Customer Interaction Solutions for Retailers
Retailers are facing ever-increasing competition and more fickle
customers with many alternatives. They are continually faced with
difficulty staying ahead of shifting market demands. They are also
challenged with ensuring consistent quality across locations,
particularly when franchising is involved. Furthermore, some
retailers have taken on the challenge of implementing and managing a
customer rewards or preferred customer program. To retain or gain
marketing share, they need to improve the effectiveness of these and
other marketing programs.
Customer satisfaction is
the key to repeat business and growth for retailers. Dissatisfied customers not only defect, but on
average they tell ten people about their bad experience. The contact center is increasingly used to
identify and resolve issues that impact customer satisfaction. Improved customer
relations can drive increased loyalty, transforming negative experiences
into positive ones, while identifying operational issues that affect
customer satisfaction.
Enhanced contact center management systems can help retailers protect
their brand, identify under-performing locations, identify and resolve
product-related issues, and support e-commerce
operations. In addition, Astute’s contact center management solution, PowerCenter, also helps companies to provide world-class customer
service, increase revenues, segment customers, improve marketing
efforts, and integrate multi-channel consumer interactions.
PowerCenter provides call centers the ability to manage all consumer
interactions, whether the interaction is over e-mail, chat, telephone,
letter/fax, or web form. PowerCenter’s advanced contact tracking,
ease-of-use and sophisticated knowledge management capabilities enable
retailers to ramp up agents quickly—especially valuable for retailers
with seasonal peaks and valleys in call center volume. Furthermore, our
web-based solution, 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.
Store-Level Issue Resolution
Astute’s ReferralCenter allows retailers to achieve centralized data
collection and analysis while ensuring customer issues are resolved at
the level at which they occur. This solution provides automatic
notification to local representatives of a customer issue related to
their outlet and provides them with a complete view of the customer
case. Issues that go unresolved within a pre-defined period of time are
automatically escalated to provide a closed loop system for issue
management.
Improve Sales
Astute’s telephony solutions can also help to improve sales. Rather than
retail store sales associates spending a large amount of time answering
questions on the phone, companies are routing calls to centralized call
centers. Many questions can be answered through interactive voice
response (IVR) and FAQs, allowing sales associates to spend more time
focusing on sales.
Astute’s customer service solutions can also integrate with customer
loyalty databases to ensure inquiries from loyal customers are routed
and handled appropriately.
Increasing Agent Efficiency and Effectiveness
PowerCenter’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. This empowers agents to
provide real-time, detailed product information to callers, including
inventory information. 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 services 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 or promotions—all with a minimal amount of training. In addition, through PowerCenter’s skills-based routing capabilities, customer inquiries can
be routed to agents based on the agent's training, expertise, and
availability.
Reporting
PowerCenter’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. PowerCenter™ Business Intelligence provides seamless
integration of contact center data with in-house reporting tools for an
even greater understanding of customers.
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. PowerCenter’s outbound
surveying capabilities can even be used to proactively solicit customer
feedback on product introductions or changes.
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.
Benefits for Retail 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
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