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“Personalization” has been one of the most common buzzwords in marketing for years — and all signs are showing that it isn’t going away any time soon! In fact, one-third of marketers believe “personalization” will be the most important marketing capability in the future. Forrester also expects personalization and predictive analytics on a micro scale will be a main feature in new marketing technologies.
Marketers are making strides in personalizing digital experiences, but what about phone calls? With the prevalence of mobile, the transition from a digital interaction to a phone call is more frequent and less predictable, so you need to be ready. With all of the customer data and marketing technologies at your fingertips, creating a seamless customer experience online and offline is possible.
In this post, we'll cover the benefits of personalizing call experiences. We'll also share 12 ways you can use Invoca to create delightfully personalized experiences for your callers during and after a phone call.
Customers want to know that they’ve been seen and heard, especially they’re engaged in a phone conversation. Personalization is now a core expectation and because of this, they take notice when it isn’t utilized. The time it takes to get your personalization strategy formed will be worth it. A 2021 McKinsey report showed that companies grow 40% faster than their competition when they use personalization, and 76% of consumers get aggravated when it’s NOT being delivered!
As Maya Angelou once said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” The same thing goes for businesses — customers will remember how you made them feel long after they're done engaging with you.
With geo-location data, you can make sure your calls are automatically routed to the right location every time. You can set up custom rules to determine where you want calls routed based on caller location. Geo-location works great for national brands with local agents or store locations and makes big brands feel like local businesses.
Each phone call comes with a plethora of information about your customer, and you can use these little nuggets to simplify the customer journey. Contextual clues can tell you what product your caller is interested in and if they’re in the research or purchase phase. These contextual clues could be the ad the customer clicked, the web pages they visited, the landing page they called from, etc. All of this information can be used to automatically route customers to the right department or sales agent.
Callers don’t want to repeat their story to every new agent they’re transferred to (which could be avoided by better call routing, but that’s another issue). Make sure your agents are equipped with the real-time customer information they need to make the process easier for both parties. With real-time data, agents can tailor the conversation to that specific caller and their needs based on search queries, ads clicked, web pages visited, and demographic data including age, household income and more. Don't waste valuable time getting this basic information from callers.
Invoca’s AI capabilities help contact center managers to quickly and efficiently determine what is and isn’t working for their agents. If you’re still evaluating your team's calls manually, this leaves the information you’re gathering vulnerable to human error and possibly even bias. If you utilize Invoca instead, you can let AI perform the quality assurance process and automatically detect when your agents fall off the talk track. This process is unbiased and immune to human error. It also allows your managers to devote more of their time to coaching agents, versus listening to and scoring call recordings.
Not all calls need an IVR (interactive voice response) or phone menu. Qualified calls from prospects ready to buy should be connected directly to a live agent. You can use Invoca's real-time call data to understand which calls should be directly connected and which should be further qualified and routed with an IVR.
For example, if you have a certain campaign that tends to refer high-quality prospects, it could be more effective to connect them to a human right away. Or if you have a long-standing relationship with a customer and you put a phone number in an email, connect that call right away to a live agent rather than using any kind of IVR to qualify them first. An IVR is great for first-time callers or to qualify leads, but established customers or high-quality leads may not appreciate voice prompts.
With voice analytics, marketers know exactly what happened during a conversation. They can track things like the call outcome, if a competitor was mentioned, what products were mentioned, etc. Marketers can use this data to send a targeted follow-up message. For example, if a customer purchased over the phone, you could send a follow-up email with an upsell offer. Or if they didn’t purchase, you could send them additional information about their product of interest or related products.
Not only can marketers use details from actual phone conversations, but phone calls also come with a wealth of insights about the caller that probably wouldn’t come up in conversation. You can gather demographic details, like geo-location, household income, homeownership, gender, and more. All these details can be used to segment your audiences and personalize the next step in their journey.
Like we said in #5, an IVR can be used for first-time callers, but live agents are probably better for repeat callers or high-quality leads. You can also show your repeat callers some extra love by routing them to the same agent they spoke with previously to give them a feeling of consistency and use data from previous interactions to inform the current conversation. A repeat call could also indicate a customer service call, so you might want to avoid routing them to the sales floor.
There are several clues that can help you determine lead quality before a call is connected to an agent. You can look at what campaign drove the call, demographic data, and geo-location to see if the caller is likely to become a customer. Then you can route high-quality calls directly to your best agents. Conversely, if it appears to be a low-quality call, you can try to qualify them further by asking qualifying questions in the IVR and then route accordingly.
Use a voice activated IVR to ask questions and properly route calls based on their responses. This is especially helpful for first-time callers as it will give call agents more information about the caller before they’re connected.
We talk a lot about how web data can help personalize the phone experience, but the data goes both ways. If you’re using a real-time personalization (RTP) tool, make sure to sync it with your call intelligence solution. You can then personalize banner images, offers, and even your CTAs on your website to reflect insights gleaned from customer conversations, like product interest or even their preference to connect over the phone.
Customers know marketers are gathering information about them, and they expect a more personalized experience because of it. But as marketers, it can tricky to access and implement effective marketing tactics based on the huge amount of data we gather. Luckily, call intelligence makes understanding gathered data much simpler and can create personalized caller experience almost immediately. You just need to take the first step.
Every customer is going to have varying degrees of needs, wants, tastes, and budgets. Invoca’s AI gathers these insights from phone conversations at scale. You can then use this data to create retargeting ads for those who have yet to convert — you can even target them based on the interests they expressed over the phone. You can also conserve your budget by suppressing customers who bought over the phone, so they don't see future ads. Learn more in this blog post.
Want to learn more about personalizing the customer experience? Check out these resources:
