Combine Data Security & Customer Service to Keep Your Customers Sweet

In this day and age, it should be top of every company’s agenda to ensure they show their customers they are fully invested in customer engagement. This should most definitely be of vital importance for contact centres, as customers are still seeking to communicate with brands with human voices, especially if they have something to complain about!  

However, now centres have to protect themselves from the impending doom of a potential breach and insider fraud; the promise of delivering a premium service is becoming an issue. We can’t ignore the threat of fraud any longer, because contact centres are the businesses most at risk!

Protecting customer data is a necessity, but this can sometimes impact on the quality of the customer experience, so finding a way to balance the two can be incredibly tough. The way a customer’s call is treated will reflect on the overall experience with your brand. A call like this alone can make or break a chance for your brand  to secure a deal and gain more business.

Research conducted by Google found that human interaction is still desired, as 57% of consumers said that their main reason for calling a company was to communicate with a human being. On top of that 70% of customers who frequently peruse mobile devices have actively used the “call me” button in order to contact a company.

Customers like communicating with another humans for many reasons. First of all, the contact centre employee on the reciprocating end of the phone call will have been trained to use a polite, friendly voice and to be knowledgeable about the company’s potential issues. They should be able to answer any queries quickly and can alleviate any concerns about the purchase of a product or service. Contact centre agents are also able to support callers may have a disability or may need extra help with their speech.

Stutters, accents, and subtle differences in how callers refer to information could cause problems, particularly for companies which have decided to use automated speech recognition (ASR) to collect certain data from their callers. Processing payments is one scenario that can be difficult to handle through ASR.

Callers almost never follow the standardised way of reading card numbers, as a four-digit number can have up to 10 different variations in human speech. Say if a customer says it in a different way to how your ASR has been programmed to recognise these clusters of numbers, then they could get annoyed and can even hang up the phone on you… and no company wants that!

However, contact centres need to sometimes use computer systems such as interactive voice response (IVR) and ASR to deal with customer calls, in order to eliminate any outside threat to customer data. Whilst they are great at answering and dealing with calls outside of normal work hours, these calls are very rarely stress or error free.

With this in mind, contact centres should have agents on standby to help callers who are struggling with the process of the call. Therefore if you employ a multi-frequency masking technology, numbers can be assigned certain functions, which prevents other parties from gaining private information, whilst the agent can follow the customer throughout their journey and be there to help if needs be.

Your customers should feel protected by your services, because your customers are the driving forces behind your brand’s success. So treat them with respect and they will welcome your business with open arms!