The Ongoing Nature of Ongoing Dialogues:
Telecommunications providers need to develop an institutional memory of each customer in order to be able to maintain a fluid, ongoing conversation across channels. Effective dialogues are not about getting interactions right once at a particular point in time, they're about getting them right continuously by connecting them across time to nurture ongoing relationships.
Moving to a dialogue-based strategy requires stopping to listen—and maintaining a conversation level that is comfortable to the customer. It is about ensuring that each interaction has a true potential positive value that outweighs the value of no interaction at all. And this will sometimes mean choosing one positive contact over another, prioritizing communications and limiting volume in order to ensure that customers are not over-inundated.
#3: Listen Before You Speak
Shifting to a dialogue approach is also vitally important to keeping the lines of communications open—and campaigns are just points along a continuum of customer communications. Any given campaign may stir more interest and more sales, but it can also serve to cut short the continuum of contacts. And this is particularly true now that so many communications are made via email.
When customers opt-out, tune-out, or relegate communications to junk mail or spam, the lines of communication are cut. To optimize customer lifetime value, telecoms must rethink how they measure campaign effectiveness. Response rates and conversions are just one side of the equation—to truly understand campaign results, negative results as well as sales that would have happened unprompted—need to be factored in.
#4: Inform Interactions with Individualized Best-Next-Action Decisioning
Real-time decisioning is particularly powerful at the flashpoint where a customer is on the verge of attrition. Its uses, however, are more extensive. At time of enrollment for periodic proactive account re-evaluations, and reactive adjustments to trigger events … real-time decisioning enables telecoms to be more nimble, more adept at tying customer preferences and needs to appropriate telecom service bundles, and more attuned to their customers overall. The result: better customer relations—and fewer of those flash-point calls. Today, consumers still pick up the phone when they have an issue, question, or concern—and with customer satisfaction low, service packages increasingly complex and competition on the rise, telecoms are getting lots of calls.
Consumers today know about the data companies collect on them. They understand how technology can be used to transfer, share, and interconnect information. They want businesses to have a clear record of their interactions. They don't like to repeat themselves; and, now more than ever, they don't believe that they should have to. At the same time, they have grown to have low expectations for the call-center experience: the long wait times, the "get them off the phone" dynamic, the probability that their calls will be outsourced to someone overseas who will read off a script that may or may not address their question head on.
