Call centers are a fundamental component of customer service teams across business sectors. For customers, these teams represent the voice of your business – helping them navigate solutions to their questions, concerns, or problems. Additionally, these teams play a key role in helping your business quantify customer satisfaction. With the help of BlastPoint’s AI-powered technology, businesses can turn customer call center activity into actionable campaigns – with the goal of keeping satisfaction high and operations costs low.
Since the start of the pandemic, businesses have reported seeing spikes of nearly 300% in call center activity compared to their previous business-as-usual environment. To manage the increase in calls, businesses initially viewed hiring more personnel, or outside vendors, as their only ‘obvious’ solution. However, for many businesses, these are not feasible solutions from either a financial or logistical standpoint.
Fundamentally, your call center is there to provide excellent support to your clients. Unfortunately, when clients experience higher-than-average wait times and lower-than-expected service level standards, your customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores are negatively impacted.
In this article, we’ll show you how using BlastPoint’s AI-powered technology to build residential call center segments can help understand your customer behaviors and direct customers away from your call center – so your teams can optimize low-touch customer engagement campaigns. When your business understands who customers are – at a household level – your teams can provide customers with the right information, at the right time, through the right channel to ensure overall customer satisfaction.
Predicting Customer Behaviors
Predicting customer behavior, for any organization, is impossible without data.
Your call center data reveals information about why your customers are calling in. Likely, representatives respond to the same, or similar, inquiries every day, from helping customers with billing or account inquiries, to start/stop service requests, and product education – to name only a few.
What call center data fails to present by itself, however, is how to predict customer behavior – with certainty.
At BlastPoint, we integrate a wide array of customer records, including payment and collections data, contact records, and various program engagement analytics, with household-level demographic and behavioral data to get a 360-degree view of your customers. We use this enriched customer data to develop a model predicting each household’s propensity to call into the call center.
From there, our Platform generates distinct customer segments based on patterns that emerge from the data. Although individual propensity to call into the call center is the main factor separating segments from one another, our algorithm considers all the different attributes included in the customer data, allowing insights learned from the segmentation to be applicable for use cases beyond understanding call center engagement. These segments, for instance, can also help identify drivers of customer behavior that can be vital to overall customer satisfaction.
Data Can Reveal Unexpected Customer Insights
Making assumptions about your customers, how they behave now and in the future, without gaining a deep, holistic understanding of them first, can sabotage any customer experience strategy campaign. Let’s look into an example.
BlastPoint’s partner, a large, southeastern utility company, sought our expertise to fulfill these objectives: help them understand their customer calling behavior and direct customers away from the call center, optimizing low-touch engagement solutions.
Prior to working with BlastPoint, assumptions could be made about high-propensity callers. Older generations tend to prefer in-person interactions and therefore, it can be assumed, that they would show a higher propensity to call in. Younger generations on the other hand typically avoid in-person interactions and prefer to communicate via mobile devices.
After enriching their data with regional demographic and behavioral data, notable, unexpected attributes appeared. They learned the segment with a high-propensity for calling in showed a younger median age, and a higher likelihood of identifying as single and part of a minority group. Data also revealed this calling segment to have lower income and less economic stability, as well as more late payments and write-offs.
While this segment has slightly higher enrollment in assistance programs than others, our data found a higher percentage of callers who were not actively receiving assistance – and have never received it, despite their income eligibility.
As you can see, data reveals unexpected and interesting insights into your customer base. This information is useful to reduce call center demand as your teams can begin building campaigns with the goal of increasing enrollment in relevant programs – diverting them towards low-touch engagement solutions.
Grow Customer Program Engagement
Businesses across the globe are transitioning their software and digital platforms towards low-touch engagement solutions. Low-touch solutions include E-Billing, SMS text alerts, chat-bots, online educational tools, front-line support features, and more. As many businesses know, it can be difficult to ‘re-train’ customers to ‘sign-on’ to new products, programs, and services.
At this point, BlastPoint’s Call Center Segmentation tool has identified the right customers so teams can target them with the right message. Now, it’s time to reach them through the right channels and grow low-touch solution program engagement.
A look into how our partner, AEP, launched a new, digital solution to increase customer program engagement and decrease call center volume.
AEP, a large electric utility servicing the southern states, had a goal: to make common customer service inquiries easier and faster by launching a digital assistant to decrease call volume.
To launch the digital assistant successfully, AEP utilized BlastPoint’s customer intelligence platform to segment customers based on their engagement with payment assistance programs and other relevant behavioral data.
Similar to our partner story above, BlastPoint’s industry-leading household-level customer intelligence showed AEP exactly which customers to target and how to reach them effectively.
Our data determined that Facebook advertising would be the best channel for reaching target customer segments. Operationalizing BlastPoint’s data-driven insights, AEP’s CX Team achieved CTR rates up to 30% higher than the benchmarks for the customer services industry and in line with the CTR for all Facebook advertisements.
Check out more data insights our customer intelligence revealed for AEP, here.
Increase Customer Satisfaction Scores
Call centers are costly to operate. Let’s be honest, when customers pick up the phone to speak with a representative, many times they are calling because a problem exists. Satisfaction may be low already, and if a barrier is in the way of resolving that problem, their satisfaction with your business will remain low, or get lower.
Your resources are then directed toward chasing resolutions, rather than predicting low customer satisfaction and preventing a further drop before an event occurs.
BlastPoint aims to keep customer satisfaction high. Our AI allows your business to see customer satisfaction at an account level. Based on behavioral-level insights, each customer is assigned a CSAT score from highest to lowest risk – with the ability to track those insights daily. These insights provide the ability to see, clearly, where teams need to divert resources into campaigns that resonate toward creating happier customers.
AI-powered CSAT scoring allows teams to make objective-driven decisions to target customers based on satisfaction levels to drive campaigns that influence positive CSAT scores.
Finally, don’t let unpredictable events impact your relationship with your customers, and strain call center operations. BlastPoint’s Customer Intelligence Platform will help you make the most of your programs and offerings while prioritizing your resources and investments for maximum impact – while helping you stay on top of your customers’ changing circumstances and needs.
Visit our case studies page to see more results we’ve helped companies achieve, and get in touch with our team to talk about how customer intelligence can help your team boost engagement and improve customer experience.