 | Issue: | Latin America 2009 |
| Article no.: | 15 | |
| Topic: | Enhancing the contact centre experience | |
| Author: | Diego Gomez | |
| Title: | Vice President CALA | |
| Organisation: | Verint Witness Actionable Solutions | |
| PDF size: | 268KB |
About author
Diego Gomez is Vice President, Latin America for Verint Witness Actionable Solutions, a global provider of analytics-driven workforce optimization (WFO) software and services for contact centre, branch/remote office, and back-office customer service operations environments. Mr Gomez has more than 20 years of experience in high technology software sales and executive management, including with PeopleSoft and IBM Corporation. Diego Gomez earned a degree in information systems and a post-graduate degree in systems engineering both at UTN National Technological University Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Article abstract
The customer experience is a constant concern for businesses. Every contact with a company affects how consumers perceive it and influences their likelihood of buying from it in the future. Companies increasingly use information extracted from their contact centres to improve their service delivery, products and services. Contact centres are a rich source of customer feedback. ‘Speech analytics’ technology lets companies mine recorded conversations for particular phrases – essentially creating ‘focus groups on demand’ – and act upon their findings.
Full Article
Has it ever occurred to you that when you leave a store, even an online site, you rarely depart empty-handed? Regardless of whether you have purchased anything, you are still walking away with something known as ‘the customer experience’ – a growing theme and focus among global organizations today. Whether you leave empty-handed or with a deposit slip acquired during a branch bank visit, leftovers from restaurant dining, a receipt from the grocery store or the keys to a shiny new BMW 550i, you have had an experience that almost certainly impacts your perception about that company – and your likelihood of making future purchases. Increasingly, enterprises are discovering the value of listening to customer perspectives and are using the information extracted from the company’s contact centre to improve their service delivery, products and service offerings. In fact, contact centres may well be the world’s greatest and largest focus groups. These days, it is not uncommon for marketing and executive management teams to listen more regularly to customer interactions. In part, customers are forcing them to do so by posting messages about their poor service experiences to blogs, YouTube and other online resources that draw in millions of readers and viewers. Every conversation with the customer is an opportunity to reinforce the brand and create an exceptional experience with your organization. With this rich source of direct customer feedback, organizations are starting to leverage technology that allows them to mine for particular phrases, essentially creating ‘focus groups on demand’. Analytics and the customer Captured customer interactions and agent screen data are a rich source of information about what customers want and need – and how well your company delivers it to them. Many organizations rely on this data solely to understand what is happening in their contact centres, but can derive more value from understanding why problems are occurring so they can be fixed – not to mention reaping the benefits of improved customer satisfaction, streamlined processes and reduced costs. Speech analytics gives organizations the ability to tap into existing recorded customer interactions, and gain actionable intelligence for improving business performance. With this actionable intelligence, they can look beyond simply tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) – such as first-contact resolution, average talk time and number of contacts handled – to address the root causes that prompted the customer contacts to begin with. Customer service has become one of today’s top differentiators for enterprises across virtually every vertical market. As organizations struggle to balance customer satisfaction with the drive to increase revenue and minimize costs, they are increasingly exploring technologies and processes that help heighten the customer experience, on one hand, and help uncover actionable intelligence for informed business decisions on the other. Speech analytics, the technology that allows enterprises to mine large volumes of recorded interactions, is among the solutions successfully addressing this need. As such, it helps redefine quality in a way that promotes greater customer satisfaction, loyalty and value – while delivering vital information to the contact centre and broader enterprise about the issues and trends driving customer calls in the first place. In day-to-day operations, organizations tend to leverage speech analytics in an iterative process that typically involves these steps: • Capture customer interactions – Many customers provide the key reasons for their frustration or levels of satisfaction in the everyday interactions they have with an organization’s contact centre. While, in many cases, these ‘insights’ are captured by recorded phone conversations, most centres do not leverage this information to influence or change the way they address customer concerns. They do not have an automated means by which to perform root cause analysis. By using speech analytics to automatically build an index of recorded customer interactions, companies can mine for insights and find out why customers feel and act in the ways that they do. The content serves as a more real-time focus group, enabling companies to extract valuable information from thousands or even millions of customers on any given topic. • Analyse interactions – Speech analytics software combines the structured and unstructured data collected from customer feedback and customer interactions. Data-mining engines analyze and surface key circumstances that positively and negatively impact business performance, such as account closures, increases and/or decreases in sales figures and costs. This ‘tell me why’ functionality allows companies to look at a particular subset of calls and dive deeper into issues. For example, a contact centre manager may search for all calls that received poor customer feedback scores. In this case, the result of the analysis is a prioritized group of words and terms correlated with poor satisfaction, indicating the reasons for the dissatisfaction and helping eliminate the guesswork. The key is having a complete, meaningful index of the words spoken and being able to instantly compare calls of interest with all the other calls. • Take action – By mining these data sources and presenting the results in a way that immediately prioritizes what has the most impact, organizations can quickly take action to optimize the customer experience and maximize overall company performance. For example, the information can serve as content in e-Learning and training sessions to help agents improve communications. On the other hand, if the relevant action is to focus on specific high-value calls – such as premium customers calling to close their accounts – supervisors can be automatically notified immediately. Marketing, financial and product departments also can leverage the intelligence to help improve and adapt company promotions, billing statements and product/service offerings. Today’s speech analytics are extending the benefits of contact centre recording from workforce quality to enterprise-wide customer process optimization. While the contact centre remains as a front-line for customer service, other enterprise groups are playing increasingly vital roles in what constitutes a positive or negative customer experience. Back-office operations departments – such as order fulfilment, billing and claims processing – are now also benefiting from specific feedback to help them better their processes, increase their accuracy and response times, and help ensure a high-calibre experience. Forward-thinking organizations leveraging the right tools and committed to acting on customer insights are more likely to reap the benefits and competitive advantages in today’s global markets.
