In the always-changing world of sun power, good marketing plans need a lot of knowledge from data and they need to use this information well.

As the sun power business grows, using call analysis has become a key way for firms trying to improve their marketing efforts.

Call tracking services have changed how solar companies measure if their ads work. By using different numbers for each campaign or way of talking, companies can directly link incoming calls to where they came from. This level of detail helps marketers to understand which marketing actions get the most leads or sales. Thus, they can use resources better.

Call tracking gives very useful information about what customers do in the solar business. This is important because people usually start by asking questions or getting advice. Looking at phone data helps businesses know what customers want, where people ask about solar in big numbers, when they call most often, and how well different ways of advertising like internet ads or social media posts work.

Understanding how tracking calls helps solar promotion plans is crucial for success. Call analytics help you understand your customers and what they need.

• Call analytics records info about incoming calls like numbers, how long they last, time of day, and place. This helps find the busiest call times so you can have enough people working. It also reveals where calls are coming from, like Google ads, social media, or other places.

• Looking at call conversations and subjects tells you what worries or questions your buyers have. Then, you can change your marketing stuff and sales talk to deal with them. Solar businesses might be asked about costs, benefits, or how their systems operate.

• Using call analytics to find your best marketing channels makes the most of your money spent on marketing. If Facebook advertising gets more phone calls than billboards, for example, you can move your resources to where they are needed most.

• Keep an eye on call results, such as sales or appointments made. This helps you see how well you’re doing and where there is room to improve. If some calls do not lead to sales, your sales team might need extra training.

In today’s world full of data, analytics are very important for any marketing plan. For solar businesses, phone stats give useful information to increase leads and sales. Knowing what your customers want, need, and feel will help you use marketing money better so you can become more successful.

In a time ruled by shopping on the internet, we understand how important reviews are. For firms that use solar power, good opinions prove they are trustworthy and skilled. Plus, reviews of solar installers have a big impact on what new customers will decide. Check out https://solarpowersystems.org/ to find the best solar panel companies.

People who might use solar often depend on what other users say and think about their experiences with it. Good reviews can help build belief and trust, making people more likely to pick one installer over another.

Thin film solar panels have caught people’s attention as an effective new thing in the world of solar energy. These light panels can be put anywhere, making them good for lots of places and things. As this technology gets better, its effects on sales are big. Due to the good marketing strategies, the Global Thin Film Solar Cell Market Size was valued at USD 12.2 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach USD 14.7 billion in 2022, and is estimated to reach USD 25.7 billion by the end of 2030.

Solar businesses using thin-film panels need to tell people why it’s better than other choices. Marketing plans should show that these panels last longer, are better in quality, and can change with old solar choices. Using call tracking solutions, businesses can find out what questions customers have about thin film tech. This helps them make special marketing plans to answer any worries or wrong ideas about it.

To sum up, by using call tracking software, you’ll gain invaluable insights into what’s working, what’s not, and how you can improve. You’ll learn what topics, questions, and concerns your potential customers have. Solar companies can get a much clearer picture of where their best potential customers and opportunities are. The data is already there – you just need to take advantage of it. By utilizing call analytics, you can achieve a real competitive advantage and increase your solar sales.

If the festive season left your frontline staff frazzled, now is the time to give them a welcome energy boost. Magnus Geverts shares his top tips for beating agent burnout—and the competition—in 2023.

Despite the cost-of-living crisis, research from Statista predicted that retail sales during the holidays were expected to reach more than £82 billion in the UK, the busiest shopping period of the year when customer queries typically increase dramatically. Great news for businesses that rely on the festive season to tide them over during the leaner months but extremely stressful for agents in contact centres. 2023 has arrived and the same tough economic challenges prevail, requiring urgent remedies to beat agent burnout and restore the contact centre to full health for a profitable New Year.

