How Analytics Enable You to Bring Your Company Closer to the Customer than Ever Before

There are divergent opinions in what technologies are most effective in creating a better customer experience, but one thing that just about every expert agrees upon is analytics can be  a real game-changer.

According to a recent Harvard Business Review Analytics Services study, published in Forbes magazine;

• 70% of enterprises have increased their spending on customer analytics solutions over the past year.
• 58% of enterprises are seeing a significant increase in customer retention and loyalty as a result of using customer analytics.
• 60% use real-time customer analytics to improve customer experience across touch points and devices as extremely important today.
• 44% of enterprises are gaining new customers and increasing revenue as a result of adopting and integrating customer analytics into their operations.

The move toward greater use of analytics has been swelled by a wave of converging technologies including artificial intelligence, the internet of things (IoT), and cloud computing. The exceptional speed and precision advanced customer data analytics continue to improve at an exponential rate, making them a must-have for businesses seeking to forge stronger connections with their audience.

As further noted in the Harvard Business Review Analytics Services study, the number of corporate executives who responded to the study indicated that the importance of having the capability to use customer analytics to improve customer experience across all touch points rose from 60% in 2018 to a projected 79% for 2020.

But it’s an oversimplification to just state that analytics can be beneficial to businesses. Analytics tools encompass a broad spectrum of categories and technologies that needs to be understood and evaluated before being implemented and integrated into a company’s CX strategy.

Can text and speech be analyzed in the same way? Why or why not and how should companies be thinking about text analysis vs. speech analysis? Both text and speech analytics enable organizations to optimize customer engagement by looking deeper into interactions its agents have with customers, regardless of channel –phone, email, chat, social media, or surveys as well.

Speech analytics uses speech recognition software to convert spoken words of recorded calls into text where analyses can be performed. When used effectively, it can help identify the reason behind a call, the products mentioned and the caller’s mood. Sophisticated speech analytics software can analyze phrases used by customers to quickly identify their needs, wants and expectations and indicate areas that need improvement for front-line personnel.

Text analytics is the process of transforming unstructured text documents into usable, structured data. It works by deconstructing sentences and phrases into their components, and then examining each part’s role and meaning using complex software rules and machine learning algorithms. One can analogize it to slicing and dicing piles of diverse documents into easy-to- interpret data pieces. By more closely examining communications written by–or about– customers, business can identify patterns and topics of interest, and follow up with practical action based on what has been learned

Desktop analytics offers contact center managers a method of capturing and analyzing user activity at the desktop level. The data gathered about individual application usage and across applications can not only impact the customer experience but ultimately affect the IT resource budget as well. It resides on each individual agent’s desktop, compiling a list of every application, URL, and more the agent accesses during the day. This empowers companies to determine if contact center personnel are adhering to standards and see how well they are relating to customers.

Leading analytics provider Calabrio will take a deeper dive into the constantly growing use of analytics—and examine its specific role in enabling companies to become more customer-centric—in two complementary…and complimentary…webcasts on CrmXchange.

The first of the two presentations –“The Beginner’s Guide to Analytics” –will take place on Thursday, February 20. Presented by Contact Center Analytics Consultant Mark Fagus of Calabrio, it will explore such key topics as:

• The differences between speech, text and desktop analytics
• Analytics technologies, such as LVCSR (Large-Vocabulary Conversational Speech Recognition), Phonetics and STT (speech-to-text)
• The top 10 analytics business use cases

The second webcast –Unlock Customer-Centric Intelligence on Thursday, March 12 will expand on how companies can make the most out of using analytics by empowering themselves to reach higher levels of comprehension by developing new insights to deal with their customers. Brad Snedeker, Director Product Marketing, Calabrio, will delve into features that companies can use to their advantage, including:

• Embedded analytics – learn how analytics have been surfaced throughout the application to provide easy access to key insights without having to go outside everyday workflows
• Unified, self-service dashboards – compelling and personalized insights within dashboards that can double as homepages
• Enterprise KPIs – out-of-the box performance management tools
• Speech-to-text enhancements – find out how to achieve increased accuracy and speed of transcription

Register now for the first or second of these informative Calabrio webcasts….even better, sign up for both! Each will take place at 1:00 pm ET: if you cannot attend the live presentations, you can download each one 24 hours after it is completed.

