Archives: Blogs

5 (Proven) Ways to Increase Call Connect & Pickup Rate

All businesses are aiming to attract and convert leads. That’s one of the most obvious things. However, customer calling is such an overused activity that customers have stopped answering most of the phone calls. Forget about getting heard by the customers in this noise of competition, it is a big deal to even make customers answer your call.

With various tools and techniques available for the customers to filter out spam calls, you need to go with some out-of-the-box dialing solutions to grow your call connect and pick-up rate.

If you want to improve your sales numbers, start with more conversations. Remember, conversations result in conversions.

The question arises, how can businesses increase call connect or call pickup rate?

In fact, as per a survey, there is a strong connection between the number of conversations that agents have each day to their performance. An agent has around six conversations a day on average, although top representatives have a lot more than that.

As customers prefer mobile phones to communicate, businesses have integrated them into their marketing strategies as a point of contact to communicate. Besides that, With increased calls or interaction on smartphones, the number of complaints about spam calls has also grown, making it difficult to get someone on the phone, as they are selective on calls to answer. Therefore, customers have become more cautious about picking calls from unknown numbers due to the rise in the number of spam calls.

Moreover, the younger generation sees the incoming promotional call as a disturbance in their productivity. So, it’s upon businesses to ensure it’s worth their time. Thus, enhancing their call pickup rates is essential to them. However, to overcome this challenge and drive more conversations over the calls, businesses need to ensure that their call connect and pickup rate is increased. There is no denying that these calls’ response rate is entirely dependent upon how you approach them.

Top 5 Ways to Boost up Call Connect & Pickup Rate

Here are the top 5 ways to boost up your probability of call being received by your customers:

Truecaller for Business

1. Build a Quality Database

The word is out and loud that ‘data is the new oil’. Eventually, it all boils down to if you are able to connect with the right audience. If you are dialing for the audience who would find your call relevant, it gains the chances of being answered.

Your customer base is the foremost thing you need to keep in mind while making calls. Businesses need to understand that the products and services they offer have an intended audience, and thus they should prioritize them.

Businesses should focus on what customers need and want and then target them accordingly. Having a good idea about target customers and their preferences makes it easy for businesses to call the customers or prospects looking for their products or services. Hence, it increases the call connect or call pickup rate.

2. Use Smart Dialing Features

We understand the main priority or the mission of any business is to get more conversations, but one needs to know that it should not come at the expense of hampering your brand image.

One of the most effective ways to achieve a business mission is Auto-dialers.

A call dialer is an application that automates the process of dialing numbers in call centers. Unlike manual dialing, it automatically dials the phone numbers pertaining to a selected list of contacts on behalf of the agents.

The right dialer software for the call center is much more than just an automatic dialing solution, as it brings intelligence and analytical insights to the outbound calling process to enhance call center efficiency and improve agent productivity.

Auto-dialer adds efficiency as it lets agents work on other aspects of the call while dialing phone numbers and screen out voice mails and negative calls such as busy signals and no answers. Ameyo’s auto dialer software lets businesses automate outbound dialing, boost call conversions to increase call connect rate efficiently, and scale outbound call center operations.

Ameyo’s autodialer software:

  • Provides 70% higher call-connect rate
  • Lets you know the best time to call the customers
  • Provides an array of dialers to choose from
  • Provides multiple dialing strategies

3. Be Choosy About Area Code

Receiving frequent promotional calls from specific area codes has made customers relate these codes to spammers. Most people do not prefer to pick up calls from such local area codes. One of the reasons that prospects are picking up their phones less is because they are using caller ID more. Let us face it – most people do not want to answer calls from numbers they do not recognize.

People are smart enough to identify if the call they are receiving is promotional or not and are more likely to answer the call when they see a local number on their caller ID. However, According to a survey, people are four times more likely to answer calls from numbers with Local caller ID.

Dialing from local numbers that show up on the caller ID gives you the advantage of a local presence. When a business looks local, it boosts the number of successful connections. Most salespeople can relate to the proven practice of appearing local when contacting potential customers as the results speak for themselves. We are here to help. Give it a try!

Ameyo’s dialing solutions can now call with a number starting from 730 thanks to our new data center in Indore, which:

  • Adds the sense of mobile-based incoming calls for customer
  • Reduces the feel of promotional calls

Hence, creating higher pick-up rates for your outbound campaigns as it adds the feel of a mobile number and priority for the customers.

4. Truecaller Verification

Do you know that setting up a professional caller ID will help you reach out to more customers?

Truecaller for business is that all-in-one solution that can help businesses improve their call pickup rate up to 52%. Call pickup rate is the percentage of calls picked up by the customers against the total number of calls made by the business’s contact center.

Differentiated visual identity on caller ID helps the business project their brand to the customer when calling. While the verified business badge is a reason for that but there is one more part to how Turecaller helps enterprises. This includes the insight and analysis part of the solution that gives businesses actionable intel to fix existing strategies and build new ones based on the calling patterns.

5. Use Multi-Channel Contact Strategy

Improving call pickup rates is not only restricted to calling at the right time or having a target customer database; it also follows a multi-channel contact approach. Call pickup success is much more than calling at the right time or using a dynamic caller ID— it requires multi-medium touchpoints.

In addition, multi-channel experience provides consistent and complementary expertise for the customer. So what does this entail for call pickup rates? For example, a few people will never accept calls from organizations they don’t identify. 

How about dropping them an SMS and an email with the details of the number from which you will be calling?

The contact rate often reflects the quality of the contact list. For that very reason, before you start calling, it’s essential to know your target personas as much as you can. You should clearly define your “perfect” audience and target them accordingly. For example, nobody wants to offer a rainbow to a blind person.

To ensure this, use a multi-channel contact strategy and create a marketing strategy around them. Know your prospect and preferences and connect with them using company websites, professional networks, industry journals, and social media. Businesses can also opt for drip campaigns and inquire about the right time to call their prospects or customers.

Call pickup success is much more than calling at the right time or using a dynamic caller ID— it requires multi-medium touchpoints. Multi-channel experience provides consistent and complementary expertise for the customer. So what does this entail for call pickup rates?

Healthcare Chatbot – Key Advantages & Use Cases

In 2022, The Healthcare industry has become the most imperative and vital for survival. With the pandemic surge, millions of people always look for easy and quick access to health information facilities. Thus, the sector needs highly advanced and proficient tools to match the demand.

All thanks to healthcare chatbots, even during the pandemic, patients can reach practitioners at the time of need. Using Conversational AI for the healthcare industry makes it easy for patients to access healthcare during emergencies, no matter where they are located.

86% of patients believe to get an answer from a chatbot instead of filling in a website form
– Salesforce Survey

AI Chatbot in the healthcare industry marks its presence as they provide quick medical support to customers at the time of emergency. In addition, Healthcare chatbots can automate all the lower-level and repetitive tasks that otherwise a representative would perform and provide 24*7 assistance to the patients. Chatbot enables patients not to wait in a queue for hours for a representative to look at their queries.