Your 5-step Detox Programme Starts Here

The New Year is the perfect time to turn realistic health intentions into reality. Blend strategies for enhanced emotional wellbeing with the latest agent-empowering technology to ensure frontline staff are feeling fit and healthy. Here are our top tips:

1. Get the foundations right—start by tackling the major stress triggers in your contact centre when the calls flood in from customers wanting to return or exchange their gifts. Don’t know what they are? If you don’t have automated analytics tools then simply ask agents directly—they will welcome the opportunity to be involved and asking shows you care and value their input. Next, rethink flexibility—what does it mean for your agents in 2023? Could experimenting with different scheduling techniques be effective? Remember to build mandatory rest time into schedules so agents can recharge their batteries. Managers might also consider developing a special DIY de-stressor kit, full of practical tips to reduce stress levels, whatever the season.

2. Build a team of brand guardians—as consumers continue to tighten their belts, competition is fiercer than ever and contact centres need to engage more intimately with customers to influence brand perception, win sales and build longer-term loyalty. Encourage agents to perfect a compelling storyboard that makes your product or service offering stand out from the crowd. Inspire and motivate team members through gamification, offering rewards to those who share their successes and learning with others. A quick Zoom call at the beginning of the day or an online video that can be watched at leisure is all it takes. This gives everyone the chance to embrace their new role as brand guardians while customers will pick up on their positive energy and enthusiasm.

3. Focus on soft skills—today’s brand guardians require a broader skillset because today’s customers want efficient service with the human touch.  Reassess agent training programmes to make sure they are ready for the year ahead. Blend traditional hard skills such as speedy resolution of customer problems and product knowledge with softer skills. Focus on the top five behaviours that are the hallmarks of good customer conversations: empathy, helpfulness, adaptability, active listening and patience. To minimise stress, empower agents with practical coping mechanisms for dealing with frustrated customers. For example, rather than over-use the word ‘sorry’ to pause a conversation or fill voids, encourage frontline staff to show genuine empathy with an opening response such as, “I know late deliveries are not acceptable and very frustrating for you”. Closing the conversation with a positive resolution of, “let’s see how we can put this right,” is a simple way to keep customers on your side while boosting agent confidence.

4. Introduce ‘lifestyle’ scheduling—and make it an intrinsic part of your wellbeing strategy to beat agent burnout. Self-service automation allows agents to build and edit their own schedules around their life rather than the other way round, in real-time, using their mobile devices. This new form of ‘lifestyle scheduling’ is particularly beneficial to hybrid working when domestic chores and work duties naturally heighten stress levels. Moreover, giving agents greater control over their work-from-home (WFH) regime will leave your brand guardians energised to deliver exceptional customer experience (CX).

5. Analytics are the way forward, inside and out— these modern-day miracle-workers capture and analyse data from within the contact centre and beyond, converting data into valuable business intelligence that can be used to enhance the agent and customer experience. Consider deploying Voice of the Employee (VoE) analytics to capture how agents are feeling to identify those who are struggling and need extra support. Next, boost agent confidence to deliver stellar customer experiences by introducing Voice of the Customer (VoC) analytics. These clever tools release intelligent insights that give frontline staff a complete understanding of their end-to-end interactions including mood on every step of the customer journey. Meanwhile, they help supervisors uncover potential knowledge and skills gaps to refine and strengthen agent coaching and training. It’s a winning combination that allows the whole contact centre to flourish as brand guardians and make 2023 your best year ever.

For more ideas on how to beat agent burnout and deliver an outstanding customer experience, download Calabrio’s Workforce Wellbeing Toolkit or visit www.calabrio.com.

About the Author

Magnus Geverts is VP Product Marketing at Calabrio.

Calabrio is a trusted ally to leading brands. The digital foundation of customer-centric contact centres, Calabrio helps enrich and interpret human interactions, empowering the contact centre as a brand guardian.

We maximise agent performance, exceed customer expectations, and boost workforce efficiency using connected data, AI-fuelled analytics, automated workforce management and personalised coaching.

Only Calabrio ONE unites workforce optimisation (WFO), agent engagement and business intelligence solutions into a true-cloud, fully integrated suite that adapts to your business.

