The traditional call centers are evolving into omnichannel contact centers, enabling enterprises to deliver personalized, purposeful, and connected communication experiences. To keep up with the momentum, contact centers must: 

• Identify the communication channels relevant to their customers.

• Advance their communication tools and capabilities for each channel.  

• Capitalize on scarce customer interactions to pave way for new business opportunities.

It all starts with choosing the right communication channel followed by adopting the right set of tools and capabilities. According to The State of Customer Conversations report by Smart Communications:

• 61% of consumers find it frustrating to get information through the wrong channels. 

• Other reasons for consumers’ frustration include irrelevant messages (58%), high frequency of calls (54%), and lack of personalization (41%).

Read More: The Right Contact Center Solution Can Enrich Your Business Calls

This article focuses on Voice Calling as a communication channel and five advanced contact center communication tools/capabilities. 

Identifying the opportunities across the customer lifecycle to improve contact center communication

Customer expectations are changing rapidly, and contact centers are expected to deliver timely, comprehensive, and empathetic communication at every checkpoint of the customer lifecycle. Instant call-backs, same-day delivery, or quick refund, for example, are no longer considered exceptional but an obvious level of service. 

Contact centers must identify opportunities at every stage of the customer lifecycle to improve their communication efficiency - using advanced features, tools, and analytics. 

We can take the example of an e-commerce journey constituting the following checkpoints: 

• A customer searches for a product and selects the most suitable e-commerce portal from SERPs. 

• He places the order, and on the day of delivery, he gets a call from the delivery agent to confirm the address. 

• He decides to return the product due to a discrepancy and calls customer service to express his dissatisfaction and ask for a suitable replacement. 

• He schedules the return, and on the day of pickup gets a call from the delivery agent to confirm his availability. 

If the contact center delivers a poor customer experience at even one checkpoint - let's say the service agent talks rudely with the customer or tries to cut short the conversation - the reputation of the business can plummet. 

Contact centers must invest in these five communication capabilities to win customer trust and loyalty in every scenario - irrespective of the industry and use case.  

1. Verified Business Caller ID 

There is a reason why people often don’t pick up calls from contact centers. They don’t know who the caller is or what’s the reason behind the call. They fear the caller might be an imposter or scammer. This hesitancy and lack of response can derail not just the customer lifecycle but potential business opportunities.   

Contact centers should make their outbound calls appear branded, conscientious, and meaningful so that customers feel safe and valued. With Truecaller Verified Business Caller ID, they can give their Caller ID an authentic makeover with: 

• Green Screen - to exude positivity and genuineness.

• Brand Visibility - accurately displaying a non-editable brand name and logo.

• Verified Business Badge - making the brand stand out from fraudulent callers. 

• Call Reason - reaching out to customers with utmost transparency. 

• Business Category Tag - adding the industry angle to the call.

Examples from Truecaller for Business ecosystem

i) Tenants and owners weren’t picking up the business calls of our partner Nestaway due to trust and safety concerns. Our partner went for Verified Business Caller ID, and now:

• Tenants and owners can easily identify the calls from its support team, thanks to the Verified Business badge and an accurate display of Nestaway’s brand name and logo. 

• The support team promptly resolves the tickets.

ii) The customer support team of Spinny was finding it difficult to connect with customers and assist them in selling their cars, because:

• Spinny didn’t have a verified and authentic Caller ID. 

• Customers didn’t recognize the caller as no brand elements (name and logo) were displayed on their phone screens.

Our Verified Business Caller ID solution helped Spinny with trusted, transparent, and timely customer communication, and improved their calling efficiency by 78%. 

2. Call Me Back - A game changer for Contact Center communication

This one is a must-have communication capability, which can: 

• Help contact centers get a clear idea of customer intent. 

• Significantly reduce the number of repeat calls for contact centers. 

• Save contact centers from persuading disinterested customers, and reduce the number of escalations. 

• Give agents an opportunity to connect with high-intent customers. 

Call Me Back is an advanced feature we offer along with Verified Business Caller ID. It enables contact centers to differentiate between customers who might have genuinely missed the call and the ones who simply don’t want to have a conversation. 

For business calls that are unattended or missed, interested customers can request a call back from the contact center agent (as shown below). Upon receiving the callback request, the agent can connect with customers at a convenient time and have detailed conversations. 

This way you can depict yourself as a considerate and conscientious brand and add more substance to your reputation.

Read More: Everything you need to know about Call Me Back

Just think about it. Will scammers or fraudulent players will respect customers’ time? No, they will call at any odd hour of the day.

3. Video Caller ID

This Voice Call capability is an extension of Verified Business Caller ID, that can make your customer communication deeply distinctive - by augmenting your Caller ID with branded, customizable use case videos (as shown below). 

Contact centers can have two major advantages with a Video Caller ID:

• They can add an extra layer of brand trust and identity to their outbound calls and deliver a more lively communication experience to customers. 

• The regular appearance of such videos on customers’ phone screens can improve brand recall. 

Key highlights of Video Caller ID 

• It takes just 5 steps to set up the Video Caller ID. 

• The customizable videos are very easy to load. 

• There are multiple formats (landscape and portrait) to choose from. 

• The branded use case video is also visible on the After Call screen.

4. Call and speech analytics 

As digital tools continue to evolve, natural-language processing capabilities combined with industry expertise are helping businesses improve quality, efficiency, and customer experience. Speech data offer customer insights that aren’t available from other sources, helping to identify the causes of customer dissatisfaction and revealing opportunities to improve compliance, operational efficiency, and agent performance.

For example:

• A contact center’s average handle time (AHT) is always above the target by 10 percent. It gives template training to all its agents, instead of providing targeted coaching. Speech analytics can help the contact center in identifying each agent’s strong and weak areas - based on which it can create specific training modules for each agent and significantly reduce its AHT. 

• Similarly, by looking at the Average Call Duration and understanding Spam Reports Context (available on our analytics dashboard), contact centers can determine the possible gaps in their pre and post-pickup communication. For example: 

1. If customers mark your call as spam after answering the call: 

• Your customer representative might not be meeting their expectations.

• There might be a misalignment in your call reason and what your representative is communicating.

2. If customers mark you as spam after missing or rejecting your call:  

• Your Call Reason might not be relevant to them. 

• You might be calling them at odd hours. 

• You might be calling too frequently.

5. Voicebots 

IVR systems are transitioning from rudimentary menu systems to smart Voicebots that are capable of handling complex customer queries. 

Contact centers no longer need to rely on deep, nested menu structures. Instead, they can ask customers to give verbal cues in just two or three words and transfer the call to the appropriate department.

IVR navigation troubles many customers, who press the wrong key, reach a dead-end or get confused by the options presented. All this complexity can be removed by enabling customers to verbally state their reason for calling. 

A Voicebot can recognize customers’ intent, initiate a simple flow, and channel that to the most relevant agent. Contact centers can leverage this information to automate ticket tagging and understand why customers contact them.

Want to empower your contact center communication and give customers a verified calling experience? Reach us at business-outreach@truecaller.com