Dan Martini’s entire career has been dedicated to the success of newspapers. He has worked with countless publishing and circulation professionals, helping them grow their subscriber base, increase revenue, reduce costs, and improve customer service.
Starting at the Beaver County Times as an advertising sales representative, Dan soon caught the publishing bug and embraced the business. He has held leadership roles in sales, marketing, and advertising in the publishing and newspaper industries as well as for software companies, including DSI/SaxoTech/Newscycle and for TeleReach prior to joining VoicePort.
VoicePort
During the pandemic, consumers moved to online channels dramatically, forcing businesses to respond to new expectations with accelerated digital transformation. Customer service needs to adapt their strategies to reflect these shifts too, especially as subscriptions shift to digital editions over print.
At VoicePort, we’ve seen increased demand for self-service automation that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language (NL) as consumers use and adopt it more in their everyday lives (Alexa, anyone?). AI and NL work together to understand and act on what customers say or type instead of relying on menus. We anticipate this trend toward AI and NL to grow. The reason: AI and NL help scale intent identification, resulting in faster resolution, increased automation, and an improved, simpler experience for consumers. Further, the more you can automate, the more you can better utilize your agents not only for more complex issues, but for revenue generating activities such as sales and stop saves.
Messaging is the hottest technology in customer service today, and it uses AI and NL to offer fast, automated resolution, first with chatbots, and then transfers to live agents via live chat, only if necessary. About 60%-70% of inbound messages are consistently fully resolved within a bot. Messaging also drives your call center efficiency by the fact that agents handle 5-7 conversations simultaneously. Also, agents prefer Messaging over the voice channel – it’s a lot less emotionally demanding.
With Messaging, when subscribers call customer service from a cell phone –and over 90% of US adults own mobile phones– they can be encouraged to switch to the messaging channel right on their phone. Over 70% of those who accept the invitation to messaging continue with it over the voice channel in later interactions. Your readers can connect with you on your website, via their phone with SMS messaging, in your app, via email, and on social channels such as FaceBook Messenger. So, they can reach you in the way that is easiest and preferred by them.
The other area we see growing is in proactive customer service. Reaching out to clients with alerts and notifications not only make good customer service, but costs a lot less than inbound calls. In today’s digitally connected world, the expectation of consumers is a lot greater. We’re more and more used to proactive notifications about delivery status, upcoming events, reminders, etc.
VoicePort helps over 700 newspapers in North America focus on anticipating the needs of today’s connected consumers – from efficient IVRs to Natural Language messaging for SMS, email and social apps. We anticipate technology so you can better anticipate and serve the needs of your subscribers for high impact customer interactions that bring value to your customers, your employees and your communities.
For more information, contact Dan Martini at 702-497-4679 or email him.
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