Module 2

Customer retention- Behavior prediction-customer profitability and value modeling -channel

optimization- Event- based marketing- CRM and customer service- the call centre-
objectives-features- functions- call scripting- web based self service- customer satisfaction
measurement (concept only)

MANAGING CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE

Customer lifecycle is an important concept of CRM. It involves a number of stages a customer

undergoes while considering, purchasing, using and maintaining loyalty to a product or service.
The strategic purpose of CRM is to manage an organisation’s relationship with its customers
through 3 main stages of the customer lifecycle. They are Customer Acquisition, Customer
Retention and Customer Development.

1. Customer Acquisition: Customer acquisition is a process of locating, qualifying and

securing new customers. It is a process of attracting prospects and turning them into
customers.
2. Customer Retention: Customer retention is all about maintaining long-term business
relationships of an organization with its customers. The customer retention activity of an
organization begins by establishing a rapport with customers and continues throughout
the lifetime.
3. Customer Development: Customer development is the process of increasing the value of
retained customers. Event based marketing, data mining, customization, shared customer
knowledge and promotion optimization are some of the strategies for customer
development.

Kindly refer text scanned copy for detailed notes on customer acquisition and customer
development.
 CUSTOMER RETENTION

Customer retention refers to the activities that businesses undertake to increase the number of
repeat customers and to increase the profitability of each existing customer. It is an activity that
is undertaken by an organization to reduce customer defections.

Customer retention is the mirror image of customer defection. A high retention rate is equivalent
to a low defection rate. Customer retention is defined as, “the number of customers doing
business with a firm at the end of a financial year expressed as percentage of those who were
active customers at the beginning of the year”. Customer retention is an important key
performance indicator (KPI) for CRM implementations.

Customer Retention Rate Formula:

Retention Rate = ((E-N)/S) x 100

E = Number of customers at end of the period

N = Number of customers acquired during the period

S = Number of customers at the start of the period

Reason for switching brands

Brand switching is a term in which customers change brands. It's an easy concept to understand,
but preventing it from happening to our customers is an entirely different matter.

1) Value for money

The first and foremost condition which comes to mind when a customer is buying a product
is value for money. Consumers will always have a brand affinity. If the customer is buying
a Levi’s jeans and it is costly, then he will still go for it if he can afford it. But the same customer
will not go for a lower cost jean which is unbranded. This is because Levi’s jeans are clearly a
status symbol also.

Brand affinity is the consumer's "love" for a specific brand. Keep in mind that every consumer
will have different levels of fondness for a brand. There are people out there that will pay
ridiculous amounts of money so that they can get their hands on their preferred brand.

Consumers will always choose their preferred brand up to a certain point. However, the most
limiting factor is the price. So one of the major reasons for brand switching is “not enough
value” being provided by a brand against the price being offered to the customer. This value can
be monetary, it can be an emotional value or it can be targeted towards the personality of the
buyer. Increase the value offering to stop the customer from brand switching.

2) Marketing mix

A very basic concept but one on which a complete company can be built. Many companies have
erred in their marketing mix by either keeping the price very high, or by having an inferior
product, or by not reaching the proper distribution channel. The people of the company matter
too.

Marketing mix can be one of the reasons for brand switching by customers. If product price is
too high, company can offer a low cost variant which can be an addition to their product depth.
Similarly, if their product is premium, they need to reach the premium channel of distribution
and they might have to wait before they start distributing. Overall, there are many tweaks
possible in a marketing mix to stop our customers from switching brands.

3) Improper service – Brand switching occurs when the services given to the customers become
inadequate. An unhappy customer will never buy a company’s product again.
4) Outdated technology

A brand is made by innovators and not by adopters or laggards. Technology is the one thing
which immediately attracts the innovator type of customers. Hence, if we are using outdated
technology, it is highly likely that we might see our customers switching brands.

5) Marketing communications

The role of marketing communications is to attract new customers and build the brand. Naturally,
if our competitor is good at it, we will see a lot of customers shifting brands immediately. The
only attack we can launch is to have an equally cut throat communications strategy. This will
help us maintain our brand equity, and won’t change the perception of our brand in the market.
Hence, investment in advertising never goes waste, even though measuring the ROI becomes
difficult.

5) Brand fatigue

The last and most valid reason is when people want to try new things. Brand fatigue is a
phenomenon in which people grow tired of a brand. It is also known as brand exhaustion.
When customers want to try something new in the market, they do brand switching and try out a
new brand.

Overall, the above are the main reasons for switching from one brand to another. There may be
others as well. Influencers are people who themselves buy a brand and then influence others to
buy the same brand. Similarly, word of mouth, social perception is all hidden reasons for which a
customer might shift from one brand to another.