An Online In-Depth Education Program Without the Cost and Inconvenience of Traditional Live Conferences

While there are numerous quality live conferences in the CX/contact center space that delve into workforce optimization, attending these events often entails a series of complex decisions. First, you must determine if it includes enough seminars that are relevant to your specific needs and exhibitors with the right solutions to advance your program. Then, you need to obtain approval and funding, plan the details of the trip and make sure all your responsibilities are covered while you are away. While some consider traveling to an event a welcome break from routine, others find it a time-consuming, expensive disruption that they simply can’t justify.

The need for ongoing education in this critical operational area continues to grow. Over the past 12 years, an increasing number of workforce planning professionals have found a flexible, no-cost, no-travel alternative in CrmXchange’s annual online Best Practices in Workforce Optimization virtual conference, produced in conjunction with the Quality Assurance and Training Connection (QATC) and the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP).

Over the past two years, the event has been expanded to provide even more in-depth education. For 2019, it will take place the first two weeks of November, with the first week (November 4-8) focusing on QA and Analytics and the second (November 11-15) examining strategies for Workforce Management and Performance Optimization.

The enhanced conference content reflects the evolution of how contact centers now approach workforce planning responsibilities. It used to be handled in independent groups, with one team handling quality assurance, another conducting training, and yet another developing agent schedules. Supervisors often tried to do coaching with no input from other functional areas, while managers simply ran and reacted to reports. But this disconnected approach no longer works in today’s complex, omnichannel contact center environments. Workforce Optimization is a wide-ranging field that now encompasses all these elements as a unified discipline. And the CrmXchange virtual conference provides WFO professionals with the year’s most convenient and comprehensive opportunity to gain greater insights on the latest technologies, tactics and best practices.

Attendees have the opportunity to meet in real time with industry experts and colleagues who can answer their questions and offer business solutions tailored to their contact centers, without the cost and time away from the office of an on-site conference. Anyone can attend learning sessions the same way they would in an on-site conference.

The format allows entire WFO teams to share newly acquired knowledge throughout an organization. Team members can attend live sessions together or attend different session tracks. All sessions will be recorded and available on demand for one week after the conference – giving those who could not attend the initial presentation the opportunity to view the sessions later.

In addition, attendees can visit the virtual exhibit hall to download product videos, and obtain product information, press releases, white papers, and much more. Sponsors, including Calabrio, CallMiner, NICE, NICE inContact and Verint, are ready to share the latest innovations that may benefit your contact center.

And while you can’t sit down over a drink after hours, you can still chat with presenters and peers in the virtual lounge, a specially designed virtual networking forum for registered members of this online event. Learn what others are doing, meet colleagues, pose questions, and offer your own insight.

The Best Practices in Workforce Optimization virtual conference kicks off on Monday, November 4 at 12 noon ET with a high-interest keynote address Building a Customer Experience Movement which examines the true elements required to create a culture-changing CX program that is built to last. It will be presented by Nate Brown, Co-Founder of CX Accelerator, a virtual community of customer experience professionals.

Join the thousands of industry executives who have already benefited from this powerful complimentary two week online conference Register now and check out the broad ranging agenda.

On-Line Workshop on Speech Analytics Designed to Help Understand the Process

To take a step forward, sometimes you need to take a step back to assess where you want to go. Many businesses are eager to implement programs to move their CX needle but often delay in the process because they simply don’t know how to get started. Beyond the obvious decision of which one will be best suited to their needs, they must also weigh such factors as calculating short and long-term costs, developing a formula for achieving ROI, and doing due diligence on the level of vendor help in both getting off the ground and maintaining a successful program.

The new CrmXchange Build-it! series of how-to webcasts offers a head start by learning the basics of putting a successful program in place. Each webcast will provide step-by-step guidance to help launch programs in a variety of customer experience technologies. Registrants receive a worksheet to help them define their goals, identify the specific improvements they want to achieve and analyze the existing technology.

Professionals benefit from an in-depth review of which areas will make significant improvements. “How to Build a Speech Analytics Program- A Workshop” will be presented by CallMiner, one of the most respected solution providers in this space.

Recent research by DMG Consulting indicates that implementing speech analytics in contact centers pays for itself in less than one year, and TechTarget reports that it pays for itself in as little as three months. The many benefits include:

• Improving the Customer Experience
• Cost Savings
• Revenue Enhancement – Identifying Upsell/Cross-Sell Opportunities
• Improvement in Operations
• Helping to Promote Customer Loyalty & Retention
• Diminishing Compliance Risk Issues
• Reducing Average Handle Time

While contact center leaders have been hearing for years about what speech analytics can do, hardly any webcasts or white papers have discussed the mechanics of putting together a functional and successful program. This live workshop will focus on critical components that need to be considered:
•Goals: How to define and prioritize
•Data Collection: What information is needed, what does your business have and what is it missing
•Staff: How do you get the right departments involved and who needs to be included
•Reporting: Who gets reports, what format are reports in, reactions to new information

Register now and come away with a detailed outline of steps required to have your program hit the ground running. If you can’t make the live September event, the recording will be available for one year.

Agent churn: It’s not you, it’s your employee engagement strategy

Jeff Gallino, CTO and founder of CallMiner

It’s no secret that contact centers are infamous for their high turnover rates, which average 45 percent year-over-year—more than double the average for all U.S. occupations. What most companies don’t realize, however, is that this doesn’t have to be the status quo. Identifying the signs an agent is about to check out and having solutions in place to change the outcome can dramatically reduce agent churn well before they decide to give their notice.

If retention isn’t motivation enough, research shows that an astonishing 77 percent of employees worldwide are not engaged, which, according to Gallup, can cost upwards of $605 billion in lost productivity per year. There’s incredible value in spotting non-engagement signs and addressing the lack of productivity that often lead to agent turnover early. This can ensure strong employee engagement and stop the turnover cycle. Not only will it save billions in lost revenue, it will promote better customer experiences through an organization’s No. 1 advocate—its employees.

Warning Sign 1: They go into silent mode

One of the primary indicators of an unengaged employee is silence. Silence is commonly caused by a lack of agent training, but this isn’t only applicable immediately after onboarding. Agents require extensive knowledge of your company’s products and services; however, many employees miss out on new product information because organizations neglect to offer continual education programs.

Employee silence can also happen outside of customer interactions, as managers of unengaged agents tend to notice an increase in the amount of time between each call. Although this doesn’t usually stem from a lack of company knowledge, it’s a telltale sign an employee is experiencing a lack of motivation. Distant employees are comfortable with doing the bare minimum to get by and will likely keep their heads down, and calls quietly recording, to purposely limit the number of customers they interact with.

Warning Sign 2: Under (but not terrible) performance

Decreased performance in areas such as average handle time (AHT), call volume, and following a script could all point to a lack of engagement that, if not fairly addressed, can lead to lower NPS scores, turnover, and even compliance risks.

Sometimes, however, quantifiable performance metrics aren’t the sole indicator of an agent’s performance—as agents aren’t at-fault for many of the disruptions that happen during the call. Companies need to take training, tools and technical factors into consideration when it comes to gaps in an agent’s performance and use contextualized scoring methods to accurately and thoroughly understand where performance issues are occurring and the root cause.
Warning Sign 3: Inconsistent feedback on their work

According to research by Gallup, less than 21 percent of employees strongly agree their employee implements fair evaluation processes. Contact center agents handle dozens of calls per day, but many outbound surveys and manual quality management reviews only account for three to five percent of an agent’s interactions—leading to ill-informed assessments of their overall performance.

In addition to being inaccurate and irregular, many legacy feedback systems are impersonal. Call center feedback usually only involves reprimanding, despite the employee’s desire to be recognized for exceptional service. The lack of effort put into celebrating successes usually causes agents to feel unappreciated and less likely to advocate for the business.

How to Stop the Cycle

Proper training—during and after onboarding: Before sending your agent out on their own, how do you know you’ve given them the proper training to handle the influx of problems they’ll face out on the floor? To keep up with the fast-paced environment of the contact center, they need to stay informed, especially if your products and services are constantly evolving. Each one of your employees is unique and despite what’s suggested by legacy employee education programs—their training processes should be as well. Speech analytics data can help managers offer personalized training programs in accordance with agents’ specific needs, even after onboarding.

