Create an innovative customer relations centre to improve the customer experience

A customer relations centre is a structure dedicated to managing the remote relationship between a company and its customers or prospects. This platform, which handles both incoming and outgoing calls, includes actions such as prospecting, assistance and customer support, with the aim of improving customer relations.

The CRC now faces new challenges: diversifying its activities, it is becoming a strategic centre for value creation, focusing on both customer satisfaction and the development of a company's sales. What are its missions and what forms can it take? What is a multi-channel customer relations centre ?

As the backbone of the customer journey, the contact centre performs a wide range of tasks in the service of the customer, across different channels and at different stages of the buying process.

Let's take a look at how to optimise the management of your customer relations centre and the tools you can use to boost performance.

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What is a customer relations centre? Definition

As its name suggests, the customer relations centre is at the heart of customer relations: it is a key contact point for establishing and nurturing the link between a company and its existing or potential customers.

Depending on the type of business and the size of the company, this service is either provided in-house or outsourced to an external service provider, as is generally the case with telephone or telecoms operators. For a small company, it may simply be the person who will be the main interface with customers.

Customer relations centre and call centre: what are the differences?

The customer relations centre and the call centre are structures that can be used in their own right or in a complementary way. Although they use different resources, they share the same objective: customer satisfaction.

The customer relations centre

▶ ︎What? A customer relations centre, the equivalent of a contact centre, is a structure that manages customer relations on the basis of various communication channels.

▶ ︎ Which communication channels? The contact or customer relations centre relies on various communication channels:

• telephone
• email
• instant messaging
• social networks, etc.

▶ ︎ F or what needs ? The customer relations centre supports the company in tasks related to acquiring and retaining customers, including:

• lead generation
• sales prospecting
• improving the customer experience.

The call centre

▶ ︎What? A call centre is a structure or service that provides the companies that use it with human and technical resources to manage their customer relations. Most call centres operate in the fields of telemarketing, sales, assistance and data processing.

▶ ︎ What means of communication? Communication takes place mainly by telephone. Carried out by telephone advisers or teleoperators, receiving and sending calls offers different functions, depending on the company's specific activities.

▶ ︎ F or what purposes ?

Incoming calls are used to process :

• information: providing a professional telephone welcome and answering enquiries (prospects),
• after-sales service: managing customer relations following a sale (customers) and dealing with complaints,
• appointment setting: receiving and scheduling appointment requests, which is a very popular task for B2B call centres in particular,
• customer support, etc.

Outbound calls are used to manage :

• prospecting: proposing offers or services with the aim of winning new customers,
• Sales: to complete the act of buying from a distance,
• satisfaction surveys: to identify customer needs, etc.

☝️ Your choice of solution will be guided by your specific needs, the quality of service you expect, and the costs involved.

Outsourcing a company's activities to a third-party service should be part of a carefully considered strategy, and can be beneficial to your bottom line. By delegating part of your customer relations to competent technicians, you free up time for higher added-value tasks.

[Focus] The multi-channel customer relations centre

Changes in the profession

While the telephone has long been the flagship tool in customer relations, the services and activities of contact centres are no longer limited solely to call management.

With the rise of new technologies and the increasing use of NICTs in our current modes of communication, and even if the telephone is still a popular tool for professionals, the transition to a multi-channel contact centre is becoming unavoidable, with a greater emphasis on digital.

The transition to an omnichannel strategy

Customer relations centres are tending to evolve by diversifying technologies:

• social networks
• instant messaging and chatbots
• chatbots, etc.

It is now essential to adapt to the habits of increasingly connected customers by offering them the possibility of using different communication channels when they need to get in touch with the company.

As well as offering different ways of getting in touch, it's important to be ubiquitous so as to always leave a door open, whatever the medium used:

• a telephone number
• a contact form on your website
• a page on social media, etc.

The move to omnichannel multiplies the points of contact and makes them interact: for example, click-to-call or web-to-call buttons ensure that contact is seamless from the website to the telephone call. By removing the barriers between the different communication channels, the customer experience is made more fluid.

