No, this is not another story about how customers are changing because of iTunes, hands-free calling, mobile shopping, show-rooming or what Zappos and Amazon are doing now.
This is a story about finding the hidden gems in your customer interaction data. And the good news is you don’t need “Big Data” to find them. Every customer interaction has value from an intelligence perspective. So, what should you do with it?
Digging into daily interactions can bring new meaning to your business. There is so much value in “small” quality management data. Just because it’s granular, doesn’t mean it lacks value. More contact centers should be incorporating agent behavior insights to refine and improve their training models. Where are they struggling? How can we make adjustments? What new information sources do they need access to? This has never been more critical than in the age of the customer. There is a lot of lip service paid to improving customer experience, but it can only be achieved one interaction at a time. In the age of big data, insights around workflow processes and creating better documentation can be lost. Looking at quality of your interactions based on your current processes is critically important to create great customer experiences.
A great place to start is speech analytics. Every interaction is important, and there’s no better way to accurately and cost-effectively capture insights from each call than through today’s speech analytics tools. The technology has gotten to the point where it can proactively identify the most critical interactions and identify trends, all without the need to hire a bunch of MIT graduates. The ability to drill down into the calls that matter also reduces reliance on the post-call survey. Some surveys are great, and yield important insight, but response rates are spotty, and feedback can be limited. Speech analytics provides feedback beyond what is asked about, and organizations end up with really valuable information that they didn’t even expect.
Not only can small data reveal insights on customer experience and agent training, but it can also transform a contact center’s hiring process. Turnover is expensive, and using small data to identify and recruit the right candidates is a strategy that isn’t utilized nearly enough. We need to start building great employee models. What attributes and factors make a great contact center employee? Dig into the small data to identify the people that fit the organization the best, and build strategies to find them.
Sometimes companies delay getting started with analytics because it seems too big and complex. What you don’t know can really hurt in unseen ways. You can easily use do a simple calculation of average call costs multiplied by the weekly number of calls that don’t result in a sale or a satisfactory resolution. Can you really afford to delay?
Cloud technology has made highly sophisticated speech analytics available in flexible, affordable, and easy to implement Workforce Optimization (WFO) solution in the cloud. No longer do contact centers have to purchase equipment, configure it, integrate it into a quality program and then hope it all works together. Nor do contact centers have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and hire an IT professional to oversee it all. NICE CXone's Analytics-Driven Quality is part of a cloud WFO solution and is eliminating the cost barrier (and hassle!) for speech analytics.
With affordable and flexible speech analytics in the cloud, you can identify key words, emotions, and pitch and tone that agents use in successful and unsuccessful calls. Unlike subjective, selective, or manual call monitoring, speech analytics can sample a large, quantifiable number of calls to reveal objective and practical insights. You can drill down on particular call types, customer types, or agents to discover why issues are issues and how to fix them. Speech analytics reveals opportunities for short-term fixes that yield quick returns and long-term changes aligned to business objectives.
You know your customers are changing—the question is how should you respond? How can you use each call to better understand customer needs? With automated analytics tools in the cloud, you can get to the specifics for your customers. You’ll have the insights to adapt your customer service in ways that can make a real difference.
This article was originally published on ICMI. Please visit ICMI for more insightful and thought-provoking content centered around customer service and the contact center industry.
