Call Recording Featured Article

Companies today spend a great deal of time and money to try and build customer loyalty. Whether they succeed or not depends greatly on how their loyalty programs are crafted, but it also depends a great deal on effectively monitoring those loyalty efforts to determine what’s working and what isn’t.

Customer loyalty programs (your shopper’s discount cards) are popular today. Sales that were available once to the generation public are now targeted only to customers who are part of the loyalty program. This way, retailers can attract customers with the promises of savings, but at the same time, they can know who those customers are and personalize offers for them. What successful loyalty programs have behind them is a robust plan for data analytics, according to a recent article by SAS’s (News - Alert) Angela Lipscomb, writing for Marketwired.

“Nearly three-quarters of organizations with highly effective loyalty programs call data analysis a core component of their loyalty initiatives; even more perceive their organizations as having a data-driven culture,” she writes. “In contrast, only about one-third of those with lower-performing programs said the same. Correspondingly, successful organizations have the right analytical talent in-house – in particular, dedicated analytics resources – to make maximum use of customer data.”

Analytical talent in-house isn’t only for retail loyalty programs. There are a number of places data analytics can benefit companies today, from examining workflow processes to call center operations to manufacturing. One of the most critical places for analytics, however, is coupled with call recording.

Most companies record some calls to use them for quality monitoring. For companies that record 100 percent of calls, however, there exists great potential for uncovering a deep well of intelligence that can drive sales and create efficiencies that save money.  Call recording solutions such as those from Coordinated Systems’ Virtual Observer product can take “big data” and apply speech analytics to drive actionable, real-time metrics. Virtual Observer’s data can then be exported to other applications and analytics tools for predictive analytical capabilities, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management (CRM) and more.

Better customer loyalty will flow from the proper use of analytics, whether it’s applied to loyalty programs or call recordings, says Lipscomb, who notes that “analytics are indispensable in enabling organizations to effectively target customers with better, more personalized rewards and create long-term relationships throughout the customer experience.”

This leads to that all-important Holy Grail of customer support: personalization of customer interactions in a way that incites customers to return again and again.