Courtney is the Marketing Manager for Aceyus and leads demand generation efforts for our award winning marketing team.
Data is everywhere and every department in an organization relies heavily on it. But how much of that data is actually shared across departments? Often not very much. How much of that data should be shared? The short answer, a lot, but the two specific departments should have a much tighter bond than they usually do.
Marketing and Contact Center orgs… The “Ross and Rachel” of company departments. They make so much sense as a couple, but so often don’t find themselves in a relationship. Why?
How Contact Center Analytics Benefits Marketers
Let’s look at the contact center analytics first. No matter the function of your contact centers, be it sales, customer support, or technical support, they are the first line of contact with your customers.
As marketers, we need to know how what we are selling is resonating with our customers. We need to know the pain points they are looking to solve, what pain points they have with our product, and what steps are taken in the contact center to resolve those challenges. This can help define and improve messaging across your website and campaigns, and can even drive new product developments that can help solve new challenges your customers face.
How Marketing Benefits Contact Centers
Optimizing messaging this way helps marketing drive more qualified leads who are more likely to convert. They are also more likely to be satisfied because their expectations have been set properly up front through the marketing.
This allows for fewer calls in the contact center, higher first call resolution (FCR), less customer churn, and (most importantly) higher company revenues and ROI for both the marketing and contact center organization.
What Contact Center Analytics Should Marketing See?
To be an effective 21st-century contact center, you should be tracking omnichannel interactions within your call center data (read more on that here). That said, it is one thing to track omnichannel contact center analytics, it is another thing entirely to make them actionable. Enter your marketing team.
Marketers love omnichannel data as it lets them understand more about where customers are engaging, which in turn tells them where they should invest their budgets. With that in mind, here are the contact analytics you should be sharing with your marketing teams.
1. Website Interactions
Honestly, the marketing team is probably already all over this, but there are insights from web interactions they may not have. For example, it is very difficult to track web conversions from phone calls without a call tracking software which is generally difficult to get approved within marketing budgets. But the truth is, your contact center already tracks and records those calls from the website, with no additional investment required.
Sharing this information with your marketing team will allow them to optimize pages that get a lot of sales calls, help make the customer experience better by making it easier to get in touch for support, and help build brand trust.
2. Chat Interactions
As with web interactions, chat is probably something that your marketing team is aware of, but maybe not beyond its set-up. A lot of marketing teams will set up a chat bot, but then never actually look at the metrics from its performance. With chat (and text messaging) becoming ever more present in contact centers, providing your marketing team with the interaction methods, preferred channels for communication and the topics they interact most with in chat, all add up to better qualified future customers like we discussed earlier.
3. Call Disposition Reports
Understanding what people call about most often is a huge benefit to your marketing team. It allows them to know what customers need and answers they’re looking for. This will help them generate relevant content for both outside and inside the contact center.
Marketers can generate content for the website based on these call dispositions that will answer customers’ questions and improve their customer experience. It will also allow your marketing team to create content that your agents can use to help support customers on their calls. Either way, everyone wins.
4. Customer Profiles
Understanding the customer journey is an essential part of marketing. Meeting your customers where they are in the customer journey with the right messaging is literally the definition of marketing! Providing analytics about how the average customer interacts with your brand is essential to the continued success of the company as a whole.
5. Preferred Channel Reports
As alluded to above, this is crucial to understanding where your customers prefer to be engaged by your brand. For example, if your contact center has a report that shows that 80% of your customers send you Facebook messages, it means that 80% of your customers are seeing ads on Facebook, so the marketing team should focus ad spend on Facebook.
Optimization is one of the most critical components in marketing success or failure, so providing as much data as possible to your marketing team can only benefit your contact center down the road.
How To Get The Conversation Started
There are a lot of ways to start sharing data within your organization. If you use a CRM like Salesforce, you can set up fields for marketing in records and create rules and reports to automatically generate and send to the marketing team. If you have a data aggregation tool, you can build custom call center analytics dashboards that the marketing team can access.
Any way you go, one thing has to happen first: The walls must come down. Each department should appoint a person or team to interact and work with the other. Meet once a month, talk to each other, find out what the other knows and then you can create solutions from there. Communication is key, and you should know that, you work in a contact center!
