Why you (still) don’t know what your customers are saying

BUSINESS

By Karl Reed, Chief marketing & solutions officer at Elingo

You may have numerous assessment tools in place to measure your contact centre efficiency. But unless you personally listen to every call received, you probably don’t know what your customers are really saying.

You certainly don’t know what department they like best, what their gripes are with your company, and what they plan to do about it.

This is because the average contact centre measures its efficiency with cold, hard numbers: call volumes, call duration, speed of resolution, number of escalations and automated satisfaction ratings.

This, many may feel, gives them a pretty good idea of their levels of customer satisfaction – right? Wrong.

You may have an excellent view of call volumes and duration, but you still don’t know exactly what your customers are saying, in what context, and what that means for your business. Service isn’t about numbers. You need to know - are your customers delighted?

Even contact centres using traditional speech analytics primed to seek out certain keywords don’t deliver the subtle nuances of human conversation. Some contact centres more geared to understand what their customers are saying actually employ staff whose job is solely to listen to recorded conversations to assess the sentiment behind the words. In a large call centre, this means a handful of staff are trying to assess thousands of calls. This is not only impractical and expensive, it also delivers feedback on a mere fraction of the total available information.

What is needed is context-aware speech analytics that not only spots keywords, but also key phrases, which are easier to detect. Statements such as “I want to close my account” or “I want to terminate my account” should trigger an instant alert via pop-up, SMS or email to a supervisor or relevant department, who can immediately step in to avert a problem.

There’s a desperate need to not only understand what lies behind customer complaints, but to also integrate this knowledge into every facet of your business. Because if you know what your customer is really saying every time they call, you will be able to adapt your business strategy and processes accordingly.

What if a customer has regular cash flow, so he looks like a good credit risk on paper, but in reality, he frequently calls a contact centre to make late payment arrangements? The credit department should be aware of this, in order to make a more considered decision the next time that customer applies for more credit. With an intelligent speech analytics tool, this information would be gathered and integrated into all enterprise systems in real time, allowing all relevant departments to view a complete picture of a customer’s interaction with your company.

The scene is set for truly intelligent interaction analysis, to close the loop in customer service.

Our customers have been waiting a long time for a tool like this, which is why we are delighted to be bringing to market Interaction Analyzer™, a revolutionary real-time speech analytics tool for customer interaction centre systems. The Interaction Analyzer application is part of the Customer Interaction Center™ (CIC) all-in-one suite of products, which makes it quick and easy to deploy by leveraging the CIC architecture. It intelligently logs unlimited chosen keywords or key phrases, triggering alerts in any number of ways, and integrating into enterprise systems to deliver real-time, complete records and analysis of customer interaction. Built from the ground up using a new breed of intelligent speech analytics tools, Interaction Analyzer™ helps complete the picture to deliver a revolutionary overview of everything you need to know about your customer.