Customer Retention Strategies

To improve customer retention, companies need to use their CRM system to its full potential.
Here are ways that CRM can improve customer retention:

1. Customer Delight- Refers to a strategy in which an organization exceeds customer

expectations. This strategy helps an organization to recognize the actual expectations of
customers from a product. Delightful customers tend to stay with a brand for a longer period.
Organisations must have deep customer insight to delight them consistently. Customer
delight can be expressed as:

CD= P>E

Where, CD= Customer Delight, P=Perception, E= Expectation

2. Perceived value of customers- Refers to a strategy where an organization creates additional

value for its customers. This strategy can be successful when an organization creates
additional value for its customers without incurring additional costs. Organisations use three
modes for creating additional value for its customers:

● Loyal System: Refers to a mode that is designed to reward customers for their
support. The more a customer spends for purchasing an organisation’s product, the
higher would be the reward received by him/her.
● Customer Club: A customer club is a membership entity created by an organization to
provide value-adding benefits exclusively to its members. Customers need to register
for becoming the member of such club. This helps an organization to collect
important information about its customers.
● Sales Encouragement: Includes offers, such as free vouchers, rebate or cash back, and
self-liquidating premium. This strategy helps an organization to promote its sales,
attract new customers and retain the existing ones.

3. Customer Engagement- Refers to a strategy where an organization tries to attach customers

emotionally to its brand in a manner so that they become highly resistant to competitive
influence. Highly engaged customers have an emotional or rational bondage with the brand.
4. Find profitable customer segments – With a CRM system in place, a company get a better
view of their customers – including their most profitable ones. They can focus on these
customers and make the most of the relationship. With these metrics, they also get to know
about those customers who can turn more profitable if targeted properly.
5. Know the needs and preferences of customers – An organisation can easily learn the needs
and preferences of their customers in order to formulate effective solutions. Also, with CRM
software, customers get new ways of communicating with the organisation (social
capabilities, web portals, and self-service options). Customer feedback gives an oragnisation
the information they need to improve.
6. Devise effective marketing campaigns – The traditional ways of marketing don’t prove to
be all that effective these days, mainly because it is difficult for an organisation to track the
results. But when they have CRM software, they can use it to track their marketing campaign
results so they learn what works for them and what doesn’t. When organisations track the
success of their marketing campaign, they also get to know what’s important to their
customers.
7. Improve target marketing – Targeted marketing allows an organisation to identify
customers who need higher levels of contacts. When they use a CRM system properly, they
can identify those customers who need expert sales representative support for better
satisfaction. By doing this, organisations can enhance the overall experience of their
customers and improve their business opportunities.
8. Manage customer channels – An organisation need to find out which channels work best
for them – web channels, direct sales or retail locations. When organisations know their
customer’s most preferred channel, they can put more emphasis on it and improve it further.
For example, if you get to know that web channel is what your customers prefer, you can
improve your web presence and use your direct sales team to focus on other productive tasks.
9. Track the success of marketing campaigns – With a CRM system in place, an organistaion
can track the success of their marketing campaigns in real numbers. Since CRM system lets
them know whether their campaign is successful or not, organisations can change their
 campaign in between if they are not getting the desired results. Therefore, a CRM system
allows a company to invest in campaigns that are effective for their organization.
10. Identify customer attrition patterns – It is difficult as well as expensive for businesses to
deal with customer attrition. It is vital for businesses to find out why their customers leave
them. CRM system can identify the patterns in customer attrition and show the ways to
prevent it.
11. Lower overall operating costs – A CRM system is known to reduce organisation’s overall
operating costs. With CRM software, they get a 360-degree view of their customers, which
helps them devise efficient and cost-effective ways of serving their customers. It allows
organisations to invest in customers who will give them higher returns. If a company
increases their customer retention rates, they can also increase their profits.

BEHAVIOR PREDICTION

Predicting customer behaviour is a tool for companies to consistently entice customers and keep
them engaged for longer such that they not only provide repeat business but also become brand
advocates for the company. Marketers understand that predicting customer behaviour is now an
indispensable part of their jobs.

Customer behavior prediction identifies behaviors among groups of customers to predict how
similar customers will behave under similar circumstances. Customer Behavior Modeling is
defined as the creation of a mathematical construct to represent the common behaviors observed
among particular groups of customers in order to predict how similar customers will behave
under similar circumstances.

Many customer behavior models are based on an analysis of Recency, Frequency and Monetary
Value (RFM). This means that customers who have spent money at a business recently are more
likely than others to spend again, that customers who spend money more often at a business are
more likely than others to spend again and that customers who have spent the most money at a
business are more likely than others to spend again.
The marketing decisions that come for Behaviour Prediction Analysis are:

● Preemptively offering discounts to the existing customers who are at risk of churning.
● Refining target marketing campaigns for smaller customer segments or specific products.
● Packaging certain products together and fixed-pricing them to sell more products and
increase their profitability.
● Cross-selling products likely to be purchased with other products.