Tools to optimize performance: Aside from training, contact center operators need to ask themselves whether their agents have the resources they need to succeed. While two-thirds of customers dial in with a problem, some caused by lack of self-serving options on other channels, they expect your agent to be able to solve, lack of resources is one of the biggest factors leading to job-related stress. It’s impossible to guide each of your representatives through every single interaction—but tools and customer engagement analytics software can take information in real time and apply historical data to provide your agent with better insight and guide them through the call based on the context of the conversation.

Real-time feedback: Agents should always know where they stand when it comes to their performance. A discussion a week, a month, or a year later about a specific interaction with a customer will not help anyone succeed. Having an analytics tool removes any sense of unfairness that’s usually associated with random selection by providing an inclusive and holistic view of your caller engagement data, ensuring a stronger voice of your employee. It also helps with coaching by automatically scoring 100 percent of your agents’ customer interactions to pinpoint the exact areas they need to both improve customer experiences in real-time and add business value in the long run.

While employee turnover is one of the biggest problems companies face today, employee engagement is just as impactful to your business’s bottom line, as those with highly-engaged workforces outperform their peers by nearly 150 percent. All problems associated with the warning signs of an unengaged employee point to a similar source—the company’s inability to fully understand the needs of their employees from both a personal and professional perspective. Similar to how analytics and artificial intelligence work to strengthen customer loyalty, these tools and concepts can help personalize your organization’s approach to agent management—offering a fully-developed employee engagement strategy that involves critical coaching and feedback procedures. In doing so, companies can foster a positive work culture and keep employees from feeling as though they are ‘just another number’.

Important Business Intelligence Tools for the Contact Center

In order for the contact center to meet (and exceed) performance goals, the right business intelligence (BI) tools and technologies have to be in place. BI tools help contact centers improve and optimize their processes in order to heighten their success rate. BI digs deeper into the data you’re already collecting to find ways to relate your findings to the customer experience and, in turn, improve customer retention.

Aggregate Analytics

Aggregate analytics, also referred to as big data, deliver information about the contact center’s overall performance. Both structured and unstructured data is organized and delivered via an “at a glance” dashboard, or something similar. The key is to have only relevant data included so that supervisors don’t have to wade through inapplicable data.

Call Recording Tools

Speech analytics tools – a long-time staple of the modern contact center – accurately transcribe conversation audio to ensure that agents are adhering to a script or guidelines when speaking with a customer. In industries that have strict rules about what can and cannot be mentioned (like collections, for example), speech analytics are even more important than usual. Certain advanced call recording tools will allow for Voice of Customer considerations, too. Real-time feedback, call coaching and customer surveys enable supervisors to make decisions that can improve the customer experience in-the-moment.

Predictive Voice Analytics

Predictive voice programs not only record agent-customer conversations, but also use them to make predictions about how both parties will respond. Emotional changes in the agent’s vocal features can determine if the agent is speaking in an appropriate way to the customer, while emotional changes in the customer’s voice can determine a variety of outcomes, like if they’re likely to become a regular customer.

Selling Recommendations

BI tools can increase revenue by recommending up-sell and cross-sell opportunities to the agent in real-time. By considering the customer’s purchase history and buyer persona, combined with predictive voice analytics, the dashboard can alert the agent when a selling opportunity presents itself. Not only is it easier to sell to customers with a strong purchase history, but BI tools can also determine which products and services will be of most interest to the customer.

The contact center is generating helpful information every single minute. Data is regularly being collected, sometimes passively. With BI tools, supervisors can gather and review all pertinent data to see where improvements can be made.

5 Tips for Root Cause Analysis in the Contact Center

The best way to solve a problem is to dig deep and find out where it started in the first place. Often, what you see of a problem is a symptom, not the cause. Here are five steps you can take to improve your contact center’s root cause analysis.

1. Consider acoustic issues.

Root-cause analysis should take acoustic factors into account. For example, if the call has long periods of silence, this could point to a problem with the system. If the contact center agent can’t access data quickly enough or if there are problems with IVR, a slow system may be the problem.

2. Flag conversations that are abnormally long.

Speech analytics will let you sort through calls based on parameters like duration and repeated calls. You can also find calls where specific keywords are mentioned, like those that are normally associated with a complaint. This will let you know which calls need the most attention.

