Consumers want to stand out from the crowd. They expect marketing interactions to be one-to-one, highly personalized experiences. It is up to marketers to meet these expectations. With 74% of online consumers getting frustrated with websites who do not cater to their specific needs (Janrain), this is not something that marketers can slack on. Personalization is clearly important to consumers. As marketers, it is crucial to personalize every interaction, both online and offline. These tips will insure that your personalization efforts carry over to the offline marketing experience for those who pick up the phone and call your business.
1. Dynamically Route Callers to the Right Place
Getting customers on the phone with someone quickly is a great way to win their business. But this doesn’t have quite the same effect if they have to be transferred in order to reach the right person or department, and it only gets worse if they continue to be transferred. In my experience, caller frustration is exponentially linked to the number of transfers. This is why you need the ability to dynamically route callers to the right place. Getting them on the phone with the right person on the first try goes a long way in keeping your customers happy with a call routing experience personalized for them.
There are a number of ways to route somebody’s call. One of my personal favorites is to use geo-location. With location-based technology you can automatically route mobile callers to the store that is closest to where they are. No asking for a zip code and no transferring. This is a great way to keep customers happy, especially when they are looking for a quick answer about something like store hours for the store nearest to them.
Another valuable way marketers route calls is by marketing source. This personalizes the experience because you already know which ad drove them to call and why they are calling. With call tracking technology you can determine the source of the call and then route it appropriately, all in real-time. This means that if somebody calls from a paid search ad, you can route their call based on the specific product they were searching for. Or if they were calling from your website, you can route calls based on the page they called from. By dynamically routing calls to the right place you can create a highly personalized experience that is unique to each caller.
2. Use Advanced Survey Technology for Painless Information Gathering
Automatic call routing might not be the ideal solution for your company. Often times businesses need to collect information about their callers before they can determine how the call should be routed. Unfortunately, this is where callers often endure seemingly endless phone surveys. But this doesn’t have to apply to your business. By taking advantage of the same technologies mentioned above, and pairing them with advanced IVR technology, you can present your callers with highly customized surveys. These surveys can differ based on things like caller location or marketing source, as well as adapt to the answers given by the caller. Nobody likes a long, complex phone survey. By using intelligent IVR surveys, you can make the experience both simple and personal for your callers.
3. Know Who’s on the Phone Before Saying Hello
It is important that the personalization of your caller experience continues after the routing process. If you make callers identify themselves over an IVR survey, it is crucial that the person answering the phone does not ask them to once again identify themselves. And knowing what they are calling about goes a long way towards advancing the conversation at the pace desired by the consumer. These are just a few examples of what can be accomplished through CRM screen pops.
By integrating your call attribution and automation with your CRM solution, you can arm your reps with valuable information about the person on the phone. This is information such as the marketing source of the call, the keywords they were searching for, where they are calling from (physical or online location), and the number they are calling from. By providing this information to your reps before they even pick up the phone, you are creating a highly personal experience for your callers.
Modern consumers expect personalized interactions from companies. If you don’t know who they are, chances are they won’t consider doing business with you. Understanding who your customer is, what they are looking for, and their purchase intent goes a long way to securing a fruitful relationship with that customer. The caller experience has become one of the most important ways to personalize the experiences of your customers. To learn more methods for personalizing the offline experience, check out our white paper: The Marketer’s Guide to Qualifying, Routing, and Scoring Inbound Calls to Optimize Sales.