Behavior Prediction Analysis includes 4 variations

Behavior Prediction uses past consumer behavior to foresee the future behavior of their
customers. This analysis includes several variations.

1. Propensity-to-buy analysis- Understanding what a particular customer might buy. What

product is a particular customer likely to buy next? This analysis studies the following points:
Who has bought?
What have they bought?
When did they buy it?
In what order did they make the purchases?
What combinations of products were bought by which set of customers?

2. Next Sequential Purchase- Predicting the customers’ next buy. Here the organization will be
analyzing when the next purchase of the customer will be happening.

3. Product Affinity Analysis- Understanding which products will be bought with other
products. A company must see if there are combinations of products that frequently co-occur in
transactions. This analysis is also known as market basket analysis.

4. Price elasticity modeling and dynamic pricing- Determine the best price for a given
product. Price elasticity modeling is used to find the price point of maximum profitability.
Dynamic pricing (surge pricing/demand pricing/time-based pricing) is a pricing strategy in which
businesses set flexible prices for products based on current market demands. For that
organizations give different price for the product in different periods and they analyse sales. Thus
 they can analyse whether the price is having an impact in the selling of the product. For that, they
can find out which is the best suitable price for that product.

Benefits of Behaviour Prediction Analysis

● It is now practical to develop cost-effective and highly targeted marketing campaigns.

● Businesses now focus on knowing their customers with real needs and preferences,
leading to better customer satisfaction.
● Businesses stop throwing away money spent on marketing to the wrong customers.
● By knowing their customers, organizations can be assured of the fact that they will
always be kept ahead of their competition.

CUSTOMER PROFITABILITY AND VALUE MODELING

The customer profitability is “the profit the firm makes from serving a customer or customer
group over a specified period of time, specifically the difference between the revenues earned
from and the costs associated with the customer relationship in a specified period”.

In other words, customer profitability focuses on the profitability of a specific customer. How
much revenue do they bring in? How much time, resources, etc. do they require from your
company? By calculating the profitability of each customer, you have some great business
insights on productivity, resource allocation, etc.

How to Measure Customer Profitability

Step 1: Identify existing channels of customer contact

The best way to begin measuring customer profitability is by identifying all the potential
channels a customer can interact with the company. By understanding all potential channels of
contact, a company can begin to evaluate the costs associated with those channels. This not only
includes the product or service cost of what their customers buy, but may include other costs
such as:

● Marketing costs
● Customer service contact costs
● Social media contact costs
● Shipping costs — especially if you fund return shipping
● Return costs, including restocking or refurbishing

Step 2: Define customer groups

Some businesses have well-defined customer segments, allowing them to more easily analyze
their customer profitability. These segments can be based on the size of the business or business
unit they buy from, or on the behavioral segmentation of customers derived from a segmentation
exercise.

If our company currently doesn’t have customer groups well defined, we can define them now.
Based on our business, what types of customers do we have and why do they buy from us? Using
the answers to these questions will help us group together our key buyers and understand their
motivations to purchase.

Step 3: Find the data and establish customer profitability metrics

In this step, companies need to put on their detective hat and search for the details necessary to
help get their colleagues from Step 1 to here. The key questions to ask are "Do we have the
data?" and “How easily tracked and accessible is the data?" By asking these questions, our
organization can start to clearly define customer profitability metrics, so we can dig into which
customers are costing us more money than others.

Marketing spend and cost per transaction is another important customer profitability metric to
consider, as there can be hidden pearls in this data when we break it down by marketing channel
and tie it to specific customer groups.

Ultimately what we’ll end up with after finding the data and defining the metrics will be an
average cost per activity, such as:

Marketing cost to generate an order

 Average customer service contact per order
Average cost per customer service contact
Average return rate
Average shipping cost

Step 4: Putting together customer profitability analysis

Putting this all together, let’s say a company has two customer segments, Segment A and
Segment B. The average revenue per transaction of Segment A is 75 dollars and Segment B is
100 dollars. That means Segment B brings more revenue to the company with every transaction.
Using this data alone, the company can shift their strategy, budget and even product development
to cater more to Segment B, as they are more profitable than Segment A.

VALUE MODELING

Value modeling deals with the value of customer’s other features like ability to bring in more
profitable customers or the potential to be a more profitable customer. It is an analysis which is
derived on the basis of data collected from customers. Value modeling is the analysis of the
additional benefits a company receives from its customers other than profit.

