Customer Interaction Solutions for Food and Beverage Companies As food and beverage companies fight a fierce battle for market share, new consumers, and brand loyalty, every opportunity for interaction with a consumer is critical. In addition, food and beverage companies face customer acquisition costs that are increasingly expensive. To remain profitable, growth must be based on repeat customers.  Knowing the profiles and preferences of these customers are critical to target marketing and successfully launching new products. An efficient customer contact center provides a vital link between food and beverage manufacturers and their consumers. In fact, the contact center may represent the most direct link between the manufacturer and the customer. As such, it presents a major opportunity to collect direct customer feedback that can be used to drive product changes and as an early warning system for issues with the potential for legal liability. Astute's contact center solutions can address the following issues that food and beverage companies face: Gaining insight into the market, consumer preferences and buying patterns Capturing feedback quickly and cost efficiently to test market new products, packaging, or marketing campaigns Mitigating risk and identifying product and quality problems early Handling a rapid increase in contact volume caused by news reports or a product recall ePowerCenter™ provides call centers the ability to manage all consumer interactions, whether the interaction is over email, chat, telephone, letter/fax, or Web form. ePowerCenter’s advanced contact tracking, ease-of-use and sophisticated knowledge management capabilities enable consumer goods companies to ramp up agents quickly—especially valuable for companies with peaks and valleys in call center volume due to promotional activity. ePowerCenter can provide companies the ability to capitalize on a non-traditional, flexible, remote workforce by establishing a ‘virtual call center’ for handling consumer inquiries. Increasing Agent Efficiency and Effectiveness ePowerCenter’s intelligent data hierarchy, screen pops, and FAQs guide agents through the service process, providing them helpful prompts and information to best assist the consumer. Agents can track requests for product information, leverage FAQs and knowledge databases, and provide the most relevant information for the caller to resolve the issue quickly and accurately. Our solution can be configured to request information from other internal and external applications and databases, empowering agents to provide real-time, detailed product information to callers. This allows for the caller’s issue to be resolved quickly and accurately which, in turn, leads to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty. Knowledge databases help agents to support a wide range of products and provide added value to their callers. Guided responses and prompts can also lead to upsell opportunities by providing agents with information about targeted offerings—all with a minimal amount of training. In addition, through ePowerCenter’s skills-based routing capabilities, customer inquiries can be routed to agents based on the agent's training, expertise, and availability. Self-Service Enabling customers to solve their own service issues, create service requests, and request literature can increase customer satisfaction while reducing the cost to service these customers. Astute’s solutions including RealDialog and IVR solutions can be the basis for a self-service solution for your company. Reporting ePowerCenter’s sophisticated reporting allows customer feedback to be analyzed and distributed across the organization while threshold-based reporting provides fast identification of issues affecting product quality. ePowerCenter™ Business Intelligence provides seamless integration of contact center data with in-house reporting tools for an even greater understanding of customers. ePowerCenter’s reports can bring valuable customer feedback to the rest of the organization in order to aid in product changes or development. ePowerCenter’s reports can also identify problems with distributors or retailers by highlighting product problems such as damage or spoilage at the store level. Surveys The ability to manage interactions across channels and assist agents with automated or guided response is essential when breaking news creates a sudden spike in customer interactions. ePowerCenter’s outbound surveying capabilities can even be used to proactively solicit customer feedback on product introductions or changes. Benefits for Food and Beverage Companies Improved Contact Center Performance Reduces training times for agents Improves email response time Improves efficiency: the ability to handle large increases in consumer interactions while not increasing staff Improves the contact center’s ability to build loyalty and drive product sales Results in elevation of contact center’s status within the organization and increased value to business Better Use of Information Increases the value of customer data to the organization Enhanced utilization of customer feedback to drive product decisions Rapid identification of product quality issues Improves visibility of consumer information across the enterprise Integrates data into one repository of information Support for email alerts drives product sales based on conditions specific to customers Improved Company Performance Improves management decisions, particularly in the areas of marketing, purchasing, and quality control Early warning and problem detection: identify and resolve crisis issues quickly through automated e-mails System flexibility to support an rapidly growing and diversifying business Ability to quickly adapt to changing business and customer needs Learn how Allied Domecq QSR benefited from ePowerCenter!