Call centres: this time it's personal

Visit your favourite website or call your bank and you're greeted with: "Welcome back, Mr Clark! We have recommendations for you" or "Hello Mr Clark. How may I help you this afternoon?"

It's called personalisation and it seems to be all about going the extra mile; showing your customers that you really do value their business and understand their requirements.

Back to the future

Personalisation is a way for marketing strategies to take heed of the old-fashioned shopkeeper scenario. The shopkeeper's purpose was to help customers enjoy their time in the shop, recommend goods that would appeal to them, convince them to purchase, leave them feeling satisfied with the purchase and encourage them to return.

The shopkeeper wrapped up all the 'front-end' functions of the modern company - sales, marketing and customer service - into one seamless interface.

Whatever the size or sophistication of your business, and whichever medium you choose to communicate with your customers - from the intimacy of face-to-face to the virtual world of the web - the aim to provide the best service should be the same.

And now we're starting to see more and more examples of companies relying on multiple channels to service customers in order to maintain that personal touch.

Volkswagen, for instance, recently announced that it is to increase its telemarketing activity to drive sales and enhance its customer retention programme.

This will support its direct mail operation, and there can be little doubt that the personal approach over the telephone will play a key role in fulfilling the company's aim to build closer relationships with customers.

Nor is Volkswagen alone. A recent survey by Noetica, which develops software solutions for the successful management of customer interactions in call centres and over the web, found that 65 per cent of marketing managers now use call centres as part of their marketing programme.

Efficiency v. effectiveness

But in order to deploy that telephone contact to enhance the relationship between a company and its customers, what counts is how you collect the data and what you use it for. This is where the 'efficiency versus effectiveness' argument comes into play.

The Noetica survey found that call centres are under increasing pressure to prove their accountability to marketing managers. Almost two-thirds of the marketing managers questioned said that they set regular volume targets for the call centre to hit, with almost half receiving daily activity reports.

But the same managers would not look favourably on 50 calls a day that result in no sales, even though they may be the ones pushing for targets to be met and exceeded.

Success isn't about rushing through interactions with the customer and consigning collected data to the dustbin of history. It's about maximising sales effort, getting to know the customer and making use of the data gathered, i.e. effectiveness.

The data game

As analyst firm Giga argues, the future of personalisation is in data mining. Database analysis will seek to find out everything there is to know about your customers: demographics, lifestyle, who they have bought from in the past, what's prompted their interest now.

Software exists that will help call centre agents write their own scripts, designing a valuable profile tool by giving an intuitive feel to a conversation.

There are masses of offerings but, if a business doesn't know what it really wants from a technology, then the technology is really only as good as the person that's using it.

Take CarChase. The online advertising provider increased its effective contact rate when it started using its data to identify when customers were about to replace their car, and choosing that moment to contact them with special offers on new cars.

Cross-selling - accessories, services, extended warranties, finance deals and so on - has provided CarChase with ongoing revenue from customers, as well as ensuring that it continues its relationship with customers. As the relationship continues, CarChase has experienced a progressively easier selling-on process.

The internet has definitely propelled personalisation. On the web, one of the best ways to provide a good service is to allow users the opportunity to customise their own pages on your website.

Whether it's allowing them to decide on colour schemes or clicking on a news site where they can customise content to their preferences, the company is giving a sign that it recognises the importance of the individual.

In perfect harmony

We know that customer retention is less expensive than customer acquisition. More customers change their spending behaviour than defect altogether, although the former can have more of an impact.

A recent report by analyst firm McKinsey found that the losses caused by one retail bank's customers defecting to another were actually lower than the losses created by customers who merely reduced their balance.

So perhaps we can turn loyalty on its head by saying that the challenge of personalisation is not about building customer loyalty, but about building the organisation's loyalty to the customer.

Ultimately, what matters is the need for the skills of the customer-facing salesperson to be at their best. This is where effectiveness and efficiency mesh.

No business will succeed without the customer, and it's often the most back-to-basics values of common sense, conscientious thought, and going that extra mile that reflect true personalisation in the eyes of the customer.

Keith Symondson is commercial director at Noetica.

See also:

Call centre churn due to lack of prospects

High stress and poor pay not to blame, says report  02 May 2002

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