Much effort is put into designing new value-adding services, marketing them, selling them and even onboarding customers. But what next? Sit back, rest on your laurels, cash the monthly bill and hope no-one complains? Therein lies the disengaged-downward-price-competition-spiral and the churn-whirlpool-of-doom folks.
The problem is that caring for and supporting customers post-sale has, for a long time, been viewed as a business cost to be avoided, rather than as a business opportunity. As myopic as that is in terms of retaining customers and pinpointing new opportunities, there is now even more reason to invest in your customer support resources. Because, my friends, support is now revenue-generating not just loyalty generating.
Yes, the indirect monetary benefits of being better at customer support just became direct and in your face.
Here’s just four reasons to invest in care:
1. It reduces operational costs by speeding the time to deal with enquiries and complaints
2. It creates satisfied customers and reduces customer churn, as well as the associated costs
3. It helps you identify new revenue-generating opportunities and upsell and cross-sell
4. You can sell support-as-a-service
What am I referring to? Well take CCAPS as an example. They’re a revenue generating, experience uplifting, loyalty building godsend to telecoms service providers the world over. But one of the key assets that service providers bring to the table – besides their networks – is their customer care apparatus. One of the main reasons that CCAPs are appealing to customers is that no single vendor is helping them find and fix faults, sort out any problems, keep them safe and ensure their connected experience is rock and rollin’. If that isn’t the core business of a service provider – and a huge opportunity for them – then what is?
But to add a service wrap to CCAPS requires service providers to think about the type of support their customers are going to need and ensure they can access that support quickly and easily. Automation is their friend here – with automated fault discovery and healing a key tool in the mix of total care for CCAPs. But a big question is whether current call centre staff have the knowledge & diagnostic capabilities to help customers solve their increasingly sophisticated problems. This makes a Total Quality Experience approach to care essential and requires service providers to look at how they design support for value-adding services. If service providers deliver fragmented support that requires customers to be passed from CSR to CSR to resolve their problems, these same customers are going to look elsewhere for their CCAPS, no matter how feature rich the service being provided.