Retail companies need to supply their service desk analysts with the right kind of customer data if they want harness the full potential of their call centres.
Call centre operators are a key point of contact and cost for most major retailers, however they are rarely have the tools to function at their maximum.
Crimson’s chief retail IT consultant, Simon Chave, said: “The holy grail for retailers is a one call solution. When call centre staff have all their customers’ little data at their fingertips they can provide excellent customer service whilst bringing down the operating costs per call. They can also use the data to upsell products.”
For decades, retailers have been told to store Big Data about their customers, to enable them to make better informed business decisions when it comes to pricing, marketing, inventory management, and even smarter store layouts.
As a result, many retail businesses have adjusted their service models to better collect and store Big Data but the problem is, in the event of having to resolve an incoming enquiry from a customer, call centre operators are being met with a swathe of Big Data that is difficult, and often impossible, to process.
Multichannel retailers are storing a huge critical mass of Big Data to boost instore customer experience but this information is of little use when a customer phones a call centre with an enquiry.
At this stage, you only want to access the Little Data – who does this phone number belong to? What have they ordered? Where did they order from? When is their item due?
This Little Data will make your service teams more responsive, your call lengths shorter, and your customers happier. However, disseminating Little Data from Big Data is a huge challenge for service desks. While swathes of Big Data are useful for long term business decisions, they are very difficult to wade through when in the middle of a call with an exasperated customer.
In 2014, the Forrester CRM Adoption Study recommended: “To truly extract value from Big Data, retailers need to start by abandoning everything they know about data accumulation, analysis and activation and concentrate instead, on helping their service teams better access, analyse, and interpret data.”
The solution is to provide operators with an application like Unified Service Desk (USD), a Microsoft Dynamics-based CRM application layer that provides operatives with critical Little Data upon receiving an incoming enquiry.
With USD, you better equip your call centre operatives with the skills they need to handle multiple different enquiries. USD includes Agent Scripting, meaning you can provide your call centre operatives with certain questions to ask during a particular scenario with a customer, and trigger certain functionality depending on the answer to that question.
It utilises Little Data, stemmed from Big Data, to suggest prompts and questions for call centre operatives to ask during a phone call. This enables you to have one customer service representative handling multiple call types by having the USD guide them through the process for each.
They can then utilise the application to route a call to other representatives without losing the context of the call. There are few things more irritating for customers than being passed around a call centre from person to person.
If you would like to discuss unified service desk with one of our leading retail IT consultants please call 01675 466 477 or email marketing@crimson.co.uk.