AI Chatbot Meets Healthcare Industry

Healthcare Chatbot

Chatbots play a crucial role in the healthcare industry as they help enhance efficiency in no time. There are several benefits of chatbots in the healthcare industry, and it’s not just for practitioners but also for patients. It is very well known that doctors always try to be available for their patients but sometimes it is impossible to cater to every patient due to their tight schedule. So, here chatbots come as saviors as they reduce the workload of doctors. 

4 Key Benefits of Healthcare Chatbots

AI chatbots are enhancing the way hospitals take care of their patients. Here are some of the benefits of chatbots in the healthcare industry:

Healthcare Chatbot

1. Keep Patients Updated

A chatbot is beneficial for patients as they regularly send text messages or emails regarding operation dates, schedules, and appointments. In addition, they send automated reminders to take medicines, suggest patients with tips to maintain their health, and provide crucial medical information.

2. Wins Patient Trust

Chatbots never leave the patients unattended. They win patients’ trust by providing an efficient and prompt response. For instance, if a part of your hospital just works for patient satisfaction and reporting, the waiting time is zero, and with less effort, patients get a response to their queries. This is what chatbots do for your hospital. Chatbots play a crucial role in providing satisfaction to patients.

3. Increased Patient Engagement

One of the most widespread problems in the healthcare sector is that therapists often ask for previous documents when a patient revisits him a week later. Unfortunately, there are times when patients forget to bring documents which in turn gives a lesser sense of the patient’s progress. Chatbots help the service provider to maintain patient data through conversation or last calls.

4. Handle Frequent Queries

Frequent inquiries overload the medical support team and keep them occupied, resulting in missing out on other patients. In this scenario, the queue gets long to answer basic queries for an agent. Whereas chatbots resolve the questions in seconds, enhancing customer experience and decreasing teams’ workload. Chatbots are beneficial in saving time that otherwise they would have spent traveling to the hospital.

For doctors, chatbots are beneficial as they can access patients’ medical records in seconds. They can also check prescriptions and last check-up records instantly at the time of emergency. Although chatbots cannot replace doctors, they help reduce their workload by assisting patients and providing solutions to their problems.

5 Essential Use Cases of Healthcare Chatbots

No doubt, chatbots have good efficiency to transform the healthcare industry. They can considerably boost proficiency besides enhancing the accuracy of detecting symptoms, post-recovery care, preventive care, and feedback procedures. Let’s discuss the important chatbot use cases.

Healthcare Chatbot

1. Easily Schedule Appointments

One of the most tasking operations of the healthcare industry is scheduling appointments. Despite scheduling systems, several patients face challenges in navigating the scheduling system. Due to the long waiting times and slow service, nearly 30% of patients leave an appointment, while 20% permanently change providers.

To overcome the challenges, healthcare industries incorporate chatbots. A well-designed healthcare Chabot asks patients about their health concerns, looks for a matching physician, provides available time slots, schedules, reschedules, and deletes appointments. Besides, chatbots can also notify patients and send reminders regarding updates about medical appointments.

2. Collect Patients Data

One of the imperative uses of chatbots in the healthcare industry is to extract patient data. First, it uses simple questions like the patient’s name, contact number, address, symptoms, current doctor, and information regarding insurance. Then it stores the extracted data into the medical facility system to make things easier like patient admission, doctor-patient communication, tracking of symptoms, and medical record keeping.

3. Quick Response to Common Queries

The common feature of most websites is the frequently asked questions section.

Chatbots can handle simple questions proficiently like:

  • What are the working hours?
  • What documents are required to get the treatment done?
  • How much cost will be covered by insurance?
  • What are the payment tariffs?

Deploying chatbot in healthcare is very beneficial as it acts as an all-in-one solution to answering all general questions of patients in just seconds.

4. Handle Insurance Queries

Healthcare chatbots can offer insurance services along with healthcare resources to the patients. Further, integrating chatbot with RPA or other automation solutions helps to automate healthcare billing and processing of insurance claims.

5. Collect Patients Feedback

To enhance healthcare services, it is very imperative to acquire patient feedback. Deploying a chatbot for healthcare is beneficial to understand what your patients think regarding your hospital, treatment, doctors, and overall experience of them via simple automated conversation.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, chatbots are beneficial.  People in the healthcare sector should deploy chatbots on their websites or apps to provide daily reminders to patients regarding scheduled appointments, get on-time medical advice, receive routine reminders, and even receive invoices. It is not only beneficial for the Healthcare center instead it is also helpful for patients.

AI Chatbots are very helpful for the healthcare sector; they reduce people’s workload. But before the implementation of chatbots for the healthcare industry, it is necessary first to define your expectations.

Chatbot Analytics: Metrics and KPIs How to Track Them

In this internet era, having great products and services is not enough for your business to blow up. If you want to gain a competitive edge, it is essential to understand clients’ wants and assist them in any trouble. But with growing online businesses, it is a substantial financial burden to hire employees to help anyone who comes to your website. That’s why most companies use a chatbot to assist probable buyers.

A chatbot is a computer program it simulates and processes human conversation; in easy words, it allows customers to communicate with digital services like they are interacting with humans. Chatbots work as a digital assistant that AI drives. Even after a business’s bot goes live, their work as a chatbot developer does not finish. After deploying a chatbot, companies need to track how customers use it. Chatbot analytics is a process where businesses analyze old historical bot conversations to gain knowledge about the performance of chatbots.

Around 67% of global customers had interaction with a chatbot at least once in the past year
– Invesp

Adding an AI-powered chatbot to your company’s webpage can help in improving customer service. Adding an AI chatbot to your website increases your online availability and better know your customer base. Using an AI chatbot doesn’t always guarantee a better customer experience. As a chatbot user, you should know about a few KPIs or Key Performance Indicators to evaluate your chatbot effectiveness.

Types of Chatbot Metrics

AI chatbot adds value to your company, but only conversational AI is insufficient. To measure your success to need to know how to track chatbot analytics. To find out whether your AI chatbot is working or not, you can use some chatbot metrics to evaluate the chatbot’s effectiveness. 

Chatbot Analytics

1. Bounce Rate

The bounce rate shows the percentage of users using the AI chatbot once but has not returned to it. As a business owner, your target would be to maintain a lower bounce rate. The higher bounce rate indicates that your chatbot does not provide the web page visitors with sufficient assistance.

2. Question per Conversation

By the name, you can guess that this metric gives you a brief idea about how many questions the visitors have as your chatbot to get the information they want. You can develop a more specific AI chatbot to answer users’ questions by tracking this metric. But at the same time, every user is unique and has a unique set of questions. So the result depends on the goals of your user.

3. Customer Satisfaction

You can create a survey to ask your users about their satisfaction with the AI chatbot. IN the survey, you can add questions asking if the chatbot was helpful or not; you can also add different satisfaction levels. Based on the answers, you can direct your bot.

