The Phone Experience
The Customer Experience
Ms. Jones is your customer. Every time you engage Ms. Jones you contribute to her experience with your company. When you speak with her. When you send her an email. When she sees an ad. Even when someone else tells Ms. Jones about their experience with your company. Every touch adds to her aggregate impression of you. And her aggregate impression is the deciding factor on whether or not she will do business with you.
There is some reservoir of goodwill that can be accumulated by providing a positive experience again and again. But the scary truth is that even when you’ve solidly cultivated a positive customer experience it is yours to lose. You’ve been strategic, you’ve been disciplined and you got it right 90% of the time. Congratulations, but be warned: there’s a decent chance you’ll lose your hard won customer from the 10% of the time you got it wrong.
These are the facts of customer experience. In today’s business environment with educated, empowered consumers and a cutthroat competitive landscape, it’s no mean feat to get the customer experience right. The margins for error are that small.
The Prospect Experience
Giving your customers a good experience is critical. But what about your prospects? For a prospect to become a customer their prospect experience must be positive. And if the margins for error are small in providing a consistently excellent Customer experience, they are even smaller when creating a positive prospect experience.
The reason for this is obvious. Take the example of a seller reaching out to a prospect over the phone; whether the sales rep is responding to an inquiry made by the prospect or cold calling, the sales rep reaching out over the phone may only have one second to make a good impression.
Consumer exposure to advertising and marketing has exploded in recent years. Filtering it out is done quickly and automatically, almost reflexively. When no relationship exists with the sales rep or the company it’s important to start strong and establish trust instantaneously. It is the only way to penetrate the barrier that consumers instinctively put between themselves and the barrage of marketing messages.
The Phone Experience
It is important to keep the prospect experience in mind when making nuts and bolts strategic decisions about how your company is contacting prospects. Take for instance dialer technology. Many companies dealing with a high volume of leads choose a predictive dialer to speed up the execution of outbound calls. The predictive dialer works on the assumption that many phone calls will not reach live prospects. So on a sales floor that has 10 sales reps, the predictive dialer will place 20 calls. Many of those calls will be disconnected since they won’t reach a live prospect. But the calls that do reach a live prospect will be transferred to a sales rep.
The predictive dialer sounds like a real time saver. But as a consumer, have you ever received a call that was placed from a predictive dialer? When you answer your phone, there is silence, some clicking and finally a sales rep comes on the line. The rep calls you and you wait for them. When they finally come on the phone they try to represent their company as a place where you are going to want to business. Because they provide superior service. Those pledges of positive customer experience to come are meaningless in the shadow of how the phone call began.
It is all too common that companies make the penny wise, pound foolish choice of trading a positive prospect experience for high contact rates. But this is by no means an unavoidable tradeoff. There are intelligent dialer products available now that make it quick to contact leads without sacrificing the prospect experience. Companies looking to improve contact rates and prospect experience concurrently should consider using an intelligent dialer that integrates with a lead management solution. A lead dialer such as this leverages all the distribution capabilities of the lead management solution to use lead data to strategically connect sales reps to prospects. The quality of the connection can also be boosted using a lead dialer that leverages built in lead prioritization to ensure that leads are being contacted in accordance with established best practices.
Managing your prospects experience is a complicated undertaking. There are a lot of aspects of it that are difficult to control. But there are some aspects of prospect experience can be controlled. One such aspect is the experience a prospect has when answering a call from one of your sales reps. Why would you choose a solution that increases contact rates at the expense of prospect experience when you can use an intelligent lead dialer that boosts both the quantity and the quality of contacts?
