In Uncertain Times, Mine the Gold in Your Unstructured Data

Is there anyone NOT thinking about the economy these days? With belt-tightening on everyone’s minds, this is a perfect time to make the most of our existing resources and investments. Consider the turmoil in the financial services industry.

I call out this industry specifically because of a number of challenges that these companies face in a volatile economy: complying with regulations, increasing cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and working with, at times, emotionally charged customers dealing with sensitive collections, investments, and lending matters. Also, many of these customers want to speak with not just a live person, but a live expert – a stock broker, investment advisor, or a mortgage lender – all residing outside the contact center, most likely sitting in an office or traveling on the road. In fact, in checking my own 401(k), I know I could use the reassurance of a certified investment expert or successful financial planner right now!

Most businesses would love to know what their customers think, and this could go a long way in giving a bank or financial services institution a competitive advantage, especially any company using a unified communications (UC) strategy. Wouldn’t you like to know your UC strategy is working, and that it is helping build profitable customer relationships? The fact is, contact centers have been giving organizations this insight into their customer care and privacy compliance initiatives for years – through quality monitoring and recording interactions. Every time a customer calls a bank’s contact center, that call is usually recorded. The recording is typically monitored for quality and training purposes, or for compliance purposes.

These recorded conversations are a gold mine. We’ve seen a number of contact centers using speech analytics tools to convert the unstructured data collected during a call and transform it into searchable content. For example, you may search on phrases like “cancel my account”. The technology automatically identifies not just specific words or phrases, but patterns that reveal trends in customer responses. More advanced tools can detect emotion and tone, all without manual searching.

There is a huge opportunity here for financial services companies to apply this concept of quality recording and interpreting unstructured data and bring it into a UC strategy, mining interactions out to the enterprise, and monitoring interactions between customers and knowledge workers such as financial experts, lending officers, and investment advisors. There are several ways financial services firms can mine the gold in their existing business assets, and these offer high-yield insights for every industry. Some speech analytics applications can also detect trends that generate spikes in call volume and identify competitive challenges, risk management issues, as well as new revenue opportunities. The opportunities include:

• Discovering cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Analytics can yield customer insights to support customer segmentation and marketing strategies.
• Ensuring regulatory compliance and reduced litigation risks. Calls that are not in compliance can be auto-matically identified so enterprises can fix potentially costly problems.
• Understanding significant trends and/or variations that can impact customer satisfaction, agent quality, sales performance, and marketing effectiveness. This new level of customer and business intelligence enables companies to act immediately to improve performance.

These concepts don’t just hold true in financial services, but also in other industries where customers need to transferred out to an expert. Think about a healthcare UC interaction, where a patient might need to be transferred outside the contact center to talk to a nurse or a pharmacist. Wouldn’t the hospital want to record these types of calls? Wouldn’t healthcare administrators want to know about patterns in patient issues and inquiries?

For any company implementing a UC strategy, speech analytics offers an important analytical tool to understand and improve the customer experience, while also providing other business insights. It can be even more powerful when combined with other technologies pioneered in the contact center, such as instant messaging and presence technology available in Microsoft (News - Alert) Office Communications Server 2007. Real-time presence information on “experts” located across the enterprise can be used to assist with customer interactions and improve service. These interactions between customers and in-house experts hold out the promise of much richer insights than monitoring the performance of contact center agents alone.

While no one is suggesting recording and analyzing every call, speech analytics applications offer compelling possibilities. Could we analyze the tone of other recorded voice content, like webinars, meetings or conference calls? At minimum, we know speech analytics can improve the overall customer experience. Speech analytics finds hidden insights, implicit customer needs and wants, and the root causes of issues embedded in conversations. This is pure gold that can be mined for the benefit of the entire organization.

Talk is cheap, as the saying goes. But not listening can be expensive. IT

Mike Sheridan is Senior Vice President, Strategy and Marketing of Aspect (News - Alert) Software (www.aspect.com).

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