A Shortcut to Satisfaction in the Age of Customer Data

By Gillian Heltai
0 min read

At their advent, CRMs, support tools and marketing automation software all offered one fantastic promise – critical data on your customers that was centralized, searchable and available to everyone in your organization. This came with the implied promise that this knowledge would solve all manner of problems, from shortening sales cycles to ensuring that marketing dollars would be targeted to achieve the optimal return.
Since then, the software landscape has changed – companies of all sizes today are awash with data. More than ever, even small and medium businesses have an enormous amount of information about their customers. Today’s problem, then, is what to do with all that data.
The contact center is a prime example of a place where data can make a difference. In many cases, businesses that properly leverage the information they already have, can not only improve the satisfaction of their customers by sparing them the ritual of proving their identity (“Can I have the last four of your social? And your mother’s maiden name?”), but they can also simultaneously reduce costs by giving agents the context they need to identify and resolve issues more quickly.
There are two types of customer data that can make a difference to the support experience: data about the caller and context about the call itself. Consider these in the context of an average call at a contact center that is not taking advantage of any of their existing data. First, the agent will determine who the caller is. Depending on the type of business, this may be as simple as asking for a first name or as complicated as going through a series of security questions.