Historically, customer support teams have taken a reactive approach to customer issues.

Improving customer experience was more about finding solutions to customer-reported issues than proactively taking steps to improve the value and quality of the company’s products and services.

Reactive customer support is time-consuming and “behind the curve”; at its worst, it prevents support agents from owning and resolving tickets end-to-end, causing a spike in engineering escalations and further delays and disruption to internal teams and customers alike. The end result is frustration and dissatisfaction on all sides.

Whether you’re in B2B SaaS, e-commerce, or another industry, customer and employee satisfaction are likely to be key to success, making new approaches more attractive. Yesterday, reactive customer support was status quo. Today, with predictive, proactive capabilities, it doesn’t need to be.

Predictive customer support means that support teams resolve issues before they occur and sometimes even before customers are aware of them. Predictive customer analytics applies AI to observe customer activity and find patterns in the data. The patterns and data uncovered can then understand how a customer is using the product and detect potential issues a customer may face.

Modern customer support teams use historical customer data in combination with real-time data to understand customers’ behaviors, needs, and pain points. Technological advances in AI enable this data to solve problems as and when they occur (and sometimes before!), reducing delays and boosting support agent productivity by providing front-line support staff with real-time suggestions on how best to solve potential issues, as well as routes to resolution. The data insights can help prevent customer escalations and churn.

To get predictive customer support right, companies need to have a technology stack that enables support agents to take effective action to resolve customer issues. What’s needed is the ability to collect customer data and share insights with the support agents in real-time. It empowers support agents with accurate and timely customer knowledge.

Some ways predictive customer support can help companies include:

• Increasing both customer and agent satisfaction: Predictive customer support leads to increased customer satisfaction by reducing resolution times — and sometimes instantly. Meanwhile, proactive support is likely to see support agents experience greater work satisfaction because they are dealing with fewer unhappy customers and can focus on impactful work. The engineering team is also likely to see fewer tickets being escalated to them, ultimately reducing business costs for companies.

• Improving customer loyalty: One of the most powerful ways to drive customer loyalty is by providing delightful customer support. Customer support is about providing positive customer experiences by quickly resolving any issues that the customer may face or is already facing. Doing this effectively will improve customer satisfaction and keep the customer happy, reducing the risk of future churn.

• Reducing customer churn: By gathering customer data with predictive analytics, customer support leaders can identify customers with a high churn risk and quickly take action to improve customer experience. With the help of AI, companies can detect where these customers are having difficulties and offer targeted solutions.

• Increasing productivity: More companies than ever are increasing productivity through proactive support. One way to achieve this is by using predictive customer analytics to stay ahead of their customers. By detecting potential customer issues, companies can reach out to the customer with a satisfying solution. This can even be a “wow” experience for the customer.

Predictive customer support enables companies to be proactive, providing value to customers, support agents, and the business as a whole. IrisAgent uses predictive analytics to identify potential customer issues and provide suggestions on how to solve the issues. To learn more, visit https://IrisAgent.com.

About the author

Palak Dalal Bhatia is founder and CEO of IrisAgent. Previously, she led product management for stateful container applications at Google. She also invested in early stage technology startups while working in the venture capital industry. She began her career as an engineer at Microsoft in their search engine team. She completed her MBA from Harvard Business School and bachelors from IIT Bombay.

By the 25th May 2018 all organisations serving customers across Europe need to comply with the new legislation. Regardless of the UK leaving the EU.

Yet, IT Governance reported this month that 68% of a survey sample have yet to update their processes to reflect the new data subject rights.

There are numerous changes to the outgoing Data Protection Act that organisations need to adhere to, or fall foul of the regulator – the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) which is currently recruiting 200 new staff to enforce the new rules. Failure to comply could result in fines of up to €20 million or 4% of annual global turnover, whichever the greater. But even worse – what if you lose all your customer data?

