Making automation work - for your customer and your business

The growth of catalogue shopping and e-tailing means that consumers are familiar with self service systems. Whilst many online businesses shun the use of the phone preferring to drive enquiries via the web, consumers remain keen to have the option of interacting over the phone or talking to an agent. A significant majority of calls to retailers concern the delivery of pre-ordered items, or problems with recently purchased goods.

Many of these calls can be removed from the queue through the use of Invomo’s hosted automated services that are available 24/7 to service customers when they want – reducing customer waiting times and in turn, the frustration and consequent perceptions of poor follow-up service from the retail brand, which can have rapid consequences for reputation and customer loyalty.

Live agents are expensive resources and significant time is taken to capture customer data – a repetitive and low value-adding task. We can help deliver reduced costs by making certain enquiries ‘self service’, from finding out the local store hours, checking the status of goods, through to ordering brochures and purchasing and returning products in an automated way. Costs per call and per minute can be dramatically reduced and not only are fewer agents required but existing agents are left free to tackle more complex customer enquiries and revenue-generating tasks reducing boredom, attrition rates and agent recruitment and training costs.

We also connect customers’ back offices systems to ours to ensure that CRM systems are up to date. SMS can further enhance the customer experience; texts can be automatically triggered to inform people when goods have shipped or when warranties are set to run out.

Best practice for call flows

Using our expertise and tools of call flow design we can work with you to improve the way your customers deal with you. We’ll take you through basic steps such as listening to the current menus, assessing call patterns and durations and analysis of caller behaviours, such as hang-up rates. This will allow us to identify how best to build effective and natural suites of services and options. We can also use speech to allow callers to speak normally to get through to the service they want to access.

Our view is that a mix and match or best of breed solution works best – some services are best handled using touch tone, some speech and some by live agents – the real challenge, and our expertise, comes in identifying which calls are best handled which way!

Significant improvements in customer service can be delivered by providing 24 x 7access to services and the ability to have problems or enquiries dealt with rapidly and efficiently outside of normal working hours. Using automation can enable retail companies to handle seasonal and promotional call volume increases avoiding long waiting times, dropped calls, and the consequent impact on customer satisfaction levels as well as lost revenues.