Improving customer loyalty through proactive communications.

"Improving customer loyalty" has been the traditional mantra of the call center since inception. As economic and regulatory pressures continue to squeeze the enterprise, however, the need to ensure customer satisfaction has reached a tipping point and has made the art of customer communications a tenuous proposition. Too often, customer service professionals are consumed with efforts to put out the fires of dissatisfaction, spending the majority of their time resolving customer complaints and problems. Few call centers have embraced the idea of proactive customer care--the ability to reach out to customers before they have a chance to become a frustrated and dissatisfied incoming caller.

As call centers become more ingrained in strategic initiatives, they require innovative thinking and models that leverage proactive customer outreach programs that are cost-effective and efficient at mitigating customer service issues before they arise. Customer notification services can be an ideal solution for companies looking to deliver customer welcome calls, payment reminders, new service/upgrade information and various other personalized and value-added touches.

By proactively making contact at each step in the customer relationship lifecycle, businesses can engender heightened customer loyalty while diffusing potentially frustrating situations and more effectively allocating agent time and resources.

The Interaction Begins

When a customer purchases goods or services, he or she begins an interaction and ongoing business relationship with the enterprise. Good businesses recognize the potential for profitably lies in how it maintains and strengthens the customer relationship over time. Results are generated when the enterprise makes it easy for a customer to do business with it. Because customers generally place significant value on the quality and speed of interactions, the quicker and easier the enterprise can make it for the customer, the more likely he or she will remain a loyal consumer.

At almost every phase of the customer lifecycle--from activating accounts to answering questions--the enterprise has the opportunity to distinguish itself from the competition with customer care that anticipates needs and streamlines the delivery of that information, making each interaction quick and resourceful. While many companies understand the need to personalize and streamline interactions, there is still a lag between knowledge of the situation and actual implementation of the practice.

One of the main hurdles in streamlining the process is that most customer-to-business communication is initiated by the customer. Inbound calls to a call center immediately generate a reactionary feeling, as the customer initiates the dialog. Oftentimes, these calls are of the routine and repetitive variety, focusing on items such as account balances or shipping times.

Inbound calls consume the majority of the bandwidth that most call centers have, impacting staffing and costs. The inability to preempt inbound inquiries can also have a negative impact on customer satisfaction as well. The more times a customer has to call to resolve a problem or obtain information, the more likely he or she is to become frustrated or dissatisfied with the business, jeopardizing the relationship. As many wireless, credit card and ISP companies have learned over the past few years, increased customer frustration leads to churn. Given the enormous economic and competitive pressures most businesses face, combined with the mounting choices consumers have, preventing customer churn has become a mantra readily embraced across all industries.

To combat frustration and customer churn, more companies are seeking ways that will enable them to effectively communicate with the customer while significantly reducing the number of inbound calls a contact center receives. Companies can no longer wait for the customer to initiate the dialog regarding products and services. To effectively communicate with the customer and diffuse the potential for negative interactions, companies need to alter traditional businesses practices and become more proactive in the customer communication arena.

Getting Proactive -- Know Your Audience

For companies in any industry, a good proactive, outbound customer communications program can be a tremendous competitive advantage. It increases customer loyalty and retention while lowering the costs affiliated with manual or agent-based outreach. Proactive customer care is a practice that is designed to preempt inbound calls and lessen call volume by delivering valuable information to the customer before the need to call into a call center arises. As with any worthwhile customer care endeavor, the first step in proactive communication is to develop an understanding and knowledge base about the target audience.

Customer preferences should be the driver behind all proactive communications campaigns. As demonstrated by the tremendous support and advocacy of the do-not-call list, consumers don't want to be bothered by outbound calls of limited value. Customers need to feel as if they are in control of how they receive communications, and deciding when, where, how and how often they are contacted. Proactive customer care means providing customers with options that let them control the means of communications and can be achieved by letting the customers opt-in to such services.

The purpose of a proactive campaign is not to bombard customers with outbound communications but to provide relevant insightful information that a customer would find valuable and worth picking up the phone to call and find out about.