6 Essential KPIs to Track Through your Chatbot Analytics

Focusing on your KPIs correctly can enhance your chat performance, but tracking all the options can overwhelm you. You need to understand what to measure to improve your live chat efficiency. So here is a list of the six most important Key Performance Indicators that you should measure.

1. Missed Utterances

The bot cannot always understand what the user is saying, which counts as a missed or failed utterance. In such cases, the AI chatbot either starts over the conversation or will not answer. Both of them can be frustrating for the user.

By reviewing failed utterances, you can identify the issue and resolve it in the future. Although it is not possible to account for every user utterance, your AI chatbot should have in place a fallback intent. The fallback plan can be a text saying, “sorry, I do not understand, would you live to speak to our live customer service agent.

2. Human Takeover Rate

This specific KPI tracks how many users ask to talk to a human. The user is asking to speak in a live chat because the AI chatbot is not helpful enough and the customer is frustrated, or the bot cannot answer the specific questions. If this happens more often, you might want to let the AI chatbot answer the basic questions and connect the user with a live rep if they need more assistance.

3. Retention Rate

It is called retention rate if a user interacts with your AI chatbot frequently over a specific period. Every company wants its retention rate to be higher than its competitors. The retention rate gives you a fair idea about how tolerable conversational AI is to the users.

4. AI Chatbot Interaction Rate

The main reason to add an AI chatbot to your website is to improve the user’s experience and increase the interaction rate with the website visitor. AI chatbot interaction rate measures the average number of text exchanges between the user and the conversational AI on each conversation. The higher interaction rate suggests that your AI chatbot is engaging.

5. Goal Completion Rate (GCR)

GCR or Goal Completion Rate is used to measure the successful engagement rate of your AI chatbot within a specific amount of time. GCR chatbot analytics gives you a proper estimate of how often your conversational AI has provided the user with adequate information about the products and services. With the help of GCR, you can get an insight into the trends of clients’ preferences.

6. Total Number of Users

As the name suggests, the total number of users means how many people are using your AI chatbot at a specific time. If you launched your AI chatbot to assist your website users, this chatbot helps you decide whether or not launching the chatbot was worth it. If you track the total number of users at the beginning, you can also see the evolution of your AI chatbot.

If you see any significant improvement in your user base, you can invest more conversational AI. Also can track how many users are new or returning. If the new user number is high, but the returning user number is low, the AI chatbot is not adding any value to your business.

Conclusion

For any new business, an AI chatbot can be very beneficial. It can enhance the user’s experience, but it is essential to measure the chatbot with metrics and KPIs to analyze its importance. And also whether the AI chatbot needs any modification or not. According to various surveys, AI-generated chatbots are the new norms; to keep up with the market, you need a better quality chatbot that accurately understands your client’s needs.

Why Remote Work Is Tough on Contact Center Supervisors & How to Simplify It

Within the contact center industry, remote work is emerging as an opportunity and a challenge, with supervisors having to adjust to the new norm and adapt strategies. While just a few years ago only 6% of employees worked from home, now more than 77% of service firms are planning on enhancing work from home infrastructures long term.

The shift towards remote resource and network management is also being supported through technology integration. Firms are also retraining employees to work synchronously in a remote cloud contact center environment.

Around 75% of contact centers plan on migrating resources to the cloud to provide the right support to their remote value network
– Deloitte

With WFH (work from home) becoming the new normal for the industry, it is important to optimize all business operations. WFH offers greater productivity, lower cost, and more opportunities for contact center businesses, which is why they are investing in scalable remote technology software. In addition, with WFH giving agents and managers more flexibility, contact centers need to support the new norm with the right technology infrastructure.

Understanding Contact Center Supervisor Challenges

Contact center supervisors experience a wide range of challenges, impacting their strategic and day-to-day activities as they navigate the remote resource network. The hardware and cloud infrastructure developed will need to be transformed to ensure utility in the new work-from-home ecosystem

Additionally, supervisors can’t solve challenges dynamically if they use different online and offline software. A lack of integration of tools, assets, and resources impacts their output while introducing the risk of miscommunication and information loss. Maintaining motivation and the continuous connection is also challenging in the work-from-home environment, which can detrimentally impact supervisor-agent relationships.

The problem is also not limited to the contact center industry, with nearly 40% of supervisors across global sectors experiencing lower self-confidence in managing remote workers productively. Supervisors within the contact center industry face the additional challenge of ensuring 99% uptime, real-time scheduling, call routing management, and security & compliance control.

Top 5 Problems with WFH and how Supervisors Solve Them

By understanding the scale of the problem, we can start reviewing the leading challenges that supervisors face and how they can overcome them strategically.

1. Lack of Integrated Remote Contact Center Infrastructure

To truly offer continuous value to clients, remote contact centers need to adopt a dedicated cloud-first infrastructure. The lack of an integrated solution can lead to agent non-connectivity, inconsistent call quality, lack of information access, non-cyber security activities, etc.

The overall output of agents will decrease, leading to additional supervisory efforts, training, and monitoring. It will also be difficult to scale team culture, as solving problems at an agent level will be nearly impossible without a completely integrated cloud-based contact center solution.

2. Ineffective Oversight Mechanisms for Complete Monitoring

There is a significant issue of lack of visibility when supervisors need to manage remote networks. There can be quality issues, challenges with agent performance, call length problems, information delay, and lack of query resolution. Supervisors will not know whether call drops were caused by customers hanging up, agents disconnecting, or technology failing.

In an office space, managers can rely on traditional setups to monitor activities, but supervisors can’t physically move from one agent to another in the digital ecosystem. An AI-based call center software is the solution to this challenge, as it can standardize workflows, provide real-time reports, and automatically update status. Additionally, with key risk controls setup, auto-flagging can immediately bring issues to supervisors for quicker oversight.

3. Problems with Technology Breakdown and Downtime

This is a common problem for supervisors that need to run highly agile contact center services for clients. Traditional equipment, hardware, setups, and data warehouses will experience breakdown as they are not equipped to handle large volumes of remote traffic. With dozens of agents connecting simultaneously, there will be crashes and regular downtime.

A critical solution to this is to adopt a complete call center management solution. The right cloud-based contact center solution is less likely to break down, as supervisors can monitor resource use, application uptime, and cloud output performance. Cloud-based solutions such as chat, routing, IVR, knowledge base, etc. can also be monitored closely to ensure uptime.

4. Low Morale and Team Productivity Due to Remote Connection

Morale and productivity can take a significant hit if the right resources aren’t provided to agents at the right time. Ineffective communication methods, lack of seamless data flow, non-regular supervisor check-ups, and a lack of community, can decrease motivation and increase the workload for managers.

