What Makes Sales and Service Conversations Great?

Computers, smartphones, and chat bots have changed the face of customer connectivity. In this world, where features and price can be copied in the blink of an eye, and competitors are just a click, tap or swipe away, customer experience (CX) has become one of the only ways to differentiate and thrive.

In fact, research by Gartner reveals that 80 percent of organisations believe they will compete almost entirely on the basis of CX within two years.

Customer to business conversations are central to dealing with requests, fixing problems and managing expectations. Across sales and service, mastering the art of these vital interactions is a powerful way to gain a competitive advantage. You can do this by:

Putting people first, tech second

Chat bots are helping businesses to offer self-service options that automate simplistic enquires. Rather than rendering the role of an agent obsolete, this makes face-to-face conversation an even more crucial part of CX management.

Human agents know how to listen, then suitably react to a customer’s opinions, desires and needs. Chat bots do not. As a result, the proportion of complex or emotionally charged issues reaching the contact centre is beginning to increase.

When the capability of a chat bot falls short of expectations, your customers will refuse to accept barriers that prevent them from speaking with a real person. Putting your customers’ needs first means ensuring a chat bot can tell the difference between issues it can solve by itself and issues that need escalating to a human agent.

Flowing effortlessly

Because connected customers enter and exit conversations across multiple channels, you will need to do more than just introduce escalation paths from chat bot support to live assistance. To be truly ready, your solution must maintain the context of conversations as they move from digital to voice, and, sometimes, back again.

An omni-channel contact centre delivers the seamless experience necessary by treating all digital and voice channels as one. In addition to creating a complete end-to-end experience, tracking customer conversations in this way will allow you to use intelligent routing to make channel transitions even more seamless.

Intelligent call routing considers all your agents’ expertise and how they have performed with similar queries in the past. Instead of routing calls to the next available agent, it routes customers to the agent best suited to solve their problem. Efficient and effective, this fast-growing tech enables better conversations by reducing waiting times, eradicating the need for customers to repeat information, and increasing first call resolution rates.

Being always personal

Personalised conversations improve loyalty and satisfaction. The better the exchange, the better the experience. For this reason, engaging customers at the right time, through the right channel, and with the right data should be one of the top goals for your organisation.

Optimising a contact centre to meet this level of personalisation requires integrating every single channel with your CRM to create a single customer view. Only then can your business provide agents with the data needed to have customised conversations.

Creating a single customer view means your frontline employees will have information such as location, age, gender, purchase history, and job role at their fingertips. With this knowledge, they will be able to unleash the true power of personalisation by adapting every conversation to the situation and individual.

Getting better every time

Think about the total number of call hours your business receives over the course of a year. If you’re not using speech analytics to study this audio data, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity to discover what your customers care about, what they hate, and the measures you need to introduce to make every conversation great.

Speech analytics identifies trends, finds the reasons why customers phone your business, and monitors agent behaviour. Sentiment analysis boosts the capabilities of the software further, studying speaking rate, silences and pitch to uncover how happy, sad or stressed your customers feel.

Using these tools to analyse your call data means you can personalise offers, unearth winning techniques, and establish better tactics to sell more. In turn, you will be able to gain actionable insights fast, develop training techniques, and coach agents so they are better prepared to deal with problems.

Free your agents from thinking about tech

NewVoiceMedia’s (NVM) cloud contact centre and inside sales solution is designed to help you outperform on CX. Available without disruptive hardware changes, it plugs straight into your Salesforce CRM and routes calls from digital in an integrated, unified and value-adding manner.

Build an army of best-sellers or service superstars with the right tools and data, at the exact moment your agents need them most. Ready for action, any channel, any time, you can ensure conversations flow without frustration, wherever and whenever customers want and without the need to repeat themselves.

Find out more about how NVM makes cold calls warmer and difficult conversations easier. Or, discover insights and tactics into sales and service success with a selection of free to download whitepapers.

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from TheMarketingblog http://www.themarketingblog.co.uk/2019/01/what-makes-sales-and-service-conversations-great/