We are truly in the age of the customer is king. With technology an integral part of our lives, the connected world means that consumers can interact with us at any time, from anywhere, and expect the same experience, no matter how they chose to communicate.
This brings great opportunities for organisations. Purchase decisions can happen instantaneously with the process of choosing, paying for and receiving an item or service taking just seconds. Equally, the decision not to choose a product or service can take just as little time.
If a consumer’s first interaction with an organisation is negative, then you can be sure there are plenty of alternatives available, instantly. So, the connected way we live our lives today can have both upsides and downsides for us as providers of products or services. Making sure that the first interaction creates a positive experience becomes increasingly critical in this highly competitive marketplace.
Organisations can spend many thousands training staff to ensure the customer journey measures up and consumers become advocates for their respective businesses. Look at some of the organisations that are synonymous for service and customer experience, Amazon, John Lewis and Virgin Atlantic for example. Not all organisations have the resources available to invest in customer journey management that some of these bigger brands enjoy. They need to be smart, and look at how the connected world and the technology we often take for granted can help ensure they deliver outstanding service, and guarantee their customers come back again and again.
In the contact centre, for example, advisors handle many different types of customer interaction; from a question about a purchase through to more complex conversations such as financial advice. You will all have heard the standard recorded message ‘your call will be recorded for training purposes’, but how can the vast bank of information collected really help to improve the experience you have in your interactions today? And do all organisations really review every recording to see what could have been done better?
Well, the answer is surely no. If they did, they would need enormous quality teams to review and report on the call outcomes and generate strategies for improvement. So how can they effectively use this information to help ensure their customer experience measures up without manually reviewing every interaction?
The answer goes back to how they use the technology that enables them to run their businesses more effectively. The increasing adoption of cloud technology in contact centres to manage customer interactions has infinite possibilities when it comes to enabling an organisation to delight customers. Increasing use of speech and interaction analytics has made it much simpler and more cost effective for organisations to manage their customer experience across all communication channels. But analytics cost, don’t they? And the complexity is beyond most small and medium sized organisations, right?
It’s a widely-held belief that speech analytics are expensive and complicated to integrate, which is why adoption hasn’t been as fast as expected. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Cloud technology used for handling customer interactions automatically captures 100% of the data from every contact made and simply integrates with cloud based interaction analytics providers such as CallMiner’s Eureka.
As a provider of cloud contact services for clients for over a decade, we’ve made it our business to understand what our clients need to deliver the service and support that their customers expect. We’ve seen an increasing desire among the users of our cloud solutions to be able to utilise the data we capture for them in a more effective way, to help them improve their customer offering. We know that they use the call recording data we capture for their own quality processes and of course, very important for compliance, so we talked to our clients about how we could make this simpler and more effective for them. Interaction analytics was the answer.
Integrating speech analytics with our cloud platform to provide a single solution for clients meant that much of the development work and cost involved to deploy analytics was born by us. The flexibility and scalability of cloud based solutions mean that its possible for clients to simply pay for the hours and minutes they use. It also means that analytics can be up and running within a matter of weeks, and without tying up internal IT resources during implementation.
With interaction analytics delivered over the cloud, what historically could have been a complex integration with significant Opex implications is now well within the grasp of many SMEs. In practice, that means smaller organisations can improve contact centre performance by analysing all interactions for all agents, rather than implementing strategies for improvement based on a small sample of calls.
The benefits of interaction analytics go beyond performance monitoring, they can help an organisation improve efficiency in a number of ways.
– Identifying the optimal path for customer interactions so that best practice can be shared across wider teams
– Recognising best practice and agent strengths so that not only can the skills of individual agents be matched to tasks but also the performance of the whole team can be raised
– Introducing a competitive spirit amongst agents by providing each agent with their own dashboard that anonymously compares their performance with best-performing agents
– Enabling contact centre managers to become more effective by switching their time from listening to a small sample of calls to identifying and delivering more targeted and intelligent coaching
– Ensuring FCA compliance very simply by providing access to all interactions
The simple fact is, with cloud based implementation and the infinite flexibility this brings, deploying analytics in even the smallest customer management teams can bring significant benefits, and no longer needs to cost the earth. So if you’ve ruled it out in the past, perhaps it’s time to think again.