Technology is a true solution for the problem of morale and productivity. In fact, average hold times for inbound and outbound is decreasing nearly 53% owing to better productivity-driven through operational digitization. Supervisors can establish skill-based routing, auto-forwarding to mobiles, and 360-degree customer views, to empower all agents and outsourced agent staff in the remote network

5. Issues with Ensuring Governance and Compliance

A key problem area for contact center supervisors is ensuring governance so that agents follow the proper workflows designed to ensure a seamless flow. Traditional systems lack the tools necessary to enforce communication, information sharing, and customer engagement compliance.

Compliance with key processes can also be monitored through update tools and notifications. Automated reports can provide instant information on agent activity, performance, and quality. Implementing the right remote work policies and monthly check-ins can also significantly improve compliance with customer engagement protocols.

WFH is Here to Stay, Keep the Track

With remote work being the new norm, there are several challenges and opportunities opening for contact center businesses. Remote work is more challenging for supervisors in the contact center industry, as they rely on real-time tools to solve problems with greater agility.

In addition, ensuring KPI compliance, governance, monitoring, and technology uptime is challenging when working in a hybrid remote environment. While the challenges above are impacting the output of supervisors within the industry, the benefits made available through WFH are multi-fold.

Firms can seamlessly handle these challenges with the right technology software, corporate policies, training, and monitoring tools. The right cloud contact center software can alleviate many of the problems supervisors face daily while providing deep analytics on agent performance, call analysis, resolution rates, etc.

Transform your call center operations, with Ameyo’s remote contact center solution.

Chatbot for Customer Support: Key Benefits to Leverage

Lack of customer communication is something that even legacy enterprises can’t choose to afford in today’s business landscape. Customer support and experience have become even more imperative than before to generate new business and retain existing customers. This communication channel between a business and its customers, either existing or potential, must be prompt and super smooth. It is needless to say that failing to create a customer success-based experience would adversely affect the business.

AI-based chatbots prove to be the biggest ally of businesses in such a scenario

However, it would be only half of the story if we say that these programs are only beneficial to the business end of the spectrum. For example, an AI-powered chatbot used for customer support is as beneficial to the customer as to the service provider. What’sWhat’s more fascinating is how machine learning and AI evolution have helped chatbots make leaps in solving customer problems.

Customers themselves are vouching for more companies to use chatbots in their customer support process. A collection of data from various sources shows that 35 percent of users want businesses to deploy chatbots in their process.

Whether it’s real estate, finance, travel, or healthcare, every industry is lapping up AI-based chatbots to reap the benefits of a smooth customer experience. And these benefits are not just limited to saving resources in the long term.

The interest in chatbots in the market has increased by five times in the last 5 years, and almost 50 percent of the big companies of the world are toying with the idea of increasing their investment in technology
– AI Multiple

Benefits of Chatbots for Businesses

chatbot for customer support

1. Ability to Boost Sales

The deployment of a chatbot allows a business to present a platform to its customers that bring valuable recommendations about their product and services. In addition, this type of frictionless experience, 24*7 availability, and faster resolution makes the user more likely to purchase and hence helps in boosting sales.

2. Increased Interaction and Better Understanding of the Customer

The real-time interaction of AI-based chatbots and consumers helps businesses gather more detailed information about customers’ issues. Businesses can use these insights in multiple ways to enhance the service offering on a large scale.

3. Adds an Edge to the Brand Identity

Personality-based AI chatbots play a significant role in shaping a business’s identity amongst existing and potential customers. Being the initial touchpoint, a chatbot has way more potential to feel personal to a customer and carry out a conversation to shape a brand identity in their head. Hence, it is important to set the right tone for a Conversational AI bot to match your brand guidelines and ethics.

4. Provides Omnichannel and Consistent Messaging

Chatbot helps businesses create a blueprint for efficient and consistent issue resolution and feedback aggregation. At the same time,  AI chatbots provide omnichannel and consistent messaging to customers and allow them to interact with the business across various channels like websites and messaging apps.

5. Saves Business Resources in Several Ways

AI chatbots allow agents to use their time and ability for tasks that require deep and critical thinking. An AI-based chatbot can significantly decrease the number of executives needed to process queries and provide basic resolution. As per the data, 34 percent of executives have benefited from chatbots as it has allowed them to create value for the business in other ways.

Chatbots Benefits for Customers

As we said earlier, chatbots are not just tools for businesses to flourish. The value generation at the business end is coming through an elevated customer experience. And there are multiple ways in which AI-based chatbots are helping customers.

1. Round the Clock Availability

The 24×7 availability of chatbots has to be one of the biggest takeaways of this technology. Nothing attracts consumers more than a business that gives its users attention, and chatbots are great at doing that.

2. AI Chatbots Provides Personalized Experience

Giving a personalized experience to customers is not the strongest suit for chat support executives because of the sheer volume of requests and queries. However, Chatbots can deliver a higher level of personalized experience to the users because of their data processing prowess.

3. Faster Transactions and Closures

There are several queries that chatbots can carry out without zero human involvement. These could be customer walkthroughs, making recommendations, or looking for the right product/service for the user instantaneously. Unfortunately, these processes become relatively time-consuming even with the most efficient customer support executives.

With the help of chatbots, customers can transact faster and get their queries resolved quicker.

4. Provides Multiple Channels for Communication

A major part of enhancing the consumer experience is to support where the consumer is most comfortable and actively present. The omnichannel feature of chatbots not only helps businesses but is a significant help for consumers as well because they give multiple windows to reach out to the business/service provider without any lag in communication.

5. Eliminates Human Errors from the Process

AI-based chatbots benefit from endless patience and error-free processing to the customers. Moreover, Chatbots can efficiently handle basic to intermediate-level queries on their own, bringing an executive in the loop only during complex issues. This arrangement drastically brings down the ambiguity involved with human support staff eliminates human errors, hence ensuring a seamless customer experience to a significant extent.

Further Evolution and Implementation

We have discussed how much a chatbot can save per interaction, but the depths to which it allows business resources to be used at its best ability is just amazing. Many businesses are taking their conversational marketing strategies to the next level with the help of AI chatbots, hence bringing a new wave of ideas to the marketing industry.

With the innumerable benefits and strong supporting data for the same, it is easy to conclude that businesses using AI chatbots for their customer support processes have a massive edge against their competitors.

Top 5 Successful Examples of AI in Contact Centers

There is no question that Artificial intelligence has taken the world by storm. However, no matter where you go, whatever you do, Artificial intelligence has some minor or significant role to play. Artificial intelligence dramatically decreases employees’ workload by letting computers take over; that’s pretty exciting. Even implementation of ai in contact centers helps agents to ease their tasks and help them perform better.

The use of machine learning coupled with Artificial intelligence and automated voice responses in a Contact center also helps the agents assist customers by making the calls interactive. According to statistics, AI-powered chatbots will handle 20% of all customer support requests by 2022. The modern age is full of technology and AI that improve everything we do.

The market size of Conversational AI is expected to reach USD$1.3 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 24% 
– Cognizant

Importance of AI in Contact Centers

When customers face some problem with some technology, the first thing they think to do is call a contact center and ask the agents for the solution. However, in reality, listening to every customer’s minute problem will take a great deal of time, and the agents cannot help as many people as possible.

