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Analytics is one of the most versatile and powerful innovations to become available to contact centers in recent years. Today speech and text analytics are being used to significantly reduce call times, raise agent productivity, and increase revenues from sales and collections operations. It is also being used to improve adherence to best practices, improve compliance with TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act), FDCPA (Fair Debt Collection Practices Act) and other regulations, optimize the customer journey across all contact channels and touchpoints, and provide a more efficient, satisfying, targeted, and optimized customer experience.
Customer engagement analytics automates the process of taking unstructured information that is trapped in customer phone calls, texts, emails, and social media streams and turns it into structured information that can be searched and analyzed. When combined with other metadata, such as which agent handled the call or customer details from a CRM system, analytics can deliver tremendous value and insight. This omni-channel analytics process commonly occurs across a wide body of recorded phone calls and other contacts. It does an excellent job at trend discovery and root cause analysis, and helps create a consistent customer experience across channels.
Analytics technology is helping contact center operators in the immediate term – while agents are engaged with customers – and in the longer term. Call recordings and text-based customer interactions are searchable and can be queried to identify trends or test different hypotheses about the most effective way to handle specific situations. The technology makes it very practical to monitor, analyze, and grade every contact in its entirety. That is a dramatic departure from the random call monitoring that is standard in most contact center operations. Applying automated analytics allows more comprehensive analysis, by including every contact regardless of channel, and provides objective scoring and analysis that is more consistent, timely, and thorough than managers can produce by themselves.
These capabilities enable organizations that use customer engagement analytics to optimize their path for customer interactions and improve the quality for each and all interactions, creating multiple benefits that are described in the following sections.
Contact centers can reduce operating costs by using analytics to optimize how contacts are handled. By analyzing the volume, content, and outcomes of all contacts across all channels (calls, emails, messaging chats, etc.), organizations can redirect flow more efficiently, maintain contact center staffing at optimal levels, enhance the customer journey across channels, and resolve individual engagements more effectively. For example, customer engagement analytics can identify the leading causes of repeat contacts, contacts that are misdirected, the sources that lead to the most frequent contacts, and calls and other contacts that generate complaints.
Typical cost reduction results include:
- High first call resolution
- Fewer deflection and repeat calls
- Lower average handle times
A large home fitness equipment provider significantly reduced its average call time after using customer engagement analytics to analyze the content of 100 percent of its calls. The analysis found the verification process typically took 30 to 60 seconds per call and that 20 percent of calls were transferred because the initial agent wasn’t able to assist the customer. This insight led to process and training changes that reduced average call times by 82 seconds after just three weeks. The company calculated that its investment in analytics produced full ROI in just six weeks.
Another way analytics helps reduce costs is by giving organizations the insight to reduce repeat call volume. Root cause analysis with speech and text analytics can reduce repeat calls by 3 to 5 percent. Reducing repeat calls not only reduces overall call volume, it also leads to greater customer satisfaction. These improvements reduce the average cost per contact, while also improving customer satisfaction. One company did a “test drive” of customer engagement analytics to get baseline metrics about its 200-agent contact center. The company learned that approximately 9 percent of the people that called its contact center were repeat callers. It estimated that analytics could be applied to reduce repeat callers by 5 percent, which would be enough to eliminate one full-time equivalent (FTE) position.
The company documented the value of repeat call reduction using the following worksheet.
Research and experience tell us that silence is not good on customer service and sales calls. Excessive silence drives up the total call time and is often an indicator that the agent does not know how to answer a question or complete a task efficiently. Customer engagement analytics can identify silence in calls and what causes it. That insight can be used to improve training or make other changes so calls can be handled more effectively. One company calculated that a 10 percent reduction in call silence would equate to a 1 percent reduction in call volume. Such an improvement would effectively increase call handling efficiency by 1 percent without adding any incremental labor costs. Another company that has 800 agents estimated that reducing silence by just 5 percent on its calls would produce $397,500 in annual savings, as shown in the calculation below.
Shorter call times clearly translate to increased productivity for agents. Customer engagement analytics also improves productivity by helping reduce training time and making training more effective, enabling organizations to maintain higher agent-to-supervisor ratios.The ability to automatically record, analyze, and score every call helps reduce the training period and time-to-value for new employees. Trainers and managers can use daily scorecards and real-time feedback to customize instruction and coaching. This not only helps new hires become productive faster, it also reduces their confusion and improves confidence, which in turn reduces dissatisfaction and attrition. Customized coaching also helps produce sustainable, continuous quality and productivity improvement.
The ability to monitor 100 percent of contacts, flag potential problems in real time and automatically produce objective scorecards enhances supervisor productivity. Supervisors can spend significantly less time randomly sampling contacts and subjectively assessing agent performance. This allows organizations to operate with higher agent-supervisor ratios, which reduces labor costs.
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[one_half_last]Automated monitoring is also highly scalable, which lessens or eliminates the need to schedule extra supervisors for peak periods. Managers can also coach agents more effectively and spend less time debating performance results because scorecards are based on 100 percent of the agent’s contacts, not a random sampling. The comprehensive, objective scoring helps reduce disputes and agent appeals and eliminates the need for resource- and time-intensive calibration processes, which also saves time for supervisors.
Companies lose untold revenues because many do not have the analytics they need to develop best practices, and agents do not consistently follow developed scripts. High conversion rates result from high consistency in the sales approach. Comprehensive monitoring and analysis through analytics helps produce the consistency that increases conversions.
Analytics makes it easier to identify successful selling techniques and identify customer objections. Organizations can then use the insight to target their offer, sales presentation, and agent training to better address leading objections. Customer engagement analytics also helps organizations to understand where missed opportunities happen. Customer engagement analytics is also a very useful and powerful tool for testing marketing campaigns to determine what messaging and activity will produce the best results.
Analysis doesