Many people dread the prospect of calling customer support. For starters, there could be an annoying auto-attendant feature to deal with before reaching a live agent. After pressing 1 for English, listening to a lengthy menu of choices, pressing a few more buttons, entering your account number when prompted, and waiting for what feels like an eternity to be transferred, you finally reach a customer service representative who has no idea who you are or why you may be calling.
Grateful to have reached a real person, you attempt to explain your issue. The CSR can’t proceed until she has first gathered some information. She asks for your account number — you know, the one you just entered when navigating the automated system. Taking a deep breath, you find and relay your account number. She then asks you to confirm your phone number and address, so you do. Next, the CSR asks for the invoice number of the product in question. You don’t know the invoice number, all you know is that you ordered a red sweater and it never arrived.
“Ah,” the CSR says. “You’ll need to speak to someone in our shipping department.”
Before you know it, your call is being transferred and, once again, you’ve been asked to press 1 for English. You can bet that you’ll need to repeat the entire story and provide the new CSR with all of your contact information once again.
Is This the Customer Support Experience You Want for Your Customers?
The scenario above plays out countless times each day, but it doesn’t have to be this way. While data validation APIs won’t necessarily solve every problem outlined above, our contact validation APIs can help to improve your customer support operations.
For example, let’s start with the original transaction. Using our address validation API can improve deliveries by immediately validating, standardizing, and correcting your customers’ addresses. Ship your products with confidence that they’re properly addressed.
Next, let’s tackle that dreaded phone call to customer support. Integrating DOTS Geo Phone Plus into your telephony system allows you to perform real-time reverse phone lookups to find out exactly who’s calling and from where. If a given phone number is associated with a contact record in your software, your customer service representatives would have the customer’s account information at their fingertips without having to prompt the customer for account numbers or other information. You could also use DOTS Geo Phone Plus in conjunction with your phone system’s routing capabilities to route individual callers to specific CSRs based on the caller’s location.
Improving customer support is a top priority, and improving the quality of your data plays an important role in the process. Use our contact validation APIs to instantly validate, correct, and standardize contact information. This one enhancement to your process alone can prevent common shipping delays, missing shipments, embarrassing name and addressing errors, and more. Not only will your customer support center have fewer unhappy customers to deal with, your company will operate more efficiently.