AI is important here, which is a prime example of Conversational AI. Therefore, when a customer calls the customer service center, they hear an automated voice that asks them a few questions about their problem. In the case of highly minute problems, AI solves them by itself.

More than 50% of enterprises will spend more per annum on bots and chatbot creation than traditional mobile app development
–Gartner

Still, when the problem is beyond the scope of that automated voice, it transfers the call to the expert in the field of the customer’s tech problem, which saves much time. The agents can assist more customers this way, so the Contact center adopted AI.

Apart from this, AI is considered important in Contact Centres due to the following reasons:

ai in contact centers

How has AI changed the Contact centers?

Bots are certainly an important use of AI in contact centers, but their applications extend far beyond them. Artificial intelligence can be used in ACDs, IVRs, and workforce management software. It can be used to improve routing interactions, forecast volumes, etc.

These transformational capabilities are a few to consider:

1. AI Optimizes Contact Centers

In contact centers everywhere, AI is used to streamline the experience by facilitating agent information collection, providing context to customer interactions, and speeding up call times. Agents are also redirected based on the context provided by AI to agents with the skills they need to solve a problem.

2. AI Helps with Call Prediction

Many contact centers use artificial intelligence to predict their customers’ behavior,  including how many calls they can expect to receive during a shift. Contact center solutions that use predictive analytics are focused not only on helping agents determine the intent of a call but also on preparing for the interaction

3. AI Helps Discover Previously Unknown Data

AI plays a key role in driving analytics and discovery in Contact Centers. An interaction’s efficiency can be determined and replicated or dispensed with the help of technology that combs through gazillions of call data. In this manner, it is possible to identify patterns and create newer tactics and policies that can be implemented across the organization.

Top Successful Examples AI in Contact Centers

ai in contact centers

1. Chatbots

In the past decade, the number of customers has grown, but the need for services has risen. Consumers who experience problems usually try to contact the contact center, but this isn’t easy at midnight. So whenever an emergency occurs, the customer is forced to resolve it themselves. To resolve the issue, most companies are now using chatbots to assist customers in solving their technical problems any time of the day.

Companies can use bots such as these to chat with customers and assist them in solving their problems, allowing them to get in touch with the customer a little later after the problem has been temporarily resolved. Moreover, artificial intelligence makes the chatbot easy to use, enabling the best interactivity possible. Customers also get satisfied because they have received some explanation of their problems.

2. Voicebots

A customer can become frustrated when the same agent repeatedly answers the same question. Another customer must wait for the agent to connect with a call. There is a long waiting period, and then the customer has to connect with an agent, which is more frustrating because they only hear beeps. To avoid these problems, engineers designed voice bots.

Voicebot can take multiple calls simultaneously and interactively with each caller. In addition, the bots can be designed to optimize indicators such as the Hold Time (HT) or First Time Resolution (FTR). Upon calling the contact center, the customer is prompted to hear an automated voice and reply according to the problem they are facing, and the bot then connects them to the expert in the field of their problem.

3. Sentiment Analysis

Using artificial intelligence technology, contact centers can do sentiment analysis like it can monitor customer emotions, thoughts, and attitudes to determine how they feel about the company. This technology runs based on natural language processing (NPL), machine learning, and computational linguistics to mine the customer’s data from their social media comments and reviews for related products.

All these inputs are then scored as positive, negative, or neutral, and these scores are made available through the reporting tools.

4. Data-driven Decision Making

A data-driven approach to decision-making focuses on making the best decision possible for the company and is based on using past data to help support decisions. That’s where data-driven decision-making comes in. Past information is used to support data-driven decisions. If someone is supposed to decide on behalf of the company, they must survey the market and use the automated tools designed using AI to determine.

These data-driven decisions can increase the business and the performance of the companies. For example, when a company makes their findings using the previously stored data, their profit is increased up to 10%, and they even have reduced costs for the customers by 10%.

Bottom Line

From the preceding, we can conclude that artificial intelligence is progressing day by day and that the application of artificial intelligence to contact centers has also proved to be productive. By using AI-based bots, agents can improve their performance and be more satisfied with their work.

Companies can use AI to analyze customers’ sentiments and increase customer satisfaction. In addition, AI helps the contact center make their calls with the customers more interactive and easy to find problems.

Top 5 Challenges Call Center Managers Face Today

The modern call center is highly dynamic and real-time oriented, with advancements being made within the technology realm to improve productivity and oversight. As a result, the role of the call center manager is evolving from focusing on monitoring and support to analytics and active engagement. There is also significant attention being given to technology-driven hyper-personalization and meaningful customer engagements, as customers interact via email, call, chat apps, etc. Call centers are emerging as pivotal areas of customer journey design and brand experiences, increasing the challenges that call center managers face today.

On an operational level, nearly 50% of contact center firms believe retention to be a key challenge for talent management
– McKinsey

Additionally, with only around 11% of call centers being equipped to provide customers a true omnichannel experience, there is a significant manual load that leaders need to manage to execute daily operations seamlessly.

Why Call Center Management is Highly Complex?

One of the main reasons call center management is tedious, and resource-intensive is that it is a highly complex domain. Therefore, several manuals and automated elements within the call center ecosystem add additional layers of management and monitoring for enhanced output. 

From ensuring customer satisfaction to improving retention, there are several parameters that call center managers will need to focus on within the function. The domain is also becoming increasingly reliant on data analytics and business intelligence, providing real-time insights for more agile decision-making.

AI is also emerging as a core call center trend, where enterprises are scaling up capabilities through automated learning, streamlined interactions, and customer insight derivation. AI Chatbot empowers agents to focus on highly qualified inquiries, more meaningful conversations, and impactful omnichannel engagement at scale.

Let us further explore why working in call centers is emerging as a tedious task –

  • Dynamic workloads make planning and resource management difficult, leading to higher pressure, lower staff count, low morale, attrition, etc. 
  • Lack of centralization of infrastructure leads to repeat customer calls, information mismanagement, lack of updating, and follow-up issues. 
  • The repetitive nature of calling and engaging with customers across cities can be draining, requiring extensive training to deal with angry callers. 
  • The focus on shorter call times, tighter schedules, and KPI adherence adds extra pressure on managers and workers within call centers. 
  • A lack of access to technology integration can lead to offline problem solving, which lowers productivity and introduces risk.

5 Key Challenges Call Center Managers Face Today

There are several challenges that call center managers face in an increasingly complex and dynamic customer engagement model. Here are 5 of the top call center management challenges.

1. Managing the Complete Scope of Call Center Automation

Automation of workflows and processes is one of the largest areas of innovation within the customer center management sphere. Nearly 75% of enterprises plan to shift call center operations to the cloud, owing to the critical benefits of digitization, cybersecurity, and data analytics.

This is making the role of a call center manager more complex, as there are several challenges to overcome when transitioning or leveraging fully scalable cloud resources. In addition, close to 79% of enterprises are also considering investing in AI to streamline workflows, requiring significant training and optimization for complete adoption.

2. Boosting Productivity Across the Call Center Ecosystem

Ensuring employees can deliver regularly is a key challenge that call center managers need to focus on for continued results. Through regular audits, enhanced training, and streamlined communication, managers are improving the output levels of agents across their operational purview.

That is why technology plays a vital role in the modern call center. The enhancement in efficiency, streamlined data access, cybersecurity measures, and process-based workflows empower agents at every stage. In addition, with productivity being a key challenge, solutions such as AI and call center management software help enhance worker output and lower overall channel costs.

3. Improving Customer Satisfaction and Engagement Quality

Customer satisfaction is an essential metric that organizations prioritize for their customer care centers. In fact, the percentage of service leaders who consider cost reduction a top priority is set to fall 32% in the coming years due to the greater attention being given to experience design.

Managers need to ensure that customers are being given an optimal engagement experience across email, call, video, and chat and that the human element is being preserved in every conversation. The transition from a functional to a relationship-focused model is vital for every call center to improve revenue and customer satisfaction.

4. Lowering Attrition and Ensuring Optimal Employee Satisfaction

Even the leading enterprises within the customer contact center domain can experience more than 20% employee turnovers, owing to the nature of the role and the complexities present within. As a result, attrition is one of the greatest areas of attention for managers within the domain, targeting through digitization, training, and other critical interventions.

Employee satisfaction plays a major role in retention, with engaged call center employees being 8.5 times more likely to stay with their organization. Managers need to ensure that agents are aligned with the enterprise’s overall culture, vision, and mission while having the right resources for open communication.

5. Optimizing the Remote Employee Network via Cloud

Nearly 77% of service organizations are adopting or accelerating their work from home policies by introducing remote technologies, better data access, and process digitization. However, while teams can securely access the centralized call center suite, managers must ensure uptime, availability, scheduling, and other operational aspects.

A key challenge for managers within the call center domain is aligning all resources, teams, and assets within the remote network. Multiple tools, chat apps, document sharing sites, and internal communication models add greater complexity to daily operational challenges. A truly centralized cloud call center software is the key to solving this problem area for enterprises.

Conclusion

Call center managers must focus on multiple metrics and strategic activities to ensure optimal functioning across domains. From data analytics to intelligent case management, there are several technological and talent-related challenges that managers need to solve daily. In addition, to offer a truly streamlined and engaging experience to customers, call center managers must align teams through a central call center management software.

Learn more about Ameyo’s comprehensive call center management suite for businesses.

Best Autodialer Software: Features That Win You More Sales

Customer service platforms are imperative for every business as it retains customers and extracts more value from the customers. In addition, investing in customer service platforms is an excellent way to activate your flywheel as your loyal customers will help you get new customers that too free of charge just by convincing the prospects to engage with your brand.

Even if customer retention is increased by 5%, it can fairly equate to 25% of the increase in profit. The reason behind this is that retained customers are more likely to invest more with your brand; this could be, 300% more. This is where your customer service team plays a crucial role; these agents speak directly to the customers and represent your brand while interacting with potential buyers.

96% of customers reveal that customer service is imperative while choosing to be loyal to a brand –Microsoft

While acknowledging that the pandemic has impacted everyone and made the situation incredibly challenging for every industry, auto-dialers come as an effective way to make businesses survive. Since the time businesses have deployed auto-dialers, it has changed the way how call centers operate. Incorporating auto-dialers in call centers enables the software to dial numbers from a list of contacts automatically.

Businesses using auto-dialers have an option to choose between different technologies. There are numerous reasons for businesses to use auto-dialers, such as it helps in generating potential leads, boosting agents’ productivity, and managing marketing campaigns. Depending on their need, they can use power dialers, preview dialers, or predictive dialers.

What is an Autodialer?

An autodialer is a software that automatically dials numbers in the list for outbound calls. It helps in saving time for people from having to dial numbers manually. It has rudimentary capabilities that enable software to automatically dial the numbers and understand whether the call was answered by a person or by an answering machine. They can even play a message or transfer the call to the agent for handling.

The main purpose of using an autodialer is to reduce the need for people to spend valuable time manually dialing every phone number they need to make a call and focus more on successfully delivering their message. Therefore, Autodialer software is quite viable for call centers because it helps in boosting the agent’s productivity to a quite higher level by reducing idle time and increasing the talk time per hour.

Call centers using auto-dialers for sales calls need to know and obey FCC (Federal Communications Commission) regulations besides Do-Not-Call Laws. In short, auto-dialer users must be aware of the rules set forth by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).

In addition, in outbound call centers, you will find agents running several campaigns and manually dialing the calls for different processes such as cold calling for leads, market research and surveys, follow-up, and nurturing inbound leads. Manual dialing is a tedious task, and this is where autodialers become helpful for agents.

Role of Auto-dialers for Call Centers

Let’s discuss some of the major roles of auto-dialers for call centers:

Autodialer

1. Boosts Contact Center’s Efficiency

One of the most imperative benefits of an autodialer is it enhances the efficiency of the contact center. Agents will not have to wait for long dialing a ten-digit number to get connected to a single lead. Also, now errors are a thing of the past with auto-dialers as it ensures that an agent will never dial a wrong digit.

2. Enhances Agent’s Productivity

It is quite essential to understand that efficiency and productivity are closely linked.  For instance, when agents are not wasting their time dialing numbers, they get more work done. As a result, agents spend more time on sales calls, leading to improved and higher sales numbers.

3. Enhances Customer Service

Auto dialers enable call centers to provide enhanced customer service. It increases the probability of agents getting through to the right customer in the first round only, which lowers the chances of encountering irritated people on the other end.

Also, the timing between the dialing and the agent picking up is seamless; thus, there is no time-wasting pause during which the customer needs to wait for the agent to speak. So, if we talk about the customer’s perspective, it looks as if the agent directly dialed their number and started the conversation.

4. Helps in Making Sales Flow Smoother

An autodialer is beneficial in reducing the probability of dialing a wrong number. In addition, it lets the agents focus on their primary work; connecting with customers, resolving their queries, and selling the services. In this way, agents can give their best performance and solely focus on delivering exemplary customer support service and win more customers. Therefore, autodialers help accelerate the speed and efficiency of agents and boost their productivity level.

Feature of Auto-Dialing Software: Generate Leads and Win Customers

An autodialer is software that can efficiently dial telephone numbers automatically. Today most call centers deploy auto-dialers, but only a few are aware of making optimum use of them. Here are the key features of auto-dialers that can benefit your call center greatly besides maximizing the productivity of your business.

autodialer

1. Able to Detect Answering Machine

One of the important features of an autodialer is that it is able to differentiate between a human being and an answering machine. The autodialer analyses the incoming audio and accordingly predicts whether it is an answering machine or a human being who would pick up the call.

