Whenever customers contact a call center, they make a judgment about how they are treated and what it says about the company they’re calling. That judgment has a direct effect on customer satisfaction and loyalty.

This is why data collected from call center interactions is absolutely critical to building the right brand image in your customers’ eyes. Tying that data to the online experience enhances the customer journey and helps companies develop marketing strategies that convert website visitors into loyal customers

However, most brands still struggle with how to make this work. They’re too focused on tracking call volumes and model performance. They lack visibility into activity associated with the call center and with phone calls driven by digital marketing efforts.

The below views have been shaped by Leapfrog’s proven approach to optimizing the customer purchase path. Read on for six compelling reasons for leveraging call center data to optimize the customer experience.

1. Customer Loyalty

Half of all consumer conversions originating online still occur through the call center. What happens during that call center interaction is directly connected to customer satisfaction and loyalty, so companies must endeavor to enhance the experience. And the frequency of calls is on the rise due in large part to the growth in mobile ad spending and mobile usage. Calling from mobile devices for live agent assistance is literally one tap away.

2. Customer Conversion

Data collected from call center interactions provides marketers with plenty of valuable information they can use to improve the customer experience both at the call center and online. When understood and applied properly, the data can drive marketing strategies to help convert website visitors to customers, in what I call “integrated conversion optimization.”

3. Understanding the Customer

Customers don’t really distinguish between online and call center experiences. Both become intertwined in their view of a brand, which is important for marketers to grasp. If marketers better understand their customers and how they like to interact with their brand, it will lead to higher ROI and lower churn. Gathering actionable data is critical to understanding low-value vs. high-value insights and the levers to pull to optimize marketing efforts.

4. Customer Expectations

When interacting with a brand, customers expect good service and want their needs to be met. Increasingly, they expect a personalized experience and do not tolerate long wait times or having to repeat the information they already provided online. They demand better and faster service. These expectations are forcing businesses to invest heavily in areas that may not have been a priority in the past, such as Call Center support.

5. Integrated Engagement

Most Leapfrog customers start out with a desire to develop an integrated customer engagement strategy but are missing the key component – connected data. So we launch a discovery process to understand how the phone calls are distributed and how they track back to their marketing campaigns. Next, we conduct data discovery to break down the data silos and determine what type of call activity reporting and conversion data is available. The outcome is a 1:1 consumer experience online and at the call center – and to integrate customer engagement data into marketing efforts.

6. Improvement Recommendations

Leveraging consumer feedback provided by call center agents helps identify problems. In one case I can recall, it was determined that the newly developed online consumer experience was causing customer confusion and frustration, therefore driving extremely high call volume. Call center data was used to provide recommendations for website content enhancements that solved their problem.

Many marketers don’t realize the full value call centers can deliver as a strategic resource for their brand. But leveraging the power of connected data that includes insights from call center interactions is invaluable when developing tactics for media optimization. We’ve repeatedly seen that having the integrated data and insights will drive ROI increases of 20 to 30 percent.