Lots of companies offer 3rd party remote call monitoring solutions, but there is just one company out there that claims to take customer/employee interactions and collate contextually accurate data from them. That company, Mattersight, has spent over 500 people years developing its algorithms with the goal of matching each caller to the agent best suited to deal with his or her concerns.
While Mattersight itself is only one year old, its brain trust has been working on this solution for over eight years, spending millions of dollars and over 500 people years perfecting the algorithms. Now Mattersight’s software can analyze customer/employee interactions, from call recordings to emails to chats and more, and ranks both agents and repeat for metrics such as empathy, engagement, sentiment and other factors.
With this data, the software can do several things. First, it can predict what customers will do in different situations. It can also help call center managers identify areas of opportunity for improvements for each agent and each call. But most importantly, the solution can route a customer’s call to the agent who is best suited to handle it. If a caller is upset, for example, about his or her bill, the program might route the call to the agent who has the best empathy score, ensuring that the customer gets an agent who can understand his or her emotional concerns and the agent gets to handle a call that lines up with his or her strengths.
Mattersight’s solution is a Web-based portal that can integrate with existing platforms. Integrated into it is a coaching platform that can help agents improve their areas of weakness, ultimately resulting in better customer service skills. David Gustafson, vice president of marketing and management at Mattersight, told me that the company saw that many of its competitors were analyzing social media messages, but doing a poor job of tying that data back to customers. The Mattersight solution does all that and more.
Gustafson said he sees the solution as being a good fit for insurance companies, HMOs, cable operators, banks and universities to start, but foresees it as useful in almost any vertical. As for the future, Gustafson says that Mattersight is looking into educational applications for the software. In the meantime, if it can route my call about my cable bill to the nicest agent, then I’ll be a lot happier when I have to shell out 20 extra bucks just to watch True Blood!
Edited by Carrie Schmelkin