Objective: offer the best experience

More than just customer relations, the trend is to offer a quality experience in order to satisfy the customer and then build loyalty. Retaining existing customers costs a company less than trying to acquire new ones. Making the commercial relationship last over time becomes a source of sales opportunities for a company.

For example, a relationship marketing strategy aimed at maintaining customer relations can be based directly on the customer relations centre. The aim is to encourage customers to embark on a new buying journey in order to generate future sales.

Customers themselves are demanding greater proximity and involvement from their contacts. In this customer-centric approach, the contact centre has a key role to play in creating links and commitment.

It is vital to nurture this relationship, in the sense that it contributes to achieving the company's objectives. So how do you reconcile the different issues facing a contact centre, between customer satisfaction, productivity and cost rationalisation?

5 steps to boost your customer relations centre

Step 1 - Identify your customers' expectations

To increase customer satisfaction, it's important to know exactly what your customers want and the problems they encounter, either before they buy your product or service, or when they use it. By accurately identifying the profile of your customers, you make it easier to personalise your communications.

This customer-centric approach must be part of a more global company strategy: if the customer is at the heart of your concerns, this will play directly into the decisions to be taken regarding contact centre management.

To do this, you can gather as much information as possible in a centralised tool, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software. By using such a tool, you can keep track of the customer relationship, and your agents can retrieve the history of exchanges so that they can quickly get to grips with a customer file and its context.

⚒️ For example, Kavkom is a powerful telephony tool, coupled with a CRM included in the package, for personalised customer relationship management. The solution is particularly well suited to companies involved in communications and customer relations (call centres, customer services or e-commerce shops).
It offers an unlimited number of calls, as well as access to a host of features such as real-time lead qualification, conversation history, interactive voice switchboard, dashboard, etc.

Step 2 - Make sure your agents are qualified and specialised

Agents or account managers are the first point of contact with the customer: they must be perfectly familiar with your offers, services and processes. As your brand image is at stake, the quality of their service must be beyond reproach.

When recruiting your staff or putting together your training and skills development programme, you can focus on :

• Knowledge of the business and company processes,
• listening skills: taking on board the customer's demands and expectations, being helpful and understanding, knowing how to reformulate the request,
• complaint management: knowing how to manage customer dissatisfaction while remaining courteous and professional, and knowing how to direct the customer to the appropriate contact,
• communication skills: knowing how to be pleasant, but also how to convey a message using clear elocution, and this is all the more important as exchanges take place at a distance,
• sales methods and techniques.

In addition to the qualifications needed to offer your customers a quality service, it is also important to ensure that each of them is specialised.

Specialisation allows you to

• develop real expertise in a targeted subject, so that you can refer customers more effectively
• and to direct requests directly to the right people according to their nature.

To help your agents work more efficiently and relieve them of tedious tasks, consider equipping yourself with a specialised tool!

⚒️ The Phedone tool is a truly intelligent assistant, which automates the management of customer returns and provides you with AI-enhanced analysis results. Its analyses are based on 4 pillars

• data structure based on content and the nature of queries,
• sorting using tags,
• resolution assistance (even before a ticket is opened),
• presentation of results.

The software helps your teams to make the best decisions and improves the performance of your contact centre.

Step 3 - Create a customer journey

You can go further than training agents in sales methods, and think about a scripted customer journey. This involves setting up or improving the process through which the customer or prospect makes contact with the company:

• Who takes the first call?
• Who takes care of the rest of the request and responds to their needs?

From the simple contact looking for information to the customer, the different stages of the journey need to be considered. The lead needs to be convinced in order to be transformed into a customer, and then the customer needs to be won over in order to maintain the relationship and even become a brand ambassador.

This means identifying the problems your customers encounter when they contact you: the person dealing with their request is not the right person, response times are too long, etc. Any difficulties encountered can be detrimental to your customer relationship. Any difficulties encountered can damage the customer experience and lead to brand misappropriation.

⚒️ The Twilio Flex platform is a toolbox that supports you in building fluid and personalised customer journeys, tailored to their uses and expectations. Really help your customers with every interaction with your brand, whatever the communication channel used (SMS, Whatsapp, Email, Voice, Video, etc.) since all conversations are centralised in Twilio's single interface. Intelligent automation features such as chatbots and routing of requests to qualified agents will make all the difference and make your customer experience unique.

Step 4 - Switch to automation

To make the customer experience as seamless as possible, you can choose to use a marketing automation or sales automation system to support your customer journey. Simple, recurring queries can be handled by robots (interactive FAQs, chatbots, etc.) and more complex or technical queries redirected to a call centre agent.

By automating part of the response to low added-value requests, you can free up time for your teams: Some of their time will be better spent developing the business and creating opportunities. To increase the efficiency with which requests are handled, plan a scripted process that includes automatic call distribution (ACD) to a qualified call centre agent to deal with a specific request.

Equipping your centre with a suitable tool can help you automate your processes and improve customer service. This is particularly vital for contact centres in the telecoms sector, which face stiff competition: with many telephone operators on the market, differentiation comes down to the customer experience and the quality of customer service.

👉 Here's some effective software to help you automate your customer relations :

🛠 Axialys is an intuitive, modular SaaS telephony solution that integrates natively with all your business tools (CRM, ticketing, etc) for centralised management of your customer relations. Ergonomic and fully customisable, it gives you a host of intelligent features: time stamping, audio recording of the conversation, call transcription, call tagging, complete daily statistics, SMS sent to the caller, and much more!

⚒️ RingCentral Experience Client is helping to increase telecoms operators' customer retention rates. By automatically allocating messages to the appropriate contacts, the productivity of agents - who receive a relevant, contextualised and prioritised request - is improved, waiting times are reduced and responses are more accurate. Compatible with numerous digital channels, this omnichannel platform creates engagement and improves the customer experience without requiring additional resources.

Step 5 - Study your performance indicators

To validate your customer relationship management choices, define relevant KPIs that are aligned with the company's strategy.

You can use cost indicators, performance indicators, satisfaction indicators, etc. to help you manage your customer relations centre more effectively.

For telephone calls, here are a few indicators to look out for:

• the rate of abandoned calls (excessive waiting time),
• the rate of calls picked up
• lost call rate, etc.

This monitoring of telephone calls is necessary to improve service quality. Thanks to an analysis carried out on the various workstations, you can highlight good practicesand make informed decisions on areas for improvement. You can also draw up a plan of actions and recommendations to refine your strategy.

Customer satisfaction is a crucial element to study. Use tools that will tell you how well you are meeting customer expectations:

• presence rate of advisers at peak times,
• average handling time ( AHT ),
• First Contact Resolution ( FCR ),
• adaptation of the channel used to the type of customer,
• agents' mastery of new technologies, etc.

⚒️ For example, software such as Ringover gives you access to advanced call statistics in real time, which you can view by department, user or date. With this type of data at your disposal, you can quickly identify any weak points in your processes, and take decisions to improve performance. Adapted to customer relations centres, this kind of solution helps you to improve both call management and the quality of the customer experience.

See all software Call Centre

A central, evolving tool

As a customer service manager or customer relations director, you are juggling a number of imperatives:

• increasing customer satisfaction, but also managing customer dissatisfaction,
• guaranteeing impeccable quality of service to build customer loyalty,
• ensuring good working conditions for agents,
• improve performance, optimise resources and rationalise costs.

To achieve your objectives and strike the right balance, you need to master the equation between profitability, customer satisfaction and a healthy working environment for your teams.

The strategy for satisfying customers is now omnichannel: the role of the customer relations centre is to facilitate contact between the company and the customer, using effective tools, training advisers and formalising best practice.

But responding as accurately as possible also means adapting to changing customer expectations. All your processes, tools and resources need to be evaluated, questioned and readjusted to ensure that you are always in a position to provide customers with added value and strengthen their trust in your company.