Balto's New Tool Solves Contact Center Challenges

Contact centers – the core of customer service in most organizations – is an opportunity for companies to build competitive advantage and improve customer retention and loyalty through exceptional service. Challenges contact centers face today, however, include gathering the necessary data to predict call trends and prepare better scripts that can help them accomplish their goals.

Collecting that information without the right tools will cost time and resources. Balto, a guidance platform for contact centers, launched a new tool, Balto Real-Time Index, which collates trends, insights, and in-depth analysis for contact centers.

The index solves the two issues above in one package. Teams can start building out talk flows to address objections or customer sentiments right away. Organizations can also compare industry baselines with others and adjust accordingly.

"The Balto Real-Time Index answers, ‘What are my industry peers doing?’ We're applying data from more than 100 million conversations to develop best practices for sales and customer service teams across a number of verticals," said Balto CEO Marc Bernstein.

The index’s first edition focuses on common consumer objections and the most- and least-utilized soft skills agents use on calls. Each metric can be sorted and compared by various industries, including collections, health care, home improvement, logistics, real estate, retail and insurance.

Index data is analyzed by Balto's in-house research team, the Conversation Excellence Lab. The data is processed through machine learning and natural language processing models trained to identify call events, like soft skills and objections. The data is then aggregated into industry-specific categories to deliver trends and insights via the index.

"Managers and playbook makers now have a crystal ball into customer behavior on calls and can pivot in real-time based on trending data or operationalize unforeseen shifts," said Ben Lazar, Balto chief marketing officer.

The data subset for the first edition is representative of trends between May and July 2022. 

The Balto Index is available for free and updated on a quarterly basis for continual trend tracking and analysis.

Edited by Erik Linask