CONTACT CENTER CORNER: Pro-active Customer Contact, Part 1: Why The Time Is Right

By Joe Outlaw

Given my focus on the leading edges of customer contact you might wonder why I would be writing a series of articles about pro-active customer contact.  Haven't outbound calling, auto dialers, and tele-marketing been around for years? Yes, but despite the obvious value of outbound contact for some businesses and the maturity of the technologies, most companies still do not employ service-related pro-active customer contact. Instead, almost 80 percent rely entirely on their customers to contact them for questions, problems, and even, in the case of many Internet-based businesses, for sales.

So, calling customers, per se, is not new. What is new is that leading companies, are discovering the strategic business value of comprehensive approaches to pro-active customer contact. They are leveraging customer and product information from across the enterprise to reach out to their customers with personalized service messages and sales offers to cement and grow profitable relationships. For the real leading-edge companies their pro-active customer contact initiatives are an integral part of their unified communications strategies, i.e. their internal and external communications strategies are intertwined and synergistic.

Reactive-only Customer Contact Is Not Good Enough Anymore

Depending upon the industry your company competes in you may already be feeling the competitive pressures to be more pro-active with your customers.  Historically, the more commoditized industries have relied disproportionately on services for differentiation to create/maintain competitive advantage. And, not surprisingly, these same industries are leading the pro-activity movement. Increasingly global competition and a weak North American economy are two of the macro business drivers for pro-active customer contact, but there are also micro drivers, including:

• to improve the efficiency of the customer contact organization;
• to increase customer retention and loyalty;
• to increase revenues and expand business with current customers; and
• to add new customers.

Pro-Active Customer Contact: Improving Call Center Operations

Improving the efficiency of the customer contact organization for most companies, means the doing more with less in their customer service group and call centers. Due to the inherent peaks and valley in incoming customer call traffic, making pro-active customer calls during the lulls for incoming calls makes use of previously unused people's and systems' capacity. Other benefits include:

• reductions in inbound calls -- e.g. shipping notifications eliminate the need shipment status calls from customers;
• job diversity for call center agents  --  often, but I appreciate not always, viewed as positive and job enriching by agents; and
  
• reduction of customer complaints -- again, pro-active notification of problems can eliminate complaint calls, which I think I can safely say always has a positive impact on agents' job satisfaction and usually on turnover.

Pro-Active Customer Contact: Increasing Customer Retention and Loyalty

Pro-actively contacting customers with service information useful to them or with personalized sales offers is generally viewed by customers as positive and brand reinforcing.  These positive effects have been shown to contribute to customer loyalty and increased purchases from the pro-active company over time. Frederick Reicheld, author of The Loyalty Effect, in researching successful companies, discovered the longer they retained a customer the more profitable that customer become for them. Likewise, I am sure everyone is tired of hearing that it is significantly less costly to retain current customers than to acquire new ones. Although, based on how many companies treat their customers its clear not everyone believes those economics.

A related topic, much in the news these days, is first contact resolution, which is also promoted as a way call centers can improve its customers' positive attitudes toward the company and thereby their loyalty. By pro-actively contacting customers with valuable service information, you cannot just resolve their questions/problems/concerns more effectively you can eliminate the need for their calls in the first place. The fourth article in this series will be all about leading customer examples, but one that fits here is the flower delivery company, which eliminated 80 percent of its incoming calls by pro-actively contacting customers to let them know their flowers had been delivered.

Pro-Active Customer Contact: Increasing Revenues

Pro-actively contacting customers should have as minimum goals to reduce your expenses and increase your customers' positive attitudes toward your company and its products/services. Increasingly, enterprises are adding revenue goals for their call centers and pro-active contact is becoming the leading way to achieve these. Call centers with these new revenue goals quickly discover that customers calling with problems and complaints are not as likely to respond positively to sales offers as pro-actively contacted customers are.  In addition, when working with B2B customers the person calling with a problem is often not the appropriate person in the organization to respond to a sales offer.

Pro-Active Customer Contact: Adding New Customers

Adding new customers, usually the primary responsibility of the sales and marketing groups can be impacted by the call center through pro-active customer contact. And, I don't mean by calling prospects in the classic tele-marketing sense. It is of course a generalization, but happy customers tell their friends and pro-active customer contact can, as mentioned above, have a positive effect on customers and brand loyalty. There are many other strategies and technologies for supporting customer communities, such as forums, and social networking, which I will discuss in future articles, but the point here is that pro-active customer contact can play a part in generating positive customer recommendations.

Part 2 in this series will explore the components of pro-active customer contact programs, Part 3 will compare some of the leading pro-active customer contact solutions on the market, and Part 4 will highlight pro-active customer contact success stories.

Joe Outlaw is President and Chief Analyst of Outlaw Research, a firm that provides results-oriented analysis and consulting of the customer contact marketplace.  The objective of Outlaw Research is building a community around the leading edges of customer contact -- the advanced strategies early-adopter companies are applying and the technologies and vendors they are working with.  His work can be found at www.outlawresearch.com