularly when it comes to customer support. Once upon a time, when you sold a customer a television, for example, all the customer had to do was plug it in, adjust the antenna, and turn it on. Today, the home entertainment system nearly requires a Master’s degree in engineering to get working properly and maintain. The same goes for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, and even kitchen gadgets and appliances. This has upped the ante for customer support centers when it comes to the knowledge and skill of their employees.

At the same time, the need to offer stellar customer service is greater than ever. Customers have many choices, and smart companies realize that keeping their existing customers is the most important thing they can do. As a result, ensuring quality customer support is the most important goal a contact center can have.

“Customer engagement” is the name of the game today. Not only supporting customers to the best of your ability – which means ensuring that the quality of support offered is high – but keeping in touch with them through proactive outreach, which can lead to upselling and cross-selling, both of which boost the value of the customer relationship.

Smart grids, energy infrastructures that use digital power use readout devices for energy use monitoring, control,  billing and maintenance, have seen particular success in customer engagement. They are technologically complex, which requires high-level agents. Poor customer service in this sector can spell doom: if customers feel that smart grid technology is not helping them, they won’t use it for its intended purpose: to save energy.

The Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative has built a database of customer engagement success stories. According to the collaborative, successful utilities with smart grid initiatives have a set of common traits. These include educating customers before deployment; anticipating and answering questions before customers ask them; facilitating community engagement; communicating ways to save via signing up for time-based prices and shifting usage off-peak; deploying a user-friendly and information-rich web portal; offer user-friendly Smart Grid-enabled technology, such as smart thermostats; and create authentic customer testimonials.

It’s a tall order, but this type of initiative should be the goal of any company with a complex product wishing to build a valuable customer engagement program. But building the program is only the first step. Being sure that you have built an effective customer engagement program is as important as the program itself.

This is where tried-and-true call center quality monitoring solutions should come in. Effective call recording and twenty-first century analytics can go a long way toward ensuring that customer engagement programs are being implemented and used properly. While many companies have these solutions in place, they often simply don’t have the time or the expertise to properly analyze the calls. Third-party call monitoring is another way to ensure complex customer engagement programs are being implemented in the way they were designed.

Companies such as BPA Quality do just that. Their third-party remote call monitoring services analyze calls that have already been recorded on a client’s recording system, or it can record calls remotely in a dedicated research center. Calls are scored by an experienced team of researchers and the results are easily accessed through a dedicated Web site in near real-time.

It becomes a valuable component of any customer engagement program. It ensures that expensive and complex customer engagement initiatives are being implemented correctly, and that the data they are generating is being utilized in the best possible way to support the customer, further the customer relationship and reap the most rewards.

Edited by Blaise McNamee

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