The GDPR will apply across the company. No longer just an issue for Marketing, Customer Insights or Compliance. Customer Services will be at the forefront when it comes to dealing with enquires from citizens, Subject Access Requests (SAR’s), engagement, loyalty and churn.

In this Digital Age, with more Artificial Intelligence and automation, the customer expects a certain level of personal targeting and customised experience. This has resulted in a more customer centric culture. Now the customer will expect not only personalisation of product and services, but security of the personal information they have shared with you.

The fact that customers have been happy to share data to obtain a value exchange with your organisation is a great starting point. You may now have access to purchase history, address, birthday, communication preferences and in some cases even their voice recording. But this results in a vast amount of personal data for storage and protection.

Now you have been entrusted with their data, you must respect it, ensure its safety and privacy. From here on in, under GDPR your company must obtain consent and understand what we at MyLife Digital call the 5W Framework:

• WHAT data has been collected.
• WHY it’s been collected and for what specific purpose.
• WHO is using the data.
• WHEN the permission was granted.
• WHERE the permission was granted.

From a Customer Service point of view, any Customer Relationship Management system needs to access and report on the above. When you’ve worked so hard to build customer satisfaction and loyalty, you don’t want to lose it.

With Chabot’s and technology removing the need for live agents, customers must feel they are able to resolve problems whilst having a good experience. In another survey recently reported by CSM, 65% of consumers “feel good” when they solve their issue without human contact. Customers rely more and more on technology. And this technology relies on data.

Analytics of customer data is getting more complex. To feed machine learning algorithms requires data; more data means more of the 5W’s. Especially who is using it, why it has been collected and for what specific purpose.

GDPR will hold your company to account, and you will need to be able to show how you use best practice to apply these controls. From your Privacy Policy, to Terms and Conditions and business processes, all need to adopt a new way of business as usual.

GDPR is seen as one of the biggest, most important changes to consumer rights in recent times. It turns the use of personal data on its head and gives back control of data to the citizen. Businesses must ensure every member of staff has the appropriate level of understanding to continue to carry out their role.

Okay. You’ve done your homework, you’ve invested resources and applied the 5W’s to your data collection, so what’s next?

In an article in Harvard Business Review, Customer Data: Designing for Transparency and Trust, the authors state, “a firm that is considered untrustworthy will find it difficult or impossible to collect certain types of data, regardless of the value offered in exchange. Highly trusted firms, on the other hand, may be able to collect it simply by asking, because customers are satisfied with past benefits received, and confident the company will guard their data.”

To be a trusted firm, to maintain loyalty and reduce churn, you need to keep your customers happy. With repeat purchases, upgrades, continued good service and of course value for money – and from May 2018 data consent.

Consent Audit

To start to understand consent, look through current statements that have been used to gather permission to contact. These might be on old direct mailing packs or in recent online or social campaigns. Collate these, then assess how legitimate that consent to use data is and whether explicit permission was given.

Your customers must agree that their data can be used and that they can be contacted. Only then do you have a legal basis for collecting, storing and using their personal data.

And be mindful: consent is not the same as a preference.

Under the DPA customers already have the right to know what data you hold on them and can submit a subject access request (SAR). The ICO has written guidance to this process which is well worth reading, and we await an update for GDPR.

Customer Service is often the first port of call when the relationship has steered off course or a simple query triggers a call. Under GDPR it may now also trigger the right to be forgotten or right to erasure.

Article 17 of GDPR states the data subject has the right to request that the data controller erases their personal data, subject to meeting certain conditions. This may be that the personal data is not necessary in relation to the purpose for which it was collected, or the data subject withdraws consent or objects to processing; amongst others.

GDPR Checklist

Now is the time, before May 2018, for your organisation to:

• consider the organisation’s stance on personal data and what is done with it
• understand what data needs to be retained for legal or other reasons
• establish or update data retention policies and adhere to them
• ensure there is a process in place to manage SARs and the Right to be Forgotten
• train all staff in the above process and the part they play in it
• draft standard communications and notifications to acknowledge requests, including the timelines for completion
• know where data is shared, internally and externally, and be ready to inform such parties to complete these requests
• comply or update a suppression list to remove requestors data from any marketing, sales or communication activity.