Example: Ability of a customer to generate goodwill for the company

CHANNEL OPTIMISATION

Channel optimisation is the most important area affecting an organisation’s profitability. It is the
process by which a company uses data to manage and improve the channel to enhance customer
experiences, increase interactions and drive an increase in incremental conversions. Channel
optimisation is offering the right message to the right customer at the right time. What is the best
way to communicate with the customer? This decision process is known as channel optimization.
There are two parts to channel optimization. The first concerns achieving a balance between
fulfilling customer preferences and lowering the cost to serve each customer. This entails
knowing what your customers prefer and obtaining pertinent cost-to-serve information. Second
part deals with optimizing each selected channel through integrated processes and technology.

A key component towards channel optimization deals with achieving a balance between
fulfilling each customer’s desired channel preferences versus achieving the organization’s desire
to secure the lowest cost-to-serve channel option for each customer.

Organizations will have to take the necessary steps to learn which channel(s) their customers
prefer to use to engage with the organization (e.g., email, face-to-face meetings, telephone
calls with Contact Centre personnel, direct mail, dialogue on public or private Social Media
channels, in-store face-to-face discussions, mobile apps, and your Website/ecommerce portal)?
To secure this information, organizations need to perform analysis of their customers’ channel
preferences today – as determined by their current purchase behavior with the organization

Regarding cost-to-serve, organizations need to ask these two questions: Does the organization
know how much it costs to serve each customer via their preferred channel(s)? And is the
organization making or losing money serving their customers via their preferred channel(s)?
 Determining cost-to-serve requires careful analysis of all relevant channel financials for existing
and planned channels.

Challenges:

● Single or multi-channel strategy?

While many customers and organizations work in on a few channels today, this will not be true
in the future. All organizations wishing to survive will have to put into place a multi-channel
strategy whereby a customer or prospect begins their customer journey in one channel (e.g., via
the Web), then moves to another channel (e.g., the Contact Centre) to get answers to questions
they could not find on the Web, and finally move to say a third channel (e.g., your retail store) to
make a purchase.

● Will a customer’s channel preference(s) change?

Think about how customers’ preferences have changed in the book, music and travel and
shopping industries over the past decade. If customer preferences begin to change within our
industry, how will this impact our organization’s ability to serve these customers?

● Channel costs – learning curve implications?

While certain channels may seem expensive to work in today, as these channels get used more
and more, costs come down due to something called the ‘learning curve’, e.g., think about the
cost to start up a Social Media community five years ago and how much that cost has decreased
in price today.

EVENT BASED MARKETING (EBM)

Event based marketing (also called trigger marketing and event initiated marketing) is a form of
marketing that identifies key events in the customer and business lifecycle. When an event
occurs a customer specific marketing activity is undertaken.
It is an extremely targeted form of marketing and has good action rates because it is initiated
when a customer is more likely to be active in a decision process. The number of triggers or
events that an organisation uses might range from just a few to several hundred.

The “event,” refers to the activity or changes in the customer or prospect. An event can be any
action, activity or change with a customer or prospect that could trigger new buying decisions.
Some events are more noticeable, but others are more discreet.

Here are a few trigger events that typically cause significant disruption, thus change within an
organization.

● Funding announcements
● Mergers and acquisitions
● Facility expansion, relocation, capital improvements
● Executive leadership changes
● Financial performance
● Hiring Announcements
● Layoffs
● New product or service announcements
● Legal or regulatory issues

Types of Events

1. Triggers
A Trigger is a circumstance that has happened to a customer today but which is not
necessarily significant. It is this lack of significance that differentiates a Trigger from a
Significant Event. Triggers are not very accurate and as such their use is not generally
advocated. However they can be extremely useful when considered in combination with
other Triggers or Events. Triggers can be very valuable for activation of straightforward
business processes.
Example: Sending an SMS offering a new mobile top-up when the current one has 10
minutes left

2. Simple (predicted) events .

Most Events are reactive, i.e., based on what has previously happened. But some events we
can predict situations that will occur in the future. This is known as simple or predicted
events. Examples: End of contract, End of loan
3. Significant events .
A single, significant event tells us something about the customer. It is an excellent indicator
of real / potential change. Customers are very responsive and accepting of communication at
this time. Examples include

● Large Deposit
● Salary start / stop, etc.

4. Behavioural (Super) Events .

A Super (or behavioural) Event is a situation where a series of circumstances happen to a
customer within a specific period of time and possibly in a certain sequence. These
circumstances can be combinations of such things as Events, Scheduled Events, Triggers and
even other Super Events.
For example, a Customer may have a Large Deposit and this would be of interest, but a Large
Deposit followed by a Large Withdrawal and then a Salary Stop (within a short period of
time) may signify something much more important such as ‘Redundancy’.
Examples of circumstances that Super Events can potentially detect include

● Redundancy
● Churn
● Moving house / job
● Marriage, etc.

