Although contact centers began as a means of addressing customer comments and complaints, innovations in enterprise software have made contact center marketing a reality in today’s business world. Because contact centers focus on direct communication with consumers, they are able to supply CMOs with vital information that can improve marketing efforts.

A Vital Point of Consumer Contact

Contact centers provide critical support to any brand ethos. In addition to helping customers get the most from products and services, contact center personnel are strategically placed to gather information about consumers’ purchasing habits and background information. No longer just a way to mollify unhappy consumers, contact centers are a means of keeping and expanding business opportunities. Both B2B and B2C marketing can benefit from contact center campaigns.

Getting Started: Reacting to Reactions

The facts speak for themselves: Every Fortune 500 company makes use of at least one contact center – whether in-house or outsourced to an agency.

Using customer relationship management tools, businesses can capture information that can be used in a broad swath of planning, from creating customized prompts for a website to planning a major marketing campaign.

Contact Center Marketing Muscle

But perhaps the most important benefit accruing from contact center management software is the opportunity to generate and periodically update call lists for cold-calling and general sales drives.

Marketing campaigns that are conducted by telephone are more likely to get a response. A 2012 survey issued by the Direct Marketing Association found that marketers on average experienced a 12.95% response rate for telephone campaigns – compared to direct mail (3.4%), email (.12%), post card (2.47%), and catalog (4.26%).

A Direct Response Marking Plan

Marketing departments need to plan carefully to ensure they realize maximum advantage from contact center initiatives.

The first step is anticipating customer response to a campaign. Providing contact center associates with a detailed response that aligns with brand ethos and hits the marketing notes you’re aiming at, is an important component.

Hand in hand with this is the need to provide a strategy for how contact center associates will respond to customers who fail to respond to the campaign. Should they contact them by phone? Chat? How much time should pass before contacting? (Note: it is imperative that marketing departments regularly review and update call lists to ensure acceptable response levels.)

The concrete result of this planning is the creation of scripts for contact center associates to use. Questions that are specific to demographic groups in your customer base can be entered into contact center management software to ensure maximum engagement with callers.

Realizing Maximum Potential: Contact Center Management Software

Because critical marketing information is supplied by contact centers, it is important that your conact center has the best management software to track and capture this data. Enterprise Feedback Management software (EFM) provides the tools needed to get a complete picture of how customers view your business, products, and services.

EFM can provide actionable data quickly to support sales and marketing campaigns. Benefits of EFM include:

Using customizable, interactive dashboards, branded reports, and embeddable widgets, you can share information and highlight actionable results.

Disparate systems and processes can be unified, enhancing and smoothing the decision making process.

Survey responses can be centralized and the data combined with information from other systems to create better reports and better customize surveys to align with demographics.

EFM possesses both the metrics needed to formulate KPIs and the support to benchmark progress toward them.

Create training opportunities for associates that is based upon individual performance as well as meeting sales goals.

KOVA: Innovation To Power Your Enterprise Goals

Our comprehensive array of solutions fits every contact center’s needs. From workforce management to customer satisfaction, KOVA has the tools you need to make your business leaner, more agile, and profitable. Our software solutions are scalable and can be tailored to your company’s unique business challenges.

Contact us today and learn how KOVA can improve your contact center’s performance.