In today’s increasingly digital world, many businesses are turning to digital channels for customer communications that align with consumer preferences to drive better engagement. And they aren’t wrong for the most part—surveys show that 59.5% of consumers prefer email as their first choice for communication and a whopping 90% of consumers prefer text messages over direct phone calls.
Appealing to the majority’s preferences makes sense in order to get the best possible engagement results, but the only thing every consumer has in common is a desire for customized treatment. There will always be certain cases when non-digital communications are required or would produce better engagement based on unique customer circumstances, and neglecting this group leaves revenue on the table.
How do you identify these cases? And how do they fit into your overall customer outreach strategy?
While Retain by TrueML Products first-and-foremost offers an effective tool for automating digital communications at scale, the data insights collected through its machine learning process can be used to build an effective multi-channel strategy to engage even more past-due customers.
Leveraging Retain’s intelligence, you can determine when non-digital communications may be required and inform your calling operations with strategic dialer files. Common reasons for making phone calls after initial digital outreach include:
- Non-responsiveness to digital channels
- Customer opt-outs or unsubscribes
- Cycle-based on days past due
For example, you send emails to 1,000 customers and find that 900 of them (90%) opened the email at the very least. Of those 900 customers, 600 (66.66%) took the next step of clicking a link in the email and 100 (11.11%) unsubscribed. Those 600 people who clicked will likely be best to continue outreach through digital channels.
But what about the rest? It’s easy to deduce that the 200 customers who either unsubscribed (100) or never opened the email (100) might be better to engage with a phone call, but what about the 200 who initially opened the email but didn’t engage further? A few more attempts at digital contact will give more insight to their situation—maybe they meant to come back to it at a later time and forgot, or perhaps they had doubts about the content of the message or were unclear about next steps. Based on more engagement data, it becomes easier to determine whether the communication channel is the roadblock to effectively engaging your customer.
Now, instead of spending hours of resources making outbound phone calls to those same 1,000 customers, you can create a smaller, more manageable dialer file of customers who are more likely to engage via phone, making the most of your calling efforts. And for those included in the dialer file, the right data insights can offer even more details on preferences for contact time.
With Retain’s dialer files generated from digital engagement data, you get a roadmap to which accounts need a human touch and when they may be most likely to engage. Instead of wasting resources on calling delinquent customers at scale, you can determine which accounts to engage with a phone call and allocate your resources accordingly.
If you’re looking to optimize your overall customer communications and engagement, Retain can help you build an informed multi-channel operation by integrating your digital and phone-based operations into one cohesive engagement strategy, setting you up to recover more efficiently.