5. Lifecycle Events .
Lifecycle Events are very similar to behavioural events and can sometimes be detected in the
same way. These events are the life changing moments. Examples include:

● First job
● First apartment
● Getting married
● First child, etc.

CALL CENTRES
A call centre is a location or a place where customer telephone calls are answered by
experienced and highly trained Customer Care Agents (CCA) using a sophisticated computer
based software application, which helps the CCA in answering the customer queries.
Call centre is a centralized office used for the purpose of receiving or transmitting a large volume
of requests by telephone. It is also known as Customer Interaction Centre (CIC).

Call centres provide invaluable service to their clients as well as general customers by answering
the questions and clearing doubts of customers. Executives sitting in these call centres have full
knowledge about the products and services of their clients. They listen to complaints of
customers and solve their issues through various channels of communications.

Features of a Call Centre CRM

1. Telescript: Telescript is a script that can be used by call centre solution agents for handling
common questions being asked by customer. It helps agents in easily managing different
kinds of campaigns. For example: When newly appointed agent receives a customer call, he
can refer to the telescript to learn exactly what questions to ask, so as to provide quick
resolution. In another case, if an organization plans to enter a new region for marketing its
product, agents can refer to the previous regions telescript provided by their managers to
create a successful campaign.

2. Automatic Escalations: There might be a situation when the agent is either not able to
respond or resolve an issue efficiently. In such cases, the incident gets automatically
escalated to a higher authority. This feature allows the agents to configure rule or policy by
which the case can be escalated to other members who are expert in the subject matter. For
example, the first responder on-call might be a junior developer new to the team. If they can’t
resolve an issue, in a hierarchical organization, they pass that issue to a more senior
developer. If the more senior developer also can’t resolve the issue, they again pass to a more
senior developer—and on up the line until the issue are resolved.

3. Incident Management: It provides agents with the capability of prioritizing incidents based
on their severity level. The most severe case can be forwarded to a supervisor or a senior
manager who intends to be an expert on the subject matter. Representatives can create
incident entity for tracking customer request, queries, or issues. They can manually apply a
 service level agreement (SLA) to an incident by updating status of the incident record as
“Active, Resolved, or Canceled.”

4. Integrated Agent Desktop: With Integrated Desktop, agents have the ability to have a
360-degree view of customer interactions. Different channels are integrated through a single
interface, so that the agents can have immediate access in the CRM to crucial information
about a case to server customers quickly and efficiently.

5. Contact Centre Analytics: CRM software provides agents with the ease of recording each
and every aspect of customer contact information. Later on, this useful information can be
widely used for analyzing trends and patterns being followed by customers. The reports
generated by CRM on Average Time to resolve an incident, First Contact Resolution
percentage, Average Response time, and Average Cost per incident can also be used for
implementing fresh strategies.

6. Multi-channel integration: In order to provide harmonious customer experience, companies

these days are operating in multi-channel environment. This has set high standards for
companies to maintain consistent, high-quality customer experience regardless of how and
where a customer chooses to interact. Thus, contact centres should ensure that their CRM has
the capability of integrating with other channels for delivering consistent and hassle-free
experience to the customers

7. Knowledge Database: The Knowledge database is a centralized repository of information.

With the help of repository agents can search for solutions, documents and cases in database
which can be used as a reference for solving customer issues.

Types of Call centres

I. There are different types of call centres based upon the nature of their functioning.
These are as follows.
 1. Inbound call centres – These call centres are set up to receive calls from common
public. The most common example of such call centres is a customer service call centre.
Customers of a company make calls and executives try to solve their queries and
complaints about products and services provided by a company.
2. Outbound call centres – These are another type of call centre where executives make
calls to contact potential customers in a bid to do telemarketing. However, these centres
also make calls to existing customers of the company to welcome them and to inform
them about the features of products and service. These call centres also make calls to
inform customers about the status of their earlier complaints. They also talk to existing
customers to resolve their complaints regarding pending bills.
3. Domestic call centres – These call centres function only within the boundaries of a
country, answering the queries of customers within a specific country. These call centres
do not make or receive calls from international customers.
4. International call centres – The clients of these call centres are multinational
companies. The executives in such a call centre make and receive calls from customers in
different countries. These executives receive culture and language training to understand
the accent of customers belonging to different countries. They also learn how to not
offend the cultural sensitivities of these customers.

II. Call centres can be also classified based on the owner:

1. In-house call centres: In-house call centres are owned and operated by the company itself.
This means that the company’s team takes care of the installation, configuration and
maintenance with in-house software and hardware.
2. Outsourced call centres: Outsourced call centres are the option used by companies that
can’t or don’t want to hire agents and spend money on training, offices and technologies. If a
company hires a third party to handle calls on its own behalf, that is outsources call centres.
Businesses that are worried about costs and time related to set-up should consider using the
 services of a cloud-based call centre which does not require any programming or special IT
infrastructure.

