Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) can offer contact centre agents a comprehensive perspective of their consumers, helping businesses to increase customer retention, reduce customer churn, and boost customer loyalty.

Changes in cultural and business situations have prompted many call centres to investigate new technological developments in order to satisfy the customer service problems posed by remote work and heightened client expectations. Daily interactions between call centre and customer service staff and customers can have a significant impact on customer satisfaction, long-term loyalty or lifetime value (LTV), and overall business performance.

The call centre would benefit greatly from any technology solution that can deliver more real-time data and actionable suggestions about customers, regardless of the channel they use to communicate with a business.

Customer Expectations Are Always Growing

Customers are seeking increasingly superior customer service support across all channels they encounter with a brand. They do not differentiate between talking with an organisation over the phone, online, or in person, and they expect the organisation to be aware of their history and difficulties regardless of the channel used.

Yet as customers increasingly interact with companies via digital channels, the ability to communicate with them effectively and with relevance is of paramount importance. Contact centres must seek out adaptive service solutions to interact with and respond to customers, with a focus on enhancing the omnichannel customer experience. According to reports, nine out of ten consumers polled, according to Paul Jarman, CEO, NICE inContact, desire an omnichannel experience with seamless service across communication platforms.  

CDPs are no longer exclusive to marketers. Across the company, various departments are beginning to recognise the value significant value of joined up CRM systems in assisting them to better comprehend and interact with clients across the whole purchase cycle. CDPs can equip agents with a more comprehensive perspective of their consumers, enabling businesses to increase customer retention rates, decrease customer churn, and boost customer loyalty, and upsell, but importantly save the customer some have those iterating repeated conversations.

The Utmost Importance of Customer Retention

How crucial is it for your firm to maintain your existing clients by delivering them a good customer service experience? It was observed that organisations that enhanced client retention by 5% boosted their profitability between 25%-95%, KMPG have stated. And improving client retention isn't only about increasing efficiency; it can also help you acquire fewer new customers. A paper from IBM shows it costs between 5 and 30 times more to acquire new consumers than to keep existing ones.

Keeping clients involves keeping them satisfied, reacting to their concerns in a timely and pertinent manner, and establishing a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship. To be able to give this degree of understanding and help, customer care agents must have a comprehensive view of the consumer. Although the agent is likely already have access to a customer's purchase history and call centre interactions, they rarely have a complete 360-degree view of the customer. In fact, 75% of a typical support contact is spent searching for client account information, and that is a poor experience for the customer and agent alike.

If the agents can gain a deeper understanding of their consumers across all channels and encounters, be they phone, digital, or in-store, they will be more equipped to respond to their customers' requirements and emotional condition. CDPs are the only customer data management system designed to handle customer data across all touchpoints, establishing a unified profile with persistent data across time under a single identity. While DMP and CRM systems are more geared towards advertising and sales professionals, CDPs are the obvious choice for call centres that must thoroughly comprehend their customers' habits and issues in order to service them swiftly and efficiently.

The All-Important Customer Experience

How much does the digital customer experience impact a consumer's perception of a brand's products and services? Eighty four percent of customers, surveyed by FullStory, believe that the experience provided by a company is just as significant as its products or services. 2020, the pandemic and the subsequent adjustments have only served to heighten customers' expectations for a brand's digital experience.  

Taking a look at Gen Z, the numbers only increase. Based on a poll of 1,000 Gen Z customers, a Sitecore study discovered that Gen Z consumers were impatient with firms who provided a bad digital experience. 63% of respondents are frustrated with slow or badly working websites, while 37% will forgo a purchase or leave a negative review if they have an unpleasant digital experience.

Great CX = Customers Willing to Pay More!

As customers have shifted towards mostly digital interactions with firms, the significance of the digital customer experience as the main pillar of the whole customer experience has increased. According to a poll by PWC, 86% of shoppers are willing to pay more for an exceptional customer experience. Plus they are willing to pay, the more expensive the goods. Customers will spend an additional 13 to 18 percent for luxury and indulgence services if they receive an exceptional customer experience.

After the pandemic, people are dissatisfied with their unsatisfactory buying experiences and have higher expectations of acquiring a superior experience from another company. A FullStory poll indicated that 64 percent of respondents have experienced frustration or difficulty with an online purchase during the past six months, while 73 percent of customers said that one exceptional experience improves their expectations for other businesses.

Moving Forward with Confidence

CDPs will help enterprises by providing them with deeper and more comprehensive data about their customers in order to promote customer retention, enhance customer loyalty, and enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of business and marketing activities. CDPs will enable organisations to harness data from various channels to create a unified profile for a single customer, enabling firms to tailor each phase of the customer's journey.

If call centres can deploy CDPs as a way to provide actionable and real-time information about their customers, customer service representatives will have a much more complete and accurate view of the individuals they are interacting with, allowing brands to meet customer expectations and enhance the quality of the relationship.

CloudInteract can help you determine what is the model to support your business. Get in touch to discuss more.

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