Two Minutes on Text Analytics –
A Game Changer

By Mats Rennstam, Bright UK, Ltd.

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Take a couple of minutes to think about ways to:

• Stop non-customer service departments from doing stupid things to your customers.
• Go from manual data mining of verbatim to automatic real-time insight.
• Become a real-time information hub for your entire organization.

A Longstanding Industry Challenge

For 30 years contact center managers have been honing their own operations but have struggled to quantify the cost of failure originating outside of their own span of control. Donna Fluss wrote a book in 2005 describing the power of harnessing the vast information a contact center sits on and how valuable this can be to a business when it is made available to the rest of the organization in real-time. Sadly very few companies embraced this idea. Organizational silos are to blame, as well as poorly designed technology and processes that create a barrier to the sharing of rich insight.

This is where real-time data-mining comes in, using the thousands of verbatim most organizations receive on a monthly basis. Data mining is however nigh on impossible when those verbatim are in the form of sound files. IVR surveys are great as they are the most effective in driving change amongst agents listening to actual customers’ voices given them feedback, but for data mining purposes, we need to add an extra step.

The enabler

Enter automatic transcription solutions and text analytics. Automated transcripts are now very cheap and incredibly accurate (+95% of all words correctly transcribed). Which in turn enables an automated feed of verbatim in text form into a text analytics solution (email and web feedback goes straight in without the need for transcription).

The prepping

Once you have set up some rules on how to segment the data (for example any words associated to digital such as website, navigation, online etc. ends up in the “Digital” bucket), you are ready to start analyzing. The creation of rules should not take you more than half a day.

If your data comes from a voice-of-the-customer (VOC) solution, you should also use the scoring the customer gave you to increase the ways of slicing and dicing the data.

Finally, you should have a solution that is designed to be clever enough to differentiate between just looking at the word “happy” versus the string of words “I am not happy.”  That’s it.
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The Insight – A. The Basics

You’re now ready to look at your pre-set “buckets,” but also analyze text based on scores customers have given. For example, looking at a word cloud showing what the key words are for your Net Promoter Score detractors and promoters. When you click on one of the phrases you will see all the verbatim comments including that phrase in full or, you can create sub word clouds, for example taking a look at what the key themes are amongst detractors having mentioned branches with negative sentiment.

The Insight – B. The Killer Feature

One of the biggest indirect costs in contact centers is failure demand. Other departments doing dumb things to our customers that customer service then have to deal with. Using text analytics, you can create automated “Top 10 gripes” lists that senior management shares with the other departments, thus driving down avoidable costs.
When the respective department heads click on one of the gripes, it brings up the all of the verbatim mentioning their disappointment about that area. In some systems, you can link to a sound file so that they can also listen to the feedback.

Website analysis is a good example of something contact centers do not traditionally get involved with. However, the cost of “failure demand” generated online can be enormous and text analytics will help them prove this.

Cost Justification

Some have said, “It’s like speech analytics at a fraction of the cost.” There are some excellent examples of speech analytics being used effectively by contact centers but more often than not; those who have an analytics capability don’t use it to its full potential. It is often included as part of a wider technology acquisition typically added to a call recorder or dialer purchase and in many occasions, remains underutilized.

Another barrier for many has been the cost attributed to this technology typically running into six figures for even a small contact center, which is ten times more than a text analytics solution. n

About the Author

Mats Rennstam is Managing Director of Bright UK Ltd. He is the author of many pieces on how to make the most of technology solutions in the contact center. He can be reached at mats@brightindex.co.uk.

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