Virtual call centre

Many businesses have opted for virtual or cloud-based call centres that combine the services of
inbound and outbound call centres with various advanced features. Cloud-based call centres can
be operated from anywhere, the set-up is very easy and quick and you don’t need any special
programming skills or equipment. Users only need a computer or a phone with internet
connection to access the service. A huge advantage of virtual call centres is the possibility to
integrate them with your existing tools, such as CRM or sales support systems.

Objectives of a Call Center

● Increased Sales

Outbound call centers have salespeople that call on leads or prospects. The primary objective of
a call centre is to generate new sales and revenue while growing the customer base. Typically,
call centers have organizational sales objectives as well as quotas for each team or employee.
Achieving a high rate of conversions as a percentage of sales calls is a common specific goal
within a company call center.

● Customer Service

Providing customer service and support is another common, broad goal of a call center. This
relates to the goal of delivering the best possible experience to each business customer. This
improves positive word-of-mouth conversation in the marketplace. Customer satisfaction ratings
are among the specific metrics used to evaluate the performance of a call center worker. Surveys
are often used with customers after phone calls to assess the level of service.
 ● Customer Retention

A follow-up goal to deliver a high level of customer service is customer retention. This means
optimizing the amount of one-time buyers who become repeat purchasers, and eventually loyal
customers. Retaining existing customers is much less expensive than investing in various forms
of promotion to attract new customers. Along with good service, call centers often make periodic
follow-up calls to monitor individual customer experiences and to detect common problems that
arise with products and services. This allows for improvements going forward.

● Optimal Resource Utilization

Businesses typically look to either increase revenue or minimize costs with all facets of
operation. In call centers, a cost-minimization objective is to optimize efficiency in resource
utilization. Average handle time is a metric used in call centers. This is the amount of time it
typically takes to complete an outbound sales or service call or to handle an inbound customer
issue. While quality of service is important, call centers want employees to make as many calls
as possible in a given work day. Additionally, companies have to compare the sales and service
results of call centers against other investments in business activities aimed at the same goals.

Key Functions of a Call Center

I. Following are the primary functions of a call center –

● Boost Sales Opportunities

Outbound call centers employ salespeople who call to generate leads or prospects. The team here
basically aims at generating new sales and revenue while expanding their customer base.
Generally, call centers include organizational sales goals and quotas for each employee or team.
Each team or employee must accomplish that goal within a specific time frame.

● Provide Personalized Customer Service

Customer service and support are one of the primary functions of the call center. This function
involves providing the best experience to each customer of the organization. This is
accomplished by harnessing positive, conversational skills. Providing customer service is not
limited to a phone call; call center executives also provide these services via email, social media
channels, live chat, etc. Ratings by customers are the metrics used to evaluate the performance of
the call center executive.

● Optimum Utilization of Resources & Meeting customer expectations

Companies either want to boost their revenue or minimize the costs across all aspects of their
business. Cost-minimization in a call center involves optimizing the efficiency of utilizing the
resources. Average handle time is the evaluation metric that call centers use in this scenario. This
is basically the time it takes a representative to execute an outbound sales or service call or
handle customer issues in the case of the outbound call center. As it is essential to adhere to the
quality of the call, call centers also put special emphasis on making as many calls as possible in a
day.

Managing a huge number of phone calls from different demographics can be a significant
challenge for companies. Call centers should provide a positive experience to customers by
solving their issues.

● Customer Retention

Customer retention involves ensuring that a customer becomes a consistent purchaser and
eventually turns into a loyal client. Customer retention is especially important for small and
growing businesses as they cannot offer to lose any customers. Retaining customers is more
cost-effective than investing in new promotional activities in order to attract new customers.
Along with providing a positive experience on the first contact, call center executives also
engage in follow-calls in order to monitor the experience of customers and solve any issues that
might have arrived with regards to the product or services.
 II. Types of Customer Care Services

Following are the types of customer care services –

● Customer Care: Customer care is a vast solution that most call center companies offer
their customers. Whether a customer requires relevant information related to some bills,
unsubscribe from a service, or need support using the company's product or service,
customer care typically stands at the forefront of an organization.

Typically, customers who purchase products or services from a company mostly communicate
with the business via the customer care division of the call center. The kind of services a
customer receives from a customer care center can be detrimental to an organization. Therefore,
it becomes imperative for the call centers to provide their customers with nothing short of the
best possible services.

