From Cost to Success: How Smart Customer Engagement Drives Sales & Loyalty
In our opinion, customer service should be seen as an opportunity rather than a cost, highlighting examples of businesses achieving significant gains through improved customer engagement. By adopting a flexible, outcome-based approach and hiring passionate experts, companies can enhance performance, quality, and revenue. This shift in perspective can lead to increased customer loyalty and satisfaction, transforming the traditional view of customer service.
When most managers think about customer service they think about how much it costs their business to handle all those customer interactions. I believe we should redefine this engagement as opportunity.
Flip the script. Cost is always important, but we can start to think about customer engagement differently. What are the opportunities to generate real value from these encounters with customers?
We took a few stories to the recent CCE Berlin event that reflect the genuine business outcomes for some of our clients:
- A telco boosting retention and cross-sell conversions by 50%
- An airline that could double the size of their customer service team inside 48 hours
- An energy provider that more than doubled their customer service team inside a few hours
- A start-up delivering 350% revenue growth thanks to an optimized sales team
- An HR startup hitting a 90% appointment setting conversion rate
- A travel company the reduced their service costs by 60% at the same time as exceeding sales targets by 110%
Conversations about customer service are always centered around the cost to the business. Just about every adviser is always publishing all these articles telling businesses how to slash their costs by outsourcing their customer service team.
Even the advice around artificial intelligence is focused on cost. Drive up productivity. Increase efficiency. Install AI everywhere!
Our business outcome examples show that there is a bigger picture that can involve real savings, but also real gains. You can drive better performance, better quality, and increased revenue by thinking more carefully about how you plan your engagement with customers.
Using a flexible platform-based approach is the most important first step. You can’t build a flexible customer service or sales team inside a contact center – what happens when you need to double the team by tomorrow?
Basing the cost of the service on outcomes is another important step. You can pay agents by the hour to sit in a contact center waiting for the phone to ring or you can pay them each time a customer is helped. This motivates the agent to help as many customers as possible, which is great for your business and great for the agent.
By hiring experts who are based at home you can widen the net and find people who really love the brands you are supporting. You can even hire fans of the brand into the service team. You can hire people with more work experience and people who would never want to commute everyday to a contact center.
Having experts on the team allows you to start thinking in much more detail about the sales process. Service to sales, upselling, cross-selling, even outbound sales. How much better is this going to be when you have experts who love their job rather than bored agents who just want to watch the clock spin around to 5pm?
So if you can pay by outcomes and start turbocharging your sales engagement then the discussion around customer service takes on an entirely new look. One that features more revenue, more customer loyalty, and more customer satisfaction.