Getting Proactive -- Tailoring Information Delivery

Determining how and when to contact a customer is paramount to the success or failure of a good proactive communications program. Proactive customer programs need to be tailored to fit individual customers' preferences. Businesses need to personalize the interactions, delivering the relevant information when, where and how the customer wants.

Technology advances have provided customers with a growing choice of multiple communications platforms. Along with traditional modes of communications, like phone and fax, the proliferation of multiple communications devices such as e-mail, wireless and SMS have created new ways for customers to glean relevant business information. It also provides businesses with the opportunity to further personalize their interactions.

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Providing multiple avenues for the receipt of information provides new opportunities for proactive customer care. Customers need to be able to tailor the means of communications by having a device preference opt-in. Enabling a customer to tailor the means and time of message delivery puts him or her in control of proactively receiving the information, making repetitive calls to the call center unnecessary.

Proactively pushing the information to the customer on his or her terms lessens inbound call volume and deflects the opportunity for frustration to set in, an important step in increasing customer loyalty.

Getting Proactive -- Information You Can Use

Generating customer loyalty usually means giving customers what they want. Proactive customer communications follow this mantra by giving customers control options, varying from how they want to be contacted to when they want it; it also means they have an opportunity to complete transactions rather than merely receiving information.

Providing customers with the relevant information they need deflects the potential for inbound calls. Organizations across all industries have the opportunity to provide proactive customer care. Following are some examples.

Telecommunications companies can notify customers if they are encroaching usage thresholds and offer alterative minutes plans; warn them of service disruptions; provide information on account balances and options to pay by credit card; and welcome new customers and verify plan type and contact information.

Financial services organizations can proactively keep borrowers up-to-date on loan status; notify customers when they are approaching or have exceeded spending limits; and integrate with fraud detection systems to alert customers when suspicious activity occurs.

Insurers can speed up the claims settlement process by notifying customers on settlement status; inform them of policy and rate changes; make them aware of missing paperwork; and alert customer to new treatment options.

Utilities can notify customers of overdue account balances; alert critical care facilities of impending outages; and inform customers of rate changes.

A Side Benefit -- Reducing Labor Costs And Increasing Service Levels

Proactive customer care is designed to build customer loyalty and lengthen the business relationship. In addition to augmenting the quality of customer communications, outbound interactions also address a critical factor facing many call centers today--high labor costs. By automating the proactive delivery of customer information, organizations can substantially reduce the level of inbound call volume. These types of proactive customer communications are well suited to offload the simple and repetitive calls that can plague a call center and siphon productivity.

Proactively pushing information to customers, such as account balances and expected ship dates, alleviates the flood of routine calls that can oftentimes cripple productivity. As a result, call centers will be able to dedicate more time to the critical problem calls and inbound inquiries that need to be attended to due to threat of client loss.

The call center units of the enterprise are undergoing a transformation. While federal regulations such as the do-not-call list have hampered the marketing practices of the call center, increased competitive pressures have forced the customer care business units to reexamine their business practices to reduce customer churn. Enterprises increasingly need to recognize that the path to profitability often lies in maintaining and strengthening the business relationships with customers. Customers place significant value on the quality and speed of interactions. When these standards of measure are not met, customer frustration results, a step in the direction of losing that customer's business.

As businesses in industries such as the credit card and wireless markets continue to see their products and services become commoditized, the mitigating factor in achieving profitably is increasingly becoming customer service. A happy customer is a loyal customer, and a loyal customer tends to be a profitable customer.

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Ben Levitan is CEO of EnvoyWorldWide (www.envoyworldwide.com). EnvoyWorldWide provides companies with a reliable communications network for the delivery of time-sensitive and proactive notifications. Companies are leveraging EnvoyWorldWide's enterprise notification services to drive customer communication and retention efforts, enhance business continuity initiatives and streamline the distribution of business-critical information.

BY Ben Levitan, EnvoyWorldWide