In my last post, I discussed how crucial your Call Center or ‘Human Interface Center’ (HIC) is to your success. Your HIC is overflowing with valuable customer insights and product feedback. In addition, HIC agents are the ones pushing your retention marketing campaigns and supporting brand reputation management. All this considered, it’s imperative that you treat your HIC as part of your acquisition and retention ideation team.
As promised, I am going to share 12 easy ways that I use to strengthen the ties between my marketing team and the HIC. Most of these suggestions require minimal organizational and managerial effort to implement, yet they yield outstanding results...
Listen to customer calls at least once a week. Both you and your team members should be listening to about 3-5 calls a week. Ask your HIC Head to send you sample of calls for a variety of resistance cases and feedback topics.
Make the time to talk directly to the HIC reps who actually communicate with the customers. Holding meetings with senior management is good, but make sure you talk junior employees too. Try to separate their personal opinions from the qualitative and quantitative insights they share you with.
Play an active role in writing and updating the HIC scripts and sale pitches. Deviations from these can prove to be catastrophe to brand coherency, messaging and positioning and do affect conversions directly.
Don’t neglect online chats, text messages and non-automated emails. Review samples of them on a monthly basis.
Monitor tightly HIC SLAs and KPIs (quantitative and qualitative). They affect UX and eventually performance. Challenge and act upon them to make sure all leads are engaged with in a timely manner, per the relevant channel and messaging.
Collaborative ideation. Once you recognise who the leading HIC agents are and develop sound relationship with them, invite them every now and then to join your marketing group ideation meetings. You can get some great promotional and campaigns ideas there.
Hold round tables. According to Aberdeen Group research, the top performing companies conduct around 18% more meetings between the marketing and sales department to discuss challenges and alignment issues.
Inspire and motivate. Sharing your new campaign ideas and marketing activities in a collaborative, inspirational manner can be very motivating for HIC employees, as it shakes up their strict, repetitive work routine.
Hash out the definition of leads and mutual KPIs. What is an ‘unripe’ lead vs. a lead that demands immediate hard sale attention? This will foster a more efficient operation, minimize friction, and simplify reporting terminology.
Streamlined simple-to-operate backend platforms. The systems should serve the agents not vice versa. Emphasis on automation, UI, UX and configuration versatility will mostly help the HIC to increase efficiency, reduce frustrations and allow focus on the sales or service provided rather than technicalities. Though this is not within the marketers’ domain, as a senior officer, you want to allocate time and resources (mostly dev, product and IT) to solve or improve such constraints, even sometimes at the expense of marketing related resources, or delaying few campaign launches. I have seen this happen over and over again. When you hear the HIC “complaining” about technical issues, about how cumbersome it is to operate parts of the backend and CRM systems, about missing tools or reports - you want to listen to them.
Explore new communication channels: emails, chat and phone calls just aren’t enough anymore. Brainstorm with your HIC and try to determine where your target customers hang out online. Try to build presence there too.
Let Sales do the selling. Tension between Marketing Departments and HICs is a furiously debated topic. If you are just as ambitious as your Sales counterpart, you can easily step on each other’s toes. While it isn’t completely avoidable, constructive work processes, trust and relationship building from a professional standpoint are keys to minimizing friction. According to Aberdeen Group research, 77% of top performing B2B companies declared having a strong relationship between their Marketing and Sales groups.
Now it’s your turn. How do you encourage collaboration with your HIC? Leave your ideas and tips in the comments below!