● Customer Acquisition: Customer acquisition is another popular service that calls centers
to provide its users. Customer acquisition doesn't merely include acquiring customers, but
it also focuses on enabling consumers to get in touch with a representative to make a
purchase. It is a form of catalog sales. Generating business customers requires call
centers to invest a lot of their resources and generally need a sales agent to contact
potential buyers over the phone. Along with businesses selling their products to the
customers, they often also extend the products and services to other organizations as well.

● Business-to-Business: There are many call centers that are outsourced to offer services
to business to business. Various important functions of the organizations are contracted to
call centers. This allows businesses to concentrate on their key operational areas and
allow dedicated professionals to take care of the other services. Call centers often aid
with healthcare, human resources, business technology support, insurance services, office
supplies, travel, etc. Furthermore, call center professionals are ideal when it comes to
doing business to business sales. Business to business is an extensive market and a huge
as an aspect of call center services.
 ● Direct Response: Direct response is highly vital for any business that is looking to
generate new customers and leads. Direct response services required call center
representatives to be available to help customers with the sales process. These consumers
may contact the agent because they found the product on promotional channels that
include catalog, TV, internet, or radio commercial. Direct response is very important to
businesses as it is responsible for generating revenue.

This type of service is often staffed with the most qualified resources, including qualified and
trained representative who holds a strong knowledge with regards to the products and services.
Additionally, these professionals are also skilled in services such as up-selling items, soft selling,
cross-selling, etc. While the direct response is closely similar to customer acquisition, the direct
response typically requires the executive to generate sales when the potential customers contact a
company to make a purchase of a certain product or service rather than company making calls to
the customers and convincing them to buy a particular product or service.

CALL SCRIPTING

A call script is a pre-written guide with helpful information used by support agents during
customer calls. Many call centers used call scripting to help maintain information consistency
and allow agents to quickly help the customer. A well-crafted contact center script can help
agents create meaningful conversations.

Benefits of Call Scripts

There are several reasons companies choose to integrate the use of call scripts into their agent's
day-to-day requirements. Some of the benefits of call scripts are:

Minimize Human Error

Call scripts are a great reference tool to use when agents feel stuck when talking with a customer
or just need a refresher on the processes set in place for our calls. Human errors are minimized,
because scripts are automated and have no chance for human error.

Promote Consistency

One of the major advantages of call scripts is that they keep the conversations with customers
consistent across the board. It ensures that customers receive consistent responses no matter
which agent they are speaking with.

Create Confidence

Agents are more confident when handling a customer's problem knowing that they have a call
script to rely on if they get stuck. Instead of worrying and anticipating how they are going to help
the customer, agents are more relaxed and are able to really take the time to listen. Since
company’s call center agents are essentially the face or the voice of company’s brand it is
important that they are confident.

Monitor Call Quality and Performance

The scripts are used to monitor the quality and performance of calls, knowing the best practices
makes it easier to identify lower-performing scripts to increase their performance. When you use
your best script, customers will also have a better experience.

Integrate Systems

The scripts are easy to integrate with your IVR system so that your agents can easily access
customer information and respond to customer specific needs accordingly.

WEB-BASED SELF-SERVICE

Web-based self-service is a form of customer service and support that lives on the internet —
your business’s website, specifically. It allows website visitors and customers to identify
solutions and resolve their challenges through support-focused resources like your knowledge
base, webinars, and FAQs. This allows customers to find the answers they need without ever
having to speak with another person or support representative.

Web-based self-service is a type of electronic support that allows customers and employees to
access information and performs routine tasks over the internet, without requiring any interaction
with a representative of an enterprise.

How does web-based self-service work?

Web-based self-service may work through a self-service portal on which customers have
accounts. It may also be accessible to access via a specific page, such as a help and support
center, on your website. Within these locations, visitors should be able to access organisation’s
self-service materials (e.g. community, knowledge base, videos, and more).

Benefits of Web-Based Self-Service

There are a number of benefits that result from web-based self-service which positively impact
business’s bottom line.

1. Save customer service and support reps valuable time.

When you readily provide answers to your customers’ frequently asked questions and
information about how to resolve their own, your reps will have fewer calls and emails to
respond to. This saves their valuable time by allowing them to focus on the customers with
complex problems instead of those with issues that could be solved with the help of some type of
self-service support (e.g. knowledge base article or automated chatbot).
2. Reduce your customer service and support costs.

Web self-service helps you drive customer service and support costs down, too. When you
provide the answers and support your customers seek in a way that teaches them, they will be
able to solve their problems without the help of reps. Additionally, they’ll learn how to
consistently mitigate their challenges on their own time — and in turn, you’ll avoid managing a
large team of service and support reps that you need to hire and pay.

3. Drive traffic to your website.

Whether you have a self-service portal, help center web page, or both, your business’s web-based
self-service will be connected to your website. That means, when someone wants to access your
self-service, you gain traffic on your website. This increases the chances of them learning about
your products, buying the latest version of your service, contributing to your customer-based
community, clicking your CTAs, and following links to your social media sites.

