Surveys and net promoter scores alone are insufficient when painting an accurate picture of a company’s customer experience. Real insight in the call center is often ignored, but it has the ability to transform the entire customer journey, writes Jeff Gallino, CTO and Founder of CallMiner.
For too long, customer experience (CX) has been left in the relative dark, informed by methods like net promoter score (NPS) or other survey work that cover only a fraction of the data available to paint a full and accurate picture of any company’s current CX state. Luckily, there is a gold mine of customer data already being collected, waiting to be unearthed – in the call center.
We all know the call center is a hub of customer engagement and feedback. Most companies already have some sort of mechanism for getting at this data, like listening to a sample of calls for quality assurance and by using surveys post call. Everyone needs a starting point, but the problem with surveys is the response rate is generally low – only between 5 and 15%, according to the American Customer Satisfaction IndexOpens a new window . Also, surveys – or any form of solicited feedback – usually attract only the extreme ends of input from either very happy or very angry customers. To better understand the customer journey and shape a meaningful experience, organizations should tap into the call center.
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Imagine you’re leading CX for a major brand, if you could analyze every conversation, categorize, tag and score every engagement, how would that impact your strategies? Do you think the decisions you make would change? According to DMG Consulting ResearchOpens a new window , companies typically conduct only 2 – 10 evaluations per agent per month, and quality monitoring is often limited to 1% to 3% of calls because it’s too costly to assign more resources to this task. But developments in AI-powered speech analytics make it possible to understand and process the semantics and acoustics (words and tone) of every conversation and every customer voice. This gives organizations the ability to transform the billions of words spoken in calls into structured data that can be analyzed into insights.
Insights powered by context
In all the bits and bytes of customer data being processed through a call center, one of the most powerful elements provided is context — the situation of why a customer chose to engage with brand at a moment in time.
A good example of this was a gaming company released a new console around the holidays that many kids (and adults!) rushed out to buy. It was all fun and games – literally – until consoles started catching fire. Calls to customer service picked up a few common keywords like “fire,†but to a company without contextual insight, these calls could have been filed away as parents commenting about the subject matter of the video games. Luckily this company had a speech analytics solution with contextual insight, measuring tone and tempo of a customer’s voice, and was alerted in real-time that consoles were actually catching fire – so, action was taken and a potential crisis was averted.
More than just transcribing a conversation, speech analytics solutions employed by call centers help analysts, managers and leaders find patterns and trends within the vast sea of conversations – patterns that could help improve operations in their call center, relationships with their customers, and even save brand reputation. Armed with this information, the call center can dig up insights faster, allowing for better decision making and data-backed strategies to improve CX and beat the competition.
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CX’s front-lines: Call center agents
Any thoughts on CX wouldn’t be complete without discussion of a brand’s front lines – their employees and in many cases, the call center agents. When a customer talks to an agent, that interaction can build a brand advocate or obliterate a relationship forever. And if the agent sits in a call center, at home, works for the brand or for an outsourced agency is inconsequential to the customer. The agent is the brand during that conversation. For CX leaders, leveraging the call center as a place to win customer loyalty is key to gaining an edge in any industry.
Arming call center agents with the right information and empowering them to deliver superior experiences is crucial to ensure a CX strategy is executed well and measurable. Objective, consistent performance analytics and feedback is not only appreciated by agents for their own development, but it helps them perform better and stay aligned with the vision of their company’s CX by pinpointing exactly where they need to improve in real-time.
With speech analytics, the call center can be the catalyst to a company’s competitive advantage, especially when driving a profitable and positive experience. Speech analysis in the call center far surpasses the customer insights of surveys to assess if a CX strategy is working or not. With the ability to improve front-line employee performance, the entire call center is a CX powerhouse of information for impact across the entire enterprise and could be the edge brands need to win.