By Oscar Alban, Principal Global Solutions Consultant Verint® Witness Actionable Solutions®
The Customer Service Game: Tougher than Ever
From Twitter to TV, your business has more pathways than ever to reach consumers.
While this ought to make attracting and retaining customers easier, the task has become far more difficult. The purchasing public is inundated with sales pitches these days, and it’s up to you to figure out how to hit a home run.
While it’s still possible to score big with customers, your success can hinge on knowing what they want—and then meeting or exceeding their expectations. But finding out what customers want can be challenging. The traditional ways—focus groups, surveys, and market projections—tend to fall short. Contact center analytics offer a practical alternative.
The Contact Center: Your Home Team Advantage
Since contact centers typically serve as the focal point for customer interactions, they’re the logical forum from which to make your play for customers.
Odds are, your contact center already collects data to assess the performance of its agents, comply with industry regulations, and so on. Contact center analytics examine this data, but focus instead on three key questions:
• How do customers rate their overall experience?
• Why do they feel this way?
• How do customer interactions affect your organization’s overall performance?
By using and augmenting data that most contact centers already collect, contact center analytics can provide insight to help you determine what customers want—and how effectively your organization delivers it. Let’s take a closer look.
Real-time Customer Feedback Surveys
Knowing how customers feel about your company is vital. And there’s only one way to find out—you need to ask!
Contact centers typically use questionnaires, interactive voice response (IVR) surveys, and live telephone conversations to solicit customer feedback. Unfortunately, these processes present a cost/time trade-off, since they often require considerable time to obtain results and can be expensive. Moreover, they seldom generate adequate participation rates.
In contrast, customer feedback surveys capture information from customers across the IVR, Web, and email. Unlike traditional IVR surveys, these short, dynamic surveys are presented immediately after the completion of the call or email/Web contact. Typically, the agent invites the customer to provide feedback, and then transfers those who agree to the survey system. This “warm” invitation can yield response rates of 40 to 60 percent or higher, providing actionable insight in real time.
Speech Analytics
Knowing what customers think about your business is important—but knowing why is equally important, since it opens the door to processes or products that may need refinement.
Customers frequently provide the reasons for their frustration during their interactions with your company—interactions that are often recorded. Although many companies capture these conversations, they seldom use or aggregate them effectively. Speech analytics can provide that insight by converting conversations from unstructured audio into data that is structured in an index that can be searched and analyzed.
Your company can mine this index for insights on customer behavior. You can search for specific words/phrases, as well as leverage data-mining technologies to surface words/phrases automatically, regardless of whether you have defined them in advance. An effective speech analytics solution will continuously categorize and mine calls, identifying new issues, trends, and opportunities as they arise.
Data Analytics
Customer feedback solutions can tell you what customers think, and speech analytics solutions can tell you why. Data analytics solutions can tell you how this affects your business.
By automatically analyzing the information collected from customer interactions, data analytics solutions help isolate the root cause of contact center performance. When a metric is selected for further investigation, a good data analytics solution can present it in a prioritized list showing specific call scenarios that could positively or negatively impact performance. These scenarios can point to what’s causing underlying business problems, enabling customer service operations and others in the enterprise to take rapid, corrective action.
Analytics-driven Workforce Optimization
Contact center analytics offer you the opportunity to listen more effectively—and respond—to the voice of your customers.
But the benefits of contact center analytics can be increased further still. When deployed as part of a unified workforce optimization solution suite, contact center analytics can capitalize on the other functionality within the broader suite. The result can provide insight extending into other areas of the enterprise.
Verint Witness Actionable Solutions’ Impact 360® Workforce Optimization is an example of a unified suite. In addition to Impact 360 Customer Feedback, Impact 360 Speech Analytics, and Impact 360 Data Analytics, it includes solutions for quality monitoring and recording, workforce management, performance management, eLearning and coaching.
Separately, these individual solutions have value in the contact center. But when deployed together under a unified framework, they offer analytics-driven workforce optimization—a new way to reduce costs while improving enterprise performance, competitive advantage, and the customer experience. With analytics-driven workforce optimization, your organization can better position itself to score a home run with customers—not just once—but again and again.