On the other hand, when an agent dials the number he cannot assume whether the call would be picked up by a person or would go to an answering machine. So in this way, the agent will have to make the call again to the same number at a different time of the day for sale or convey a message.

This in turn is a waste of time which results in low productivity. With the help of auto dialers, the agent will not have to wait on call or wait for the answering machine as it will pass the call to the agent only when a customer answers the phone

2. Filtering DNC/DND List

When running outbound calling campaigns, each and every call center needs to make sure no call is made to the number appearing in the DNC (do-not-call) or DND (Do-Not-disturb) list. Violation of the DNC/DND list results in making them pay hefty penalties.

With the help of auto dialer software call centers can perform DND filtering while running their marketing campaigns without contacting people appearing in the DNC/DND list and thus can obey DNC/DND rules.

3. Integration of CRM

Nowadays, most businesses use CRM systems to manage their customer data besides streamlining customer interaction. In addition, businesses can automatically update their customer data by integrating the CRM system with a cloud-based autodialer.

4. Real-time Call Monitoring

With the help of auto dialers, managers or supervisors can monitor live calls or ongoing conversations. Auto dialers provide a web-based portal for managers where they can listen to an ongoing conversation between the customer and the agent. It also enables managers to check the call attempts made by agents. This real-time call monitoring helps managers assess the agent’s performance besides implementing the required changes to enhance outbound campaigns.

5. Scheduling Call Back

It sometimes happens that an agent is not able to connect to the customer on the first attempt. In this scenario, they need to call the customer again to carry out the telemarketing activities. Auto dialers enable agents to schedule callbacks and reconnect with the customers. This callback scheduling feature is beneficial for call centers to increase customer connections besides boosting telemarketing campaigns.

6. Call Recording

Apart from real-time monitoring, the auto dialers software can also record outgoing calls in HD format and store the files in the cloud. This call recording feature is beneficial for call center managers to analyze agents’ performance besides identifying agent inefficiencies by reviewing the recorded conversations. In addition, this feature is also beneficial for call centers to resolve customer disputes.

Autodialers help businesses to record, organize and manage all leads. Further, the user can integrate an autodialer with the existing CRM to keep the contact list updated, and it also helps identify promising customers.

Conclusion

Autodialer software use well-defined criteria to automatically dial phone numbers. They play an imperative role in increasing the efficiency of call centers besides boosting the productivity of sales agents. Auto dialers come in handy for businesses that are more into outbound calls as it helps in improving their operational efficiency besides enhancing communication by personalizing clients’ messages.

Applications of AI that will Make You Rethink Your CX Strategy

Artificial intelligence (AI), also called machine learning, has hugely impacted the digital world. AI is based on the process of mimicking the human intelligence process by the creation of algorithms into the computer process. Businesses have completely reinvented the customer journey while taking the CX benefits to a new level by incorporating AI. However, to achieve this, three key components are required:

  • Computational systems
  • Advanced data management
  • AI algorithms

The amount of data that both humans and machines generate is far more than humans can absorb and interpret. Due to the large quantity of data available, the complex decision-making process has become even more difficult. 

This is where artificial intelligence comes in. Since computers are highly efficient in calculating combinations and permutations to arrive at the best decisions, AI is the most logical evolution of machine learning and is becoming the foundational future of business and decision-making processes.

AI customer experience has emerged as one of the most massive and dominant trends in the customer experience strategy. A good customer experience leaves a positive response which makes a customer come back in the future. 

The better and more efficient the experiences, the more likely companies can turn a first-time customer into a long-term loyalist. Through AI, businesses can augment customer experience. AI incorporated CX technologies leverage deep learning and natural language understanding to automate even the most minor interactions that can make up a user’s experience.

For instance, AI augments customer experience through an AI-powered chatbot. It can function digitally through various messaging platforms and other voice assistance systems. Various chatbot statistics show that the most significant benefit of an AI customer support system is eliminating long waiting hours, which is present only with human support.

Furthermore, since helping customer service works more efficiently by automation, it leaves human agents to focus on more complex and challenging issues. As a result, happier customers become regular customers in the long term, thus reducing the overall customer service cost.

58% of the consumers use AI to save their time, while the other 56% said they use it to save money
– Gartner

AI can enhance CX in several ways. First, it streamlines the entire process and improves the overall automated support to simplify everyday tasks and work. The more time a customer saves, the more likely it is that they will purchase a product and the money held makes them return to your business again.

Role of AI in Customer Service

Companies visit employ artificial intelligence can create a much better user experience in the following ways:

AI

1. AI for Hyper-relevant Digital Advertisements

Ads have become more intrusive nowadays than two to three years ago. Of course, there is no denying that ads are not going anywhere, but the experience certainly is up for a change. It is seen that people generally do not prefer advertisements that are irrelevant to the customers and want to filter out the obnoxious ones.

Most brands and companies harness AI to show hyper-relevant advertisements, address this challenge of digital advertising, and make them less intrusive. Machine learning can help companies anticipate if a person is likely to click on an ad based on their online behavior and audience segmentation. 

For example, predictive targeting can help a company to adapt advertisements for an individual customer and recommend products in their advertising based on several algorithms and signals.

AI can help customers discover more relevant products and streamline their user experience in a much better way. It is mainly driven by 80% of consumers purchasing a brand that offers personalized experiences. 

For example, Netflix uses AI to crunch vast amounts of data and present a different home screen to every viewer based on personalization and previous history. The recommendations are mainly based on their past viewing behavior and the overall audience segmentation. 

3. AI Helps Customers Find the Best Available Price

Artificial intelligence also helps customers find the best price to feel confident while buying a product. This is mainly based on predictive intelligence around various price fluctuations. For instance, several startups rely on AI to provide an excellent CX. In addition, companies offer various flight recommendations based on highly accurate price predictions while uncovering other price drops and exclusive deals relevant to travelers.

4. Assist Customers 24*7

AI offers instant resolutions to simple queries such as flight status, refund policy, and much more. Some advanced customer service even integrates back-end systems like CRM to provide personalized solutions to infinite customer issues. This allows the customer’s reps to utilize their time on more critical matters like complex customer situations.

Top 5 AI Applications That Enhance CX

AI

1. Machine Learning

There is no denying that machine learning has a significant role in customer service and customer service is no longer only the domain of humans. Machine learning algorithms help a model respond to any given data and specify how a model should learn the mapping for the entire process. For instance, the algorithm determines the way data should be transformed from output to input and vice versa. Therefore, machines with artificial intelligence are increasingly being used to help the human support agents to keep the customers happy.

For example, In Starbucks, Machine learning enables to recognize the customers as they enter the shop. This allows the baristas to check the customer’s ordering history, making it easier to make recommendations for new drinks that the customer might enjoy.

2. Voice Assistants and Chatbots

Chat and virtual assistants are some of the most commonly used machine learning applications in the customer service industry. Chatbots are used almost everywhere to accurately identify the right tag for every conversation using natural language processing. Therefore, the more conversations a chatbot has, the more correct its response will be in the future. For example, you can allow your customers to navigate themselves by searching through your website and connecting with your business through voice assistant technology.

3. Internet of Things (IoT)

IoT Stands for the Internet of Things, an application system that companies use for providing a personalized experience, proactive customer service, better customer insights, and increased customer engagement through various data collection and transmission. Data is collected across multiple touchpoints based on different environmental factors, which further transmits through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to a data analysis platform, where it is then stored in a cloud system. 

For instance, several innovative home security systems use IoT technology to provide users with seamless and high-end security.

4. Location-based Computing

Location-based computing systems is a general term that denotes the software services that use specified geographic data and information to offer services and information to their users. For example, location-based computing has a huge role in providing a personalized experience to the customers in the customer service sector. Tracking systems and location-based advertising is yet another example of location-based computing.

5. Virtual and Augmented Reality

Augmented and virtual reality helps businesses provide an amazing customer experience with various simulations for real and imagined environments using various three-dimensional graphics and audio systems. Augmented reality also brings different simulated objects into the user’s world, whereas virtual reality brings the user to a simulated world.

These applications are based on head-mounted displays, haptic controllers, and earphones. Various companies use these kinds of augmented and virtual reality in different sectors such as industries, healthcare, gaming, entertainment, media, and much more.
 
For example, Virtual shopping malls are gaining a lot of popularity. They are an online shopping 3D mall where the customers can virtually navigate the shop through 3D technology.

Wrapping Up

AI has become the future of customer service, which is beneficial since customer data processing without artificial intelligence is highly complicated. Customer service is one of the most critical aspects of a successful business that has made AI one of the most attractive technologies. Using machine learning for customer viewing can eliminate this complex processing process.

Virtual and augmented reality is another highly beneficial and top-of-the-line technology that can help companies enhance their CX. Voice assistance and chatbots are the best solutions for customer service.

There is nothing better than Conversational AI and AI-driven technologies to find and access every small link in the buying decision chain of a customer. Moreover, AI has different solution packages ready, enterprise-ready, and responsive to various CX initiatives. As a result, most leading enterprises have started investing in sophisticated technologies to augment their customer experience.

Proactive Customer Engagement: 3 Things to Remember

Customer engagement is a tricky business. Organizations now use multiple tools to communicate with customers according to their preferences. 

Yet, these messages sometimes fail to show drastic improvements in the engagement metrics. It could be due to the incessant stream of communications leading to increased spam rates, concerns over user privacy, and other data misuse risks. 

Include cases of unavailability of products or services, and the customers start leaving you at the behest of poor customer experience. A service center that responds after the customers are already irked does not work either. 

Let’s ponder over an alternate scenario here. What if you can prejudge your customers’ issues before they come to you and already have solutions for them? It could help you reduce customer complaints, improve their loyalty towards your brand, increase sales, and increase their customer satisfaction index to quite some degree. 

Developing and working according to such a concept is the key to the technique known as Proactive Customer Engagement. 

Let’s find out what it means, why it is crucial, and how to implement such a system.

What is Proactive Customer Engagement?

Simply put, proactive customer support is defined as the steps or actions by an organization towards solving their customers’ issues before the latter reaches out to the brand. 

The technique is an effort by the brand to take the extra steps to make their customers’ experience enriching during their journey. 

Being proactive helps make customers realize your willingness to help them before an issue arises. It lets you instill a token of belief among your customers and stands out in the marketplace. Statistics reveal that the brand’s prospects are taking the initiative to help excite almost 70% of customers. 

Naturally, there are several benefits of using proactive customer engagement tactics, some of which are discussed in the next section. 

Why shifting from reactive to proactive customer engagement is important 

Living in a customer-centric world requires you to focus on the clients’ needs all the time. It would be best to make them feel unique and valued and motivate them to stay associated. 

A proactive customer engagement strategy can benefit you in several ways:

  • Build connections with customers: When customers visit your website for the first time, they might find difficulty navigating through all the information.

    Now, if your support agent can initiate a conversation to offer proactive help, your customers can find the information they seek efficiently. This can improve your user acquisition and retention metrics more effectively.
  • Fast track of customer issues: Proactive communication helps you identify customer issues faster and solve them before they grow out of control. 

    It also allows you to recognize probable bottlenecks in the process and overcome them before they occur. Consequently, you can quickly reduce the number of customer grievances or tackle them entirely. 
  • Improve Customer Satisfaction: Since proactive engagement allows you to build a positive connection with your customers and solve their complaints faster, customer satisfaction grows.

    Tools such as instant messengers, chatbots, and feedback collection systems help you improve your service offering experience according to the customer’s expectations. It also enables you to increase conversion and retention rates by improving brand loyalty and trust. 
  • Enhance feedback collection: Customer feedback plays a vital role for any brand in improving its offerings. Proactive engagement helps you initiate two-way communication with the customers and ask for their feedback on a real-time basis more effectively. 

The feedback collection can help you evolve your brand by improving the existing products or services.

Proactive Customer Engagement: 3 Things to Remember 

Since the advantages of an aggressive customer engagement technique are several, it is quite fitting to re-strategize your customer care services accordingly. 

These are the three crucial factors you should consider while implementing a proactive customer engagement plan. 

Listen to your customers

Communicating is critical for any support platform. A modern-day customer care platform uses multiple touchpoints to talk to the customers, including social media channels, online messengers, and feedback collection systems. 

Your service agents should pay attention to these messages and identify the customer needs and preferences. These channels also provide insights regarding the existing issues and concerns among the customers. 

Listening to the customers’ voices can help you understand the actual acceptance of your brand among them. Consequently, you can strategize your engagement strategy according to your audience’s interests or preferences.  

Anticipate the pain points

Understanding their journey map is essential before providing support and help to your customers. Customer journeys help you identify the steps taken by the customers before they convert. 

While the journey is smooth for some customers, others might experience difficulty moving to the next steps. You should grasp the most common bottlenecks in this scenario and help the customers in need. 

Anticipating the customers’ pain points and providing them the necessary support before they encounter them would help you make the journey shorter and smoother, resulting in a better experience.

Send targeted communications

Once you have identified customer preferences and pain points, you can deliver more connected and engaging messages for them. You can optimize the frequency of communication, time, and the proper channels. 

It allows you to build positive interactions with the customers and improve their brand loyalty. Further, it improves your engagement rates and helps you build a healthy customer lifetime value, resulting in recurring sales and increased revenue.

Wrapping Up 

There is an old proverb about the futility of crying over spilled milk. When it comes to customer engagement and delight, such a saying is exceptionally valid. 

Trying to build trust among customers lost due to bad customer experience often becomes futile. Proactive customer engagement helps you avoid such situations and deliver practical support and services. 

Going the extra mile to help your customers often results in a delightful experience, eventually improving your brand value and revenue. 

Visit our website or write to us to know more about how we can help you implement proactive customer engagement strategies.