Analyzing the Voice of the Customer
January 03, 2013
By Rachel Ramsey, TMCnet Web Editor
Today, it is not uncommon to try and get in contact with a company by phone and be greeted with an automatic responder or an interactive voice response (IVR) system. While IVR systems can be a huge help in increasing call efficiency by directing calls exactly where they need to go and reducing the amounts of agents needed, they can also be a huge turn-off to the customer who wants immediate, human interaction and support.
Many enterprises have already learned that the contact center is a critical, high-volume interaction point, where investments to improve the customer experience can really pay off. Your IVR system can have an impact on customer experience that is equally significant to that of your agents—sometimes even more so, because that critical "first impression" of your contact center is shaped by the caller's experience in the IVR. So if you want to effectively manage and improve the customer experience in your contact center, you're going to have to "coach" your IVR as well as your agents.
Call center software can now identify everything from anger to dissatisfaction in the voices of customers. Both through recorded calls and through real-time and near-real-time analysis, call center agents and managers have access to an unprecedented amount of information about the person on the other end of the line.
This information can reveal everything from general dissatisfaction or confusion to imminent account or service cancellation, known in the industry as "churn." It also gives call centers the opportunity to respond more effectively to customer problems, questions and complaints.
"The human voice is made of many repeating patterns," Amir Liberman, CEO of Nemesysco, told CRM Buyer. "Everything that attracts your attention will generate a slight disturbance in these patterns. We look carefully at this voice chart, and we identify disturbances."
Organizations across industries increasingly view analytics and measurement as key capabilities to improve firms' understanding of customers, continuously optimize marketing campaigns across channels, and enhance the relevance of customer experiences using data-driven insights.
"We listen to how each word is said -- tempo, silence, agitation level, stress -- and then we annotate that for every word and every conversation," Jeff Gallino, chief technology officer with CallMiner (News - Alert). "We add context and words to the indicators to get the full story."
Voice analytic systems offer call centers a variety of options, from using recordings for coaching and training to responding in real-time to problematic calls. Coaching an IVR isn’t much different from coaching a call center agent; you measure, collecting a lot of performance data; you analyze, using the data to identify areas of improvement; and you improve, implementing a process to make sure those improvements are implemented.
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Edited by Rich Steeves