3. Monitor data in real time.

Accessing real time data can help you spot and stop issues early. If a new sales or marketing strategy launches and then phone calls start coming in within an hour or two, you’ll know that there’s a problem with the launch that must be fixed. Real time data lets you identify trends as they emerge, giving you the opportunity to stop a problem in its tracks.

4. Sort problems into categories.

As you start to uncover the main problems customers are having, you can segment them into categories, such as product defects, customer education and marketing communication. Then, you can meet with specific teams to come up with targeted strategies to solve the problems.

5. Understand the context of the situation.

Relying on word count frequency isn’t enough – the terms and phrases that are being used have to be understood contextually, too. Knowing the context of a problem instead of just the hard data will allow you to pinpoint the situation that caused or contributed to it.

Knowing the average number of complaints your contact center receives on a weekly basis is just a start. You have to figure out the root cause of the complaints in order to effectively tackle them and prevent them in the future. Root cause analysis is a way to solve prominent issues instead of merely putting a Band Aid on them.

4 Voice of the Customer Tools for Collecting Feedback

Analytics often track what a customer does, but voice of the customer tools figure out why someone performs an action. Several voice of the customer tools can be used to collect feedback. The feedback tool you choose depends on your goal.

1. Community Forums

Customers can discuss their experiences with one another in forums. These are great places to find out what customers need and which needs aren’t being met. They’re hubs for suggestions and ideas that a brand can use to guide everything from product development to customer support practices.

2. Visual Feedback

Brands that have recently launched a new website or mobile app can benefit from visual feedback tools. Elements on a page will have the option to provide feedback. The customer can make a note about what they think about a specific element and then a screenshot will be sent to the appropriate department or agent. The customer uses his or her own words to describe a problem, which helps brands figure out which parts of a page or app are faulty or unclear.

3. E-shop Reviews

E-shop surveys are auto-emailed to customers after they purchase or receive a product. A short assessment survey asks the customer to rate their experience or the product on a scale of one to five. There’s also a section where customers can write in an account of their experience. The benefits of this type of feedback are twofold. First, the brand learns about the customer’s experience and can opt to reach out to the customer if they submit low scores or describe a problem. Second, if the star ratings are published on a review site, other shoppers will be influenced by them, and a brand with high ratings will attract more customers.

4. Speech Analytics

Speech analytics delve deep into a recording to uncover intelligence from customer-agent conversations. Advanced software digs through dialogue to isolate specific phrases and words. Results can be organized and then compared to reason codes (why customers contacted support) as well as trends to determine recurring problems.

Voice of the customer feedback tools help contact centers to determine what people do and do not like about a brand. By pinpointing why someone may choose, stay with or leave a brand, the entire customer journey can be updated and adapted to meet specific customer needs.

 

How to Make the Most of Your Contact Center’s Speech Analytics

Speech analytics work best when the correct processes are in place. Without the right objectives, you won’t know what to specifically measure. Without involving the rest of your team, you won’t be able to leverage the data you collect. Keep the following tips in mind to maximize your speech analytics efforts.

1. Get Clear About Your Objectives

Speech analytics can be used in a variety of ways. Do you want to improve the customer experience? Do you want to enhance the skills of the sales team? Are you worried about quality assurance? Knowing which objectives you need to focus on will guide you when it comes to analyzing the data.

2. Get Your Team on Board

When you’re giving your speech analytics regime an overhaul, everyone from management to your customer service agents need to be in-the-know. Whoever is going to be affected by the technology, particularly those who will benefit from it, should be involved. The best speech analytics programs don’t just involve technology, but also cooperation from various departments.

3. Create a Training Program

If you’re setting up a new speech analytics program, your employees may benefit from some education and training. There are likely to be big changes when it comes to goal-setting, workflow, and how teams interact with one another. The speech analytics team and the contact center agents should have communication from the beginning. Agents will need to know how the new speech analytics plan will benefit them and the contact center as a whole.

4. Prepare for Even More Change Than Expected

There’s often a domino effect that occurs when making a big change to a contact center. When one process changes, it could cause another to change unexpectedly. Speech analytics may streamline many of your business processes, but it could also uproot others, a shift you probably didn’t prepare for. Change management requires agility. If you can’t respond and adapt to the new issues that pop up, you’ll become paralyzed.

5. Create a Plan for Reporting Data

Collecting data is one thing, but all of that information needs to be disseminated and analyzed. Relevant departments should receive reports that they can then act on. Keeping everyone in the loop will help your speech analytics program to be more impactful and it will also garner the support of all involved.

How Speech Analytics Affect the Outcome of Calls

By the time a customer has contacted a live agent, they’ve probably tried to troubleshoot the problem on their own with self-service tools. When they’ve reached the point of wanting to speak with someone, they’re already part of the way through their customer journey. Real-time speech analytics take into account customer history so they can pick up where they left off instead of starting from the beginning.

Real-time speech analytics help agents determine the right thing to say to a customer in the moment in a variety of situations. On top of making sure the customer is directed to the correct agent or department, this technology also gives agents the current, relevant information they need to solve the customer’s problem. Examples of up-to-the-minute information agents will receive include:

• Issues that are trending on social media.
• Topics customers are currently calling about the most.
• Recent updates to products or services.

Real-time speech analytics technology, combined with information being fed to agents in the moment, means that the customer support offered will be tailored to the individual.

Management can program speech analytics to choose agent scripts based on specific speech cues. Software is able to identify words and phrases that are present as well as those that are absent. The software also takes into account sentiment; the point in a call when a word or phrase is said; and the absence of a word or phrase when it should have been said. On top of improving the course of a call while an agent is on the phone, speech analytics can also pinpoint larger gaps in training and find areas for improvement.

The best speech analytics technology will understand the context of a conversation in order to appropriately guide the agent. Customer calls are analyzed in real-time and conversational indicators make it possible for agents to proactively handle a call in a way that’s highly beneficial to the customer.

Advanced speech analytics software helps contact centers in a number of ways. It increases first call resolution and improves the customer experience. It monitors agents for regulation compliance and adherence to company policies. Agents can also use real-time speech analytics to recognize and take advantage of sales opportunities.

4 Important Categories of Contact Center Analytics

 

Contact centers collect a lot of data. They can find out what their customers are doing on a daily basis. They can determine what time a customer contacted support and how long their contact lasted. They can listen carefully to conversations and decide if a customer is happy or angry based on certain keywords. All of this data helps the contact center do things like reduce call times and examine agent performance. To be competitive, contact centers have to stay focused on the customer. By keeping track of customer service metrics, contact centers can make decisions based on reliable data.

1. Speech Analytics

Speech analytics help contact centers improve a customer’s phone call experience. Customer service agents are monitored to ensure they’re adhering to scripts and following regulations. This can also pinpoint the areas in which an agent needs additional training. Speech analytics will also segment hard-to-handle calls so that they can be dealt with by a supervisor or an agent with more experience. Furthermore, speech analytics can determine the reason for the customer’s call, what they hope to get out of the call, and if they are happy, upset, stressed, satisfied, etc.

2. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Analytics

Intuitive IVR systems improve the customer experience. Insights that can be gleaned from IVR analytics include the percentage of callers who want to speak with a live agent and their reason for doing so; the reason for the transfer of calls between departments; the percentage of callers who were not identified accurately; and the number of calls that were handled from start to finish by IVR.

3. Overall Customer Satisfaction

Gauging overall customer satisfaction will give you an idea of how well you’re delivering the entire customer experience. In order to measure customer satisfaction, the CSAT score is often used. The contact center will ask the customer to rate their satisfaction with a specific experience, like an interaction with the company or a transaction. For example, the customer may be asked to rate their satisfaction on a scale of one to ten. Any answer that’s a six or above means the customer is satisfied. To figure out the percentage of satisfied customers, the number of customers who responded with a satisfied rating is divided by the total number of customers who were surveyed.

4. Predictive Analytics

Tracking analytics isn’t worth much if you’re not going to take the information and figure out how to improve the contact center. Predictive analytics show the changes that will most impact the performance of the contact center. Management can then figure out the best way to communicate with customers, retain happy customers and resolve problems with dissatisfied customers.

One single metric will not give you a useful view of customer service quality. Instead, several metrics that are carefully chosen based on your customer service goals have to be followed. Tracking analytics allows the contact center to improve, update and revamp their programs on a regular basis.