Measuring Customer Sentiment in Contact Centres

Monitoring and Measuring Customer Sentiment in the Contact Centre

Daisy Shevlin, Marketing Content Executive at Britannic Technologies

Digital transformation is changing services and products to simplify and augment the customer journey, and identify the sentiments of conversations.

Here are the tools you can utilise to monitor and measure customer sentiment in the contact centre. Enabling you to uncover angry and unsatisfied customers through the power of sentiment technology so you can resolve their issues and improve your customer service.

Social Media is your friend and your enemy

It’s probably one of the first places your customers will go to write about their experience with your company. Whether it be LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, there’s no escape from honest opinions.

75% of consumers say social media has empowered them to interact with brands. Even if that interaction is embarrassing for your company, it’s very important to take on board, and respond!

It’s fairly easy to monitor and reply to customer feedback through the mentions your company receives. However, if you want to find something specific out from your followers why not just ask them? Platforms such as Twitter now facilitate for their own surveys so you can publish them quickly and easily on the platform. From a top level this provides an overview of people interacting with your company.

But here’s how you take it one step further and measure the sentiment of the customer. There are a few tools out there but one of the best we’ve found for measuring sentiment of the customer, is our partner Bizvu. Its social media monitoring on steroids.

Bizvu enables you to add keywords that mean you can track what your customer’s are saying, even if they don’t mention you in their social posts. It also facilitates to see what your customer’s are saying about your competitors, something that could play to your advantage. Each social post is given a sentiment score, which evaluates how your customer is feeling about your company (or your competition!).

Voice is (still) vital to understand sentiment

In the contact centre, voice is still the most effective form of communication for determining customer sentiment.

You can monitor and measure it with not just what the customer is saying, but their tone of voice.

It’s important to invest heavily in training so that your contact centre agents know how to recognise and deal with customer emotion whilst on the phone.

Soon, the bots will understand emotions too

Though we already know that the bots will never take over human contact centre agents, they will eventually understand customer emotions. Continually advancing to be the best sidekick for your contact centre staff.

Conversational AI, like Ami, will soon be able to understand customer sentiment. Making it easier to ensure they are passed onto a human agent urgently. Ami learns with each interaction so with every conversation she has, a deeper understanding of the sentiment would be gained, and indeed the appropriate action for the situation.

Context is king

A lot about tapping into customer sentiment analysis is providing context. It’s important to understand and ask yourself, why does the customer feel this way? We all have an emotional intelligence capacity, therefore understanding context is about showing some emotion.

The communication channel chosen by the customer may be an indication of the customer’s sentiment. For example, as we’ve already mentioned angry customers are likely to pick up the phone to speak to someone through a real-time channel.

Customer Interaction Model

It’s all well and good to have a Net Promoter Score (NPS), but you need to understand which bits of your product or service are good and bad. Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSATs) can help provide your business with context into the areas that your business needs to improve on.

Daisy Shevlin, Marketing Content Executive at Britannic Technologies

Britannic Technologies are award-winning specialists in voice communications, systems integration and managed services with experience of over 30 years in telecommunications. Their leading technical expertise and consultative approach has helped hundreds of midsize UK businesses with their Digital Transformation.