White Papers
Below is a sampling of White Papers published by AnswerOn, as well as some excerpts from the White Papers. Click any of the article titles for a form to request the whole document.
“Customer Service is one of the most important aspects of any business. Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) may be the only direct contact your customers have with your company and can make the difference between a happy or unsatisfied customer. A recent survey revealed that 59% of consumers would stop doing business with a company if the customer service was unsatisfactory. Studies have also shown that…”
Prediction of Agent Attrition and Performance
“In AnswerOn’s experience, very few industries can match the amount of information collected by the
Call Center Industry. Data is collected and analyzed on every call: hold time, answer time, wait
between calls, etc. Employee schedules are dynamic where bidding, trading, adherence and nonadherence
are common practices. The amount of agent behavior data available is enormous. Yet
despite this vast amount of information, certain problems continue to bedevil most operators. Some
of these problems include:”
The AnswerOn Solution for Customer Retention
“The AnswerOn Solution for Customer Retention helps increase offer take rates and promotes customer loyalty driving dramatic improvements to revenues and profits. AnswerOn’s quantitative predictive models along with qualitative analysis of customer behavior identify churn-likely customers and generate recommended actions a service provider can take to retain those customers; thereby increasing revenue and optimizing operating costs. AnswerOn’s solutions enable service providers to make decisions that consider what is best for their company and their customers. The end result is a demonstrable return on investment coupled with improved customer satisfaction.”
The Silver Bullet of Customer Retention
“The quest for a “Silver Bullet” in customer retention has taken many paths over the years. Inherently, marketers and executives have sought many different solutions to what is by definition an amorphous, dynamic and multifaceted problem — customer retention. Different methods in the past have included segmentation, one-to-one marketing and data warehouses/marts, to name a few. All of these approaches have brought valuable insight into the mind and heart of the customer, but each has fallen short of attaining vaunted “silver bullet” status. Each of the aforementioned approaches has value or a role to play in contributing to understanding the customer. However, these approaches fall short because they remain tethered to a static representation of the customer. Put another way, all of these approaches are helpful in a historic view of the customer, which is useful, but none of them capture the CURRENT customer profile. This missing component of contemporaneous information can be realized with the combination of advanced predictive models and speech analytics, providing a powerful solution to predicting and reducing customer churn.”
How to Recession Proof Your Customers
“During the early days of wireless phones, the telecommunications industry found itself in the midst of a recession (1990-1991). One question dominating the minds of executives in the industry was whether the use of telephone devices (wireless phones, land line phones, fax machines) was discretionary or mandatory. The concern was if consumers viewed the use of mobile phones as discretionary then it was likely to be something they would discontinue or curtail use of in a recession. If consumers viewed usage as mandatory or essential for business, then the expected growth curves would continue and the industry could expect continued growth. For those companies who survived the early 1990’s in the wireless industry, they found their customers did not view their phone usage as discretionary. As a result, the manner in which customers were managed became extremely important. Several of the customer management techniques were “shot gunned” or in other words non-specific and scattered in many directions. Many strategies relied on the then duopoly environment, counting on the fact that the lost customers would be replaced by those of the competitor and vice versa. What was missing was a technology which would help target and analyze specific customer behavior. In light of the current economic environment, it is helpful to review some of those early approaches and, when appropriate, juxtaposition the use of some of the technologies which are now available.”
“The AnswerOn Platform comprises the database and software components of the AnswerOn Retention Program. The Platform has been designed to accommodate the tasks required to develop models, train models, and generate predictions for the AnswerOn Retention Program. The AnswerOn Platform supports a wide variety of modeling techniques, multiple data sources used in modeling, and a multitude of methods for provisioning prediction results. The AnswerOn Platform is deployed as a Service Bureau model in which the data and the software reside on the AnswerOn servers and results are returned to AnswerOn’s customers. The AnswerOn Platform provides a high degree of reliability, availability, performance, and security.”
Family Plans as Retention Devices
“Family plans or group plans can be traced back to the early years of wireless. They operate as a form of bundling and provide a lower rate for customers who “bundle” their family members into a single account. For the customer, the savings can be quite compelling and for the carrier the gain in loyalty is presumably rewarding as well. But is it truly? What are the advantages/disadvantages of family plans? What kinds of behavior changes are associated with family plans?”
How to Validate Retention Campaign Success
“Marketing executives are under more and more pressure to prove marketing ROI and justify spending on campaigns. For a large part, companies measure the success or failure of a marketing campaign against a baseline, provided by a control group of customers. This white paper discusses the practicality of using control groups to confirm the success of a retention campaign and suggests an alternative method to prove marketing ROI.”
Successful Retention Campaigns
“AnswerOn has conducted hundreds of marketing campaigns and designed thousands of retention offers to successfully lower customer attrition. This white paper walks through the steps necessary to proactively save identified potential churners, focusing primarily on what happens after advanced analytic modeling has detected potential churners.”