Customers touch the organisation from multiple points: websites, SMS, WhatsApp, live chats, bots, social media, email and the contact centre. Every one of these touchpoints is a data treasure trove, offering insights into customer behaviour, product issues, service metrics and so much more.
As McKinsey points out, this influx forces decision makers to manage an increasingly heavy data load making it challenging to fully realise the value of the data, particularly when it comes to voice.
Wynand Smit, CEO of Inovo, explains that voice traditionally faces challenges due to limited sampling capabilities, incomplete and unrepresentative datasets, and poor visibility into the full customer experience.
“Often, organisations use manual sampling methods that capture a low percentage of interactions and use key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the call quality,” he says. “This type of quality assurance (QA) is often more focused on the agent than on the customer or on identifying challenges. In addition, the speech is often transcribed using third-party service providers causing delays and potentially introducing errors. None of these vectors open up opportunity or potential new avenues of customer engagement.”
Another challenge is that often companies use surveys to gauge customer satisfaction or attrition. These surveys often only tackle a small percentage of customers and the information is limited – unless they’re bombarded by specifics. This limits insights and decision-making.
What’s needed is to sift through the data to help the business improve services, provide returns, or deliver measurable benefits. The problem is that there’s a large volume of data that can be difficult to store or extract meaningful insights from – and the latter is what’s needed to find business opportunities.
“What’s needed is for the business to unpack precisely what’s happening in interactions using keywords and phrases to identify specific trends, types of interaction, engagement parameters and more,” says Smit. “This helps to whittle down the conversational value into key metrics that allow for relevant decision making.
“For example, if a speech analytics solution picks up that there’s a need for more extensive agent training around a particular product or service, then the company can train agents better who can then engage with customers better, and this often results in upselling, reselling and customer retention.”
The data can also be used to monitor sentiment or emotions, assessing whether or not customers finish a call on a positive or negative note. Drilling down into this information can then determine if it’s a trend with a specific agent, product or query. This then helps the company refine those specific processes and clear out any bottlenecks that may have hampered sales or retention.
In addition, the data can be correlated with specific sales or orders, which allows for the business to then connect the virtual dots and translate calls into sales.
“The same approach can be used to pick up on trends that may be impacting sales from an external or market perspective,” says Smit. “The data can show a dip in product order volumes that correlates to competitor cost cutting indicating that customers are leaving in favour of cheaper service elsewhere.
“This is of immediate value to the business as it can adjust pricing or develop competitive offers that recapture the market, and potentially open up new opportunities for these solutions or services.”
By unpacking and analysing customer interactions, companies can effectively reshape how their contact centres engage with their customers. They can use the data to refine product offerings so they’re more in line with existing market demand; identify key trends that can help adapt services or improve agent training that delivers on upselling or cross-selling; and it can help minimise negative interactions and boost CX through consistent cycles of improvement.
“These vast quantities of data do not have to be intimidating lakes that sit in storage and deliver little more than a large storage bill,” concludes Smit. “They can fundamentally change how the business measures people, engagements, products, services and strategic approaches. You just need the right tools to help refine how the data is managed and interpreted to ensure that the insights gleaned are richly nuanced and relevant.”