Moving more customers online. Isn’t that what all organizations want? But how do you do so successfully? There are plenty of logical first steps, such as e-mail marketing with information on online, references to online in all communication and outgoing documents, and steering towards DIY solutions on the website instead of immediately picking up the phone. Apparently they are not good enough. We discovered that it only really took off once we assigned the agents an active role.
Phone first
One of the questions put to customers in the weekly telephony CSAT survey is: dear customer, have you searched for information to answer your question in any other way? The website is available as one of the options. We discovered that 35% of the customers who call us, first check the website. This means that 65% of the customers automatically pick up the phone without even going near the website.
Impact of website
This also means that there is no point at all creating a brilliant website, perfect self-service, chat box or any other tool, for 65% of your callers. They simply don’t go near that environment. So how can you move these customers online? For 18 months, we initiated all kinds of activities, such as informing customers about online options via e-mail, but the percentage remained stable, around 35%. It did not change until we assigned the contact center employees a clear role in tempting customers online. We instructed them to tell customers about the online environment, in any conversations where this was relevant. They needed to know that they could find their own information there or could conduct the transaction themselves online, instead of making the call. Within two months, the percentage of customers who had checked the site before calling us increased to 55%!
Employees are key
When looking for successful transition to an online service provider therefore, cherish your contact center employees and make sure they are uniformly enthusiastic about the online environment, because they personally experience how happy it makes the customers!