US Airways, W.T. Grant, and Blockbuster are three companies from different eras and industries but they have one common link: all three failed and were eventually shut down due to poor customer service.

• Before US Airways was purchased by America West in 2005, the airline slashed its customer service budget resulting in the mishandling of numerous complaints, angering customers to the point that the company eventually filed for bankruptcy.
• T. Grant was an American retail institution for 70 years until 1976 when the company filed bankruptcy; at the time, the W.T. Grant bankruptcy was the second-largest in U.S. history. During the 1960s and 70s, the company ignored that middle-class Americans were moving to the suburbs, failed to adapt, effectively telling customers they were wrong and was eventually shut down.
• Blockbuster, a once-dominant video rental chain shut down half of its stores and was auctioned off to the Dish Network in bankruptcy primarily because they charged outrageous sums for late fees and cared little for what their customers wanted.

The key lesson here is that customer service and engagement are the fundamental units of any business across all industries at all times. A growing, engaged and happy consumer base is the ultimate requirement for any business to survive, scale and grow.

Using AI to help businesses with customer engagement

Today, in the digital decade, there is no dearth of brands. With SMEs, startups and enterprises sprouting like mushrooms across the world, customers have numerous choices. Therefore, engagement becomes even more important. Gartner research backs this theory and suggests that a marketing engagement strategy should heavily consider what existing and potential customers need throughout their purchase journey. This is where Tokyo-based RevComm is helping businesses. Founded in July 2017, RevComm focuses on issues in phone sales and customer support as well as success. RevComm’s MiiTel, a cloud IP-phone, which is powered by a conversation intelligence platform helps increase sales conversion and customer satisfaction rates while decreasing education & communication costs.

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“MiiTel enables companies to solve the so-called “black box” problems in sales and customer success by recording, transcribing, analysing talk and listen ratio, interruption, talk speed, call transcriptions, etc. and visualising “what” and “how” sales and customer success staff are talking with customers. At the same time, staff can self-coach and improve their sales/support skills by themselves based on these quantitative ratings, leading to higher closing rates,” shared Yuiichiro Sasaki from RevComm’s global division.

Next stop: Southeast Asia

The sales and customer support staff play very important roles in the success of any business. They lead sales by understanding customers’ pain points, answering questions, handling objections and challenges. However, despite the vitality of their roles, there is still no way to determine the reason behind the variation in their performance. This is because conversations between sales and/or customer success staff and customers are in so-called “black boxes” meaning there is no record of their interactions on the phone or in online meetings, and therefore no way to evaluate them. MiiTel helps managers to understand situations in sales and customer success solving “black box” problems, leading to an increase in sales.

They have managed to build a strong presence in Japan since their launch in 2017. RevComm has acquired more than 27,500 paid users in a short span of three years. Today, approximately 80 million sales calls are made via MiiTel in Japan. They have customers in a wide range of sectors, including banking, IT, tech startups and large corporations.

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This challenge is extremely relevant in Southeast Asia where human resource is arguably one of the biggest problems. MiiTel enables sales and customer success staff to improve their communication skills by providing them insights based on data. This also helps reduce training costs. As such, RevComm is now looking to expand and establish a presence in Southeast Asia through Japan External Trade Organisation (JETRO) with a keen focus on Indonesia, and other countries in that region

“We believe our contribution to self-coaching and reducing education costs is very valuable for corporate management in Southeast Asia,” said Yuiichiro.

Find out more about RevComm here: https://miitel.revcomm.co.jp

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This article is produced by the e27 team, sponsored by JETRO

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