6 Examples of How Giving Agents Insight into Each Buyer’s Journey Leads to More Delightful Contact Center Interactions

The modern consumer expects a consistent, personalized experience across all of a brand’s touch points – ads, website, app, marketing email and yes, even contact center interactions. Equipping your sales and cx teams with insights into each user’s unique journey and goals is essential for meeting these expectations and driving better business outcomes.

Last month we launched an exciting new feature – Custom Events in the Agent Desktop Activity Feed – designed to empower agents with real-time, first-party data for personalizing their customer conversations.

Here are 6 real-world examples for how high-consideration B2C companies are arming their agents with real-time customer data to drive more effective sales, support and retention interactions across industries.

New Sales

Even early in the sales process, prospects are interacting with your brand by browsing your website or app, filling out forms & applications, opening marketing emails & clicking on links, etc. We've heard from agents that it's incredibly useful to highlight such signals of positive intent, as well as which products/services the customer was exploring, and how far along a multi-step process they might have gotten.

Home Services Example:

• Scenario: Prospect browsing the brand's website requested multiple different service quotes, including building furniture, moving furniture, repairing a leak under the sink, and painting some rooms. Each of these requests appeared in their activity timeline as a custom event. 
• Insight: When an agent was assigned the task to reach out to this customer, they saw not just the event that triggered the task, but all the others as well. So many varied quotes at once suggested to the agent that the customer might have just moved into a new home and could be interested in a customizable bundle of move-in services. 
• Outcome: Armed with this information, the agent called the customer with a bundle deal already prepared in their back-pocket. This delighted the customer and established a positive relationship with the brand, resulting in multiple subsequent service requests.

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Without these events showing in the feed, the agent would have had to discover the customer's unique situation the hard way - while on the call - leaving them with little time to prepare a customized bundle package. Maybe they successfully book 1 or 2 services for the customer, but turning them into a repeat customer would have become an uphill battle.

Financial Services Example:

• Scenario: Customer was applying for a new credit card on the brand's website, which is commonly a multi-step process that involves browsing the eligible options, providing personal information, submitting employment verification, providing proof of income and other financial details, etc. After getting decently far into the process, the customer abandoned the application, triggering a task for one of the brand's agents to reach out. 
• Insight: While reviewing the customer's activity feed, the agent could see from the activity events that the customer got as far as uploading their income verification, a signal of high intent, but had quit before initiating the credit score inquiry. This allowed the agent to enter the conversation ready to explain the implications of the credit check and address any concerns regarding the impact to their credit score. 
• Outcome: Feeling heard and assured, the customer went on to finish their application.

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Without seeing those critical funnel events, the agent would have had to waste their time checking some other system to understand where the customer was in their journey. Or worse: waste the customer's time having them explain everything they've done up to that point.

New sales engagements are critical moments for representing your brand as competent, attentive, and trustworthy, so equip your front-line with the best real-time customer data and context possible.

Cross-Selling

Making great first impressions with a customer increases the likelihood they will seek you out again in the future. But rather than waiting for the customer to make a move, various activity or status changes throughout their history can reveal good opportunities for cross-selling proactively.

Insurance Example:

• Scenario: Existing customer's home insurance policy was about to auto-renew. 
• Insight: While preparing a customary notification message, agent did a quick scroll through the customer's activity timeline and saw that the first time around while shopping for quotes, the customer had received a marketing email for auto insurance, and had clicked a tracking link in the email. Checking the call notes from around that time she learned that the customer had decided to wait on auto insurance and move forward only with homeowners.
• Outcome: Using this knowledge, the agent reworded her message to the customer, re-opening a conversation about a bundled home & auto policy. This time around the customer renewed with the bundled policy – leading to more revenue for the company and a stickier relationship.

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Call summaries and notes contain a wealth of information about a customer, but, while briefer than an entire call transcript, are still too much for an agent to stop and read every single one. For agents moving quickly and efficiently, highlighted key events in the activity timeline are easier & faster to digest, providing a sweet spot of context to signal to an agent when it's the right time to stop & look closer. Without these events, the insurance brand's agent would have likely sent a routine auto-renew message and moved on.

Retention and Winback

Just as signals of positive intent are useful in an early sales context, signals of negative intent can provide critical context for preemptively saving an at-risk customer relationship.

Banking Example:

• Scenario: Agent received a task to reach out to a customer following a missed inbound call. 
• Insight: Reviewing the customer activity, the agent saw several events of concern: an event indicating the customer had incurred some fees, the missed inbound call, and then several events for large withdrawals from their checking account. Immediately, the agent understood that this customer was likely unhappy about the fees and moving to close their account.
• Outcome: Instead of going into the conversation blind, the agent was prepared to address fee concerns directly and offer a solution which included fee waivers and a revised account type. The customer felt pleasantly surprised, and subsequently transferred their funds back to the bank.

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In these situations, you might only get one conversation in which to win back the customer, so the more agents know going into the conversation, the better they can address any concerns.

Proactive Support

Real-time customer data can also be valuable during the service and support phases of a customer journey. Sometimes customers naturally have more activity post-sales, during the normal course of experiencing your brand's services. These are great opportunities to track customer engagement or other operational activity so that you can reach out proactively in a way that truly distinguishes your brand.

In Healthcare contexts, we've seen brands create events to highlight new weight readings, low blood sugar alerts, care package delivery statuses, etc., which are invaluable information for care teams when shown in a single front-and-center timeline. This means care teams no longer need to hunt this information down across disparate systems, and can reach out proactively to better serve the customer (even before the customer resolves to call in).

We’ve seen similar examples in the Education context, with online bootcamp providers or tutoring services that aim to ensure high course-completion rates. Their advisors can get a full picture of how well a student is progressing through a program via events for completed modules, test scores, homework submissions, missed classes, and more. Being able to see those events in the same place they communicate with students or parents enables the team to proactively reach out to offer help or resources if needed, or simply to say congratulations and keep up the good work.

Give Your Team Superpowers

We've all had annoying or frustrating experiences when talking to a company's sales or service rep over the phone, especially when you have to explain things they should already know, or endure long hold times while they check on your information. So when you finally connect with a brand whose representative is competent, prepared, well-informed, and genuinely helpful, it feels like magic.

We're thrilled to see how our customers are taking advantage of this real-time customer data feature to create delightful, personalized experiences for their customers, which are not only driving revenue today, but also creating long-term brand loyalty.

If you’re ready to move #BeyondCCaaS and start treating millions of customers like one in a million contact us.

‍Learn about these products and services at Regal.io, read most posts at regal.io/blog or email us at hello@regal.io.

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