Combating customer churn

One of the first lessons anyone involved with sales and marketing is ever taught is the “Four Ps” of price, product, place and promotion. Getting the right combination of these is the formula for successful customer acquisition. But in the case of customer retention it is the fifth and most commonly ignored P that is by far the most important—keeping your promise.

Doing what you said you would do, when you said you would do it, is the most basic of all customer expectations. When they commit to buying goods and services they impart a level of trust that the promises made to them during the time of purchase will be upheld. You can have market-leading products on the shelves of the very best retailers, at the most competitive price, with a compelling promotion, but if you overpromise and underdeliver it is the fastest way to disappoint and lose customers.

Keeping a promise to the customer—and how you manage a broken promise—is the collective responsibility of the entire organisation, although the contact centre is the coalface, and its performance is often the benchmark on which customers will judge whether their standards are being met.

Locking the door before the horse bolts
So, how do you know if you are making good on your promises? For many, the first they will ever know is when it is too late and the customer has churned, and even then the root cause may not be instantly apparent—is there a problem with the product; is there a broken process within the organisation that is causing widespread customer dissatisfaction; or, is an external factor having an impact? It is stating the obvious to say that you need to understand why customers churn, but there is far more value in learning as early as possible if and when they plan to leave, what is triggering this action, how can they be engaged to prevent it in the short-term and what can be done longer term to reduce the overall trend.

Underlying any organisation’s sales, marketing, product development, and customer service operations is the need for a joined-up strategy and ongoing process for listening to and the absorption of customer feedback, extracting the valuable insights and in turn using these to make the right decisions and actions for the business. However, with so many communication channels, customer touchpoints and interactions, implementing and managing such a process can appear an insurmountable task.

Every communication channel you choose to adopt comes with an explicit promise to honour what you have said you will do, and an implicit promise to meet the expectations that are set by the customer. Meeting both of these promises across every channel is inextricable with increasing customer retention. You may have the best of intentions to deliver a truly multichannel customer experience but if a channel is only receiving lip service then perhaps you are (albeit unintentionally) overpromising.
 
Today, there are a plethora of opportunities to learn about the behaviours, attitudes and intent of customers, ranging from hitting the high-street with a clipboard, through to logging on to the cyber grapevine and monitoring blogs, user forums, and popular websites such as Twitter. Yet, whilst every proactive attempt to learn more about what makes a customer tick has value, the challenge is how to manage this cost-effectively and distilling the information, so that it reaches the right people at the right time, in order to take action before the horse has bolted.

There is a real danger when approaching a customer retention learning exercise of spreading resources too thinly, with the resulting information emerging as piecemeal and inconclusive. However, there does exist in many large organisations a vast (often untapped) repository of information right under their noses that is all top often overlooked—the contact centre.

The contact centre is in many cases the hub of customer interactions and service provision, increasingly managing not only phone calls but also sessions using instant messaging, SMS, and email. As the role of the contact centre has evolved so too have some of the fundamental technologies that are used in its day-to-day management. One such technology is the call recorder, which is traditionally installed for quality monitoring and regulatory compliance purposes. These digital recorders have huge storage capacities, capable of capturing every single agent/customer interaction that takes place. Essentially this small box contains the largest source of up-to-the-minute information from your customers, far exceeding that of any marketing database, or CRM system. 

Of course, the problem is if you need a contact centre it is because you need to deal with a large number of customers, so it is simply not feasible to playback these recording to understand the common trends, themes and issues. By the same token, replaying a small percentage of interactions is likely to distort the reality of the situation.

However, with the solid foundation of the call recorder already in place, it is possible to overlay what is known as “interaction analytics” over the top. When implemented these software tools (either deployed or used as a hosted service) interact with the call recorder/s and include techniques such as customer feedback, emotion detection and phonetic indexing that in essence allow you to quickly and efficiently perform a Google-style search, in near real-time, of the entire “customer interaction database”. When these tools are applied in such a search it quickly returns a categorised list of the calls that meet the specified criteria—for example, every time a customer mentioned a competitor’s product, or demonstrated a heightened level of emotion—enabling these calls, or the relevant section of the call, to be replayed.

To minimise churn, interaction analytics can be used to identify and predict which customers are at risk of leaving. For example, based on a predefined threshold, you can set your customer interactions to receive a churn-risk score. If needed, a request is delivered directly to the right person in the organisation who can take immediate action, includes information such as the danger score, a link to the interaction, and a list of the words and phrases that came up during the call and which may indicate potential churn—avoiding the need to listen to the full interaction, and saving critical time.

Regardless of where you find customer insights, whether it is on your own doorstep, or eavesdropping on the latest online grapevine, it is important to have a strategy and a process for managing the funnelling of said insights back to the relevant people and departments within the organisation in a timely manner, in order for the right decisions to be made. Achieve this and you will see the benefits rollout across the entire organisation and particularly in customer retention.

That is a promise.

Craig Pumfrey is director of marketing communications at Nice Systems EMEA, a provider of communications solutions.