4. Empower and educate your customers.

Empowering and educating your customers will naturally happen when you provide them with
web-based self-service — this is because you’re allowing them to find the answers and support
they need, on their time, without having to speak to a rep. By doing so, you show your customers
that you’re their advocates, which helps you build strong relationships and a sense of trust
between your brand and customers.

5. Allow for account personalization.

Customers can personalize their account settings in their portals via your website (if you offer
self-service portals to customers). Whether it’s their account details, payment method, or overall
plan, this information is customizable and viewable within their self-service portal. And
depending on the type of self-service portal you offer customers, it might even welcome each
customer by their first name when they login to their account. Account personalization helps
self-service systems understand how they can best help specific individuals based on their
preferences.

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

Business always starts and closes with customers and hence the customers must be treated as the
King of the market. All the business enhancements, profit, status, image etc of the organization
depends on customers. Hence it is important for all the organizations to meet all the customers’
expectations and identify that they are satisfied customer.

Customer satisfaction is the measure of how the needs and responses are collaborated and
delivered to excel customer expectation. It can only be attained if the customer has an overall
good relationship with the supplier. In today’s competitive business marketplace, customer
satisfaction is an important performance exponent and basic differentiator of business strategies.
Hence, the more is customer satisfaction; more is the business and the bonding with customer.

It is necessarily required for an organization to interact and communicate with customers on a

regular basis to increase customer satisfaction. In these interactions and communications it is
required to learn and determine all individual customer needs and respond accordingly. Even if
the products are identical in competing markets, satisfaction provides high retention rates. Higher
the satisfaction level, higher is the sentimental attachment of customers with the specific brand
of product and also with the supplier.

Methods of Measuring Customer Satisfaction

Managing customers’ satisfaction efficiently is one the biggest challenge an organization face.
The tools or methods to measure customer satisfaction needs to be defined sophisticatedly to
fulfill the desired norms. There are following methods to measure customer satisfaction:

1. Direct Methods: Directly contacting customers and getting their valuable feedback is
very important. Following are some of the ways by which customers could be directly
tabbed:
 a. Getting customer feedback through third party agencies.
b. Direct marketing, in-house call centers, complaint handling department could be
treated as first point of contact for getting customer feedback. These feedbacks
are compiled to analyze customers’ perception.
c. Getting customer feedback through face to face conversation or meeting.
d. Feedback through complaint or appreciation letter.
e. Direct customer feedback through surveys and questionnaires.

Organizations mostly employ external agencies to listen to their customers and provide
dedicated feedback to them. These feedbacks needs to be sophisticated and in structured
format so that conclusive results could be fetched out. Face to face meetings and
complaint or appreciation letter engages immediate issues. The feedback received in this
is not uniformed as different types of customers are addressed with different domains of
questions. This hiders the analysis process to be performed accurately and consistently.
Hence the best way is to implement a proper survey which consists of uniformed
questionnaire to get customer feedback from well segmented customers. The design of
the prepared questionnaire is an important aspect and should enclose all the essential
factors of business. The questions asked should be in a way that the customer is
encouraged to respond in an obvious way. These feedback could received by the
organizations can be treated as one of the best way to measure customer satisfaction.

Apart from the above methods there is another very popular direct method which is
surprise market visit. By this, information regarding different segment of products and
services provided to the customers could be obtained in an efficient manner. It becomes
easy for the supplier to know the weak and strong aspects of products and services.

2. Indirect Method: The major drawback of direct methods is that it turns out to be very
costly and requires a lot of pre compiled preparations to implement. For getting the
valuable feedbacks the supplier totally depends on the customer due to which they looses
options and chances to take corrective measure at correct time. Hence there are other
following indirect methods of getting feedback regarding customer satisfaction:
a. Customer Complaints: Customer’s complaints are the issues and problems
reported by the customer to supplier with regards to any specific product or
related service. These complaints can be classified under different segments
according to the severity and department. If the complaints under a particular
segment go high in a specific period of time then the performance of the
organization is degrading in that specific area or segment. But if the complaints
diminish in a specific period of time then that means the organization is
performing well and customer satisfaction level is also higher.
b. Customer Loyalty: It is necessarily required for an organization to interact and
communicate with customers on a regular basis to increase customer loyalty. In
these interactions and communications it is required to learn and determine all
individual customer needs and respond accordingly. A customer is said to be loyal
if he revisits supplier on regular basis for purchases. These loyal customers are the
satisfied ones and hence they are bounded with a relationship with the supplier.
Hence by obtaining the customer loyalty index, suppliers can indirectly measure
customer satisfaction.