Basically, leave no stone unturned. Don’t live under a rock or bury your head in the sand – GDPR is coming and sooner than you think.

About the Author

Keith Dewar is Group Marketing and Product Director at MyLife Digital, with over 25 years of senior management experience across functional disciplines including marketing, sales, business development and strategy. He has held various directorships with Cable & Wireless, Vodafone and O2.

More recently, Keith was Vice President, Marketing & Strategy for technology start-up IP Wireless where he helped grow the business over five years, culminating in a successful acquisition of the company by General Dynamics. Keith is also a post graduate student in the Department of Economics, Finance and Management at the University of Bristol where he is studying and researching areas of strategy, change and leadership.

Even so, it remains a rare experience. But what if e-commerce merchants had the ability to not only collect massive amounts of data about their customers’ experience and behavior, but also to use it to anticipate and deliver the seamless, targeted experience those customers really want? To harvest complex metrics in real time and use them to reshape customer experience, enhance customer satisfaction, build loyalty, and drive conversion rates higher?

The short answer is, they do. The new generation of sophisticated customer experience analytics intelligence now available makes all of that and more possible and accessible for every online business.

The answers are here and now

The emerging solutions sometimes sound like science fiction, or like cost-prohibitive tools beyond the reach of any but the biggest corporations. But breakthroughs such as predictive analytics, machine learning, digital self-service, voice analytics and more are not only the cornerstones of the online experiences customers are coming to expect – and will soon demand. They are also cost-effective ways for businesses to:

• Predict purchases and target offers or coupons to the right customer at the right time
• Increase transactional value by suggesting complementary or additional purchases
• Understand and respond to customer preferences in order to anticipate what information they need or want before they even ask
• Resolve the identities behind anonymous transactions
• Identify customer’s social media usage and influence
• Predict attrition and reach out to dissatisfied customers to limit it
• Employ Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to engage customers more fully
• Protect fraud by recognizing patterns that potentially signal trouble
• Analyze voices to respond proactively to customers’ preferences and concerns
• Engage each customer with a personalized experience

And the list goes on.

Significantly, though, the many customer-centered solutions made possible by the new technologies are flexible and allow businesses to be agile from the outset. The various functions can be readily adapted and tailored to the specific needs and goals of each business while allowing for change and growth down the line.

And change is going to come

It’s the one thing any business can be sure of, especially those grounded in or making heavy use of the internet. Change is a constant – but that doesn’t mean only technological change. At this point, keeping up with technology to consistently deliver the best customer experience possible and outpace the competition may actually be the easiest challenge to meet. The trickier part may be anticipating, preparing for, and successfully meeting the ever-evolving preferences, expectations, and requirements of customers, in order to maintain that optimal customer experience for the long run.

As the customer experience analytics experts at nanorep point out, tomorrow’s successful businesses won’t merely be the ones that have stayed in step with technology, but the ones that have also recognized that their customers are individuals who expect to enjoy a personalized experience from an e-commerce business. And that will be so whether the customers arrive by way of website, app, an instant message visit with a chatbot, or the next platform to come along.

Customers come in all different ages, genders and cultural backgrounds, and as marketers already know, we have seen major generational shifts in attitudes, habits, and behavior patterns in recent years, and that rapidly shifting retail terrain promises to continue into the future. The one constant through it all is that each of those customers, no matter what demographic sector they inhabit, now expects a tailor-made experience with the businesses they patronize.

That’s what will keep them coming back, and that’s what customer experience analytics can deliver.

About the Author

Debbie Fletcher is an enthusiastic, experienced writer who has written for a range of different magazines and news publications over the years. Graduating from City University London specialising in English Literature, Debbie’s passion for writing has since grown. She loves anything and everything technology, and exploring different cultures across the world. She’s currently looking towards starting her Masters in Comparative Literature in the next few years.