How to Maximise the Margin in Customer Experience

Customer experience is one of the key battlegrounds for businesses in 2019 as organisations look to differentiate and better serve their customers. However, it’s not always clear how the reseller community can leverage CX in order to drive additional margin.

Leading call analytics, call recording and fraud management software developer Tollring provides a suite of tools that enables organisations of any size to drive their communications channels and attain exceptional customer experience. We spoke to Carl Boraman, Director of Strategic Alliances at Tollring, to find out how resellers can increase margin in communications with CX.

“CX is the critical differentiator in a highly competitive market.”

“If you can deliver business intelligence around customer experience and you can highlight where your customers are highly satisfied, or indeed any areas where you need to improve, then that drives legitimate and worthwhile revenue streams for resellers,” explains Carl. “We deliver UC and call analytics products that provide information to businesses about their customer interactions, highlighting good and bad customer experience areas and making it easy to take action.”

Historically seen as a play for big business, the customer experience conversation is now starting to be had at the small business level and resellers are finding that the tried and trusted ‘saving money on your telecoms’ pitches aren’t what customers want to hear.

“Customer experience touches all parts of your business, even down to paying invoices. People always think of CX as a contact centre role but every part of an organisation, every employee that is customer facing, has an impact on the customer experience,” continues Carl. “If the reseller can understand how to have the conversation around customer experience and its business benefits, as well as how they can make improvements rather than simply talking about the technology, then they can genuinely differentiate themselves in any market or segment. Simple things like unreturned missed calls and not just missed calls, or a chat engine that nobody’s monitoring make a huge difference to customers’ experiences and the businesses’ reputation.”

Through greater use of the cloud, the reseller community now has access to tools that customers want and need to make the necessary changes within their business to impact customer experience.

“If you can’t measure it then you can’t manage it.”

“That old adage has never gone away,” adds Carl. “These insights help customers to make better decisions around their resources, including optimising their workforce, whilst understanding how they are interacting with their customers. That’s something with a tangible value that resellers can charge for. Tollring’s suite of tools help resellers and their end users to see what their customers’ journey was actually like, which leads to improved productivity and efficiency.

“These insights can help businesses to understand if they need to extend opening times, employ additional agents or make sure they have sufficient staff during peak times. Such timely insights can make all the difference in being able to make informed decisions.”

As businesses start to demand access to these tools and the insights they provide, resellers have an opportunity to switch the conversation away from simply saving money or adding the latest features. And it’s in these adjusted conversations that resellers will see the real returns.

“We work closely with resellers and their sales people, helping them to explain the business benefits. The key is to talk about the business challenges; the opportunities and the benefits rather than just features and technology,” adds Carl. “The reseller that can have a conversation with the customer that helps to identify and overcome their challenges will be the one that wins and enables them to improve the customer experience journey. Resellers who provide a quote, cut a deal, sign a contract and run will find it increasingly tough.

“Unified communications can help to foster a relationship with a business customer as they become less likely to rip and replace cloud technologies. Instead they will rather enhance them and introduce new features and ways of working. It’s therefore important that resellers understand the customer and what they need, rather than looking at them as just a deal. A long-term customer relationship will derive far more value for both the reseller and the customer, so it is a true win-win scenario.”

Carl continues,“Further to additional revenue generated by selling analytics tools to help customers improve their CX performance, business intelligence will highlight other opportunities for margin and additional value.  Tollring’s churn is incredibly low, in the region of 1 or 2%, because once the business customer has this information and insights that help them to make improvements, they don’t want it taken away.”

The message from Tollring is clear, that putting CX at the heart of customer conversations in 2019 will open up opportunities for the channel.

“Our roadmap is full of features that drive customer experience.”

“It’s not just about answering the phone quicker, it’s about making sure every interaction with the customer is understood and ultimately delivers business benefits,” concludes Carl. “We do the heavy lifting in that we get the raw data and mesh it with other data and deliver it in a way that is easy to access and understand, making it available in a meaningful and contextual way. The reseller can then focus on having an open conversation and being able to really understand the customer in order to present a solution that satisfies their needs. Customers are going to simply stop consuming core telephony services in an isolated way and instead buy into whichever reseller can take them on the journey to exceptional customer experience.”