Business intelligence and the area of Customer Care.

All to often these days a Product recall it’s the headlines, ranging from exploding laptop batteries to lead paint on toys, both of which mean that the product is unsafe which in turn means potential legal issues if the matter is not dealt with quickly.  In many cases, the manufacturer has been a global brand with an impeccable reputation and millions of loyal customers.

Globally consumers are talking, but is anyone listening besides the call centre fielding the calls? Obviously the customer care agent will be documenting the interaction in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, but and it is a big but, is anyone in  management looking to identify trends? 

If recurring complaints about poorly designed products were noticed soon enough, the data could be passed on the design and manufacturing areas, thus allowing them to make  the necessary modifications or in extreme situations stop production. Taking this action early could well save customers from injury (or even death) and also as importantly ensure that any brand damaging situations are reduced to a minimum.

The answer lies in intelligent customer care.

Business Intelligence allows companies to rethink customer care, this time working from the outside in, business intelligence tools and analytics being used to extract business insight from the reams of available customer data. This is the key to knowing customers better and making customer care proactive and intelligent, and not simply reactive, when by definition it is already too late to stop the problem escalating, the horse being well and truly out of the stable.

Taking the intelligent customer care approach means spotting the potential trends before they become a real problem, something that will not only increase customer satisfaction, but also is likely to reduce costs. Gone will be the reactive approach, where companies rush in resources to meet escalating call volumes, with all the hefty investments in process and technology that that entails. Instead, the company will be one step ahead of the problem, far enough perhaps to stop many customers even experiencing the problem in the first place.

The fact that a businesses customers are less likely to have problems is of course an important fact, but even when they do, having that little bit more time to prepare is bound to improve the customer experience, and with survey after survey reporting that customer satisfaction is dropping globally, this can only improve customer loyalty and sales.

 The Shift to Proactive Customer Care

Building intelligent customer care is not just about trying to do more with less with the goal of reducing operating costs, it signifies a drive to improve business-to-customer relationships by strengthening the connection between the call centre and the parent business, thus ensuring goals are aligned and that serious customer issues do not fall through any cracks, as they oft have done in the past.

The 80/20 rule is at the heart of this approach, the  difficult, specialty customer queries  that normally make up 20 percent of call volumes being the focus. Business intelligence tools and processes are then used to uncover the root cause analysis of these, the  most complex customer issues. The solutions found are then applied to the ongoing day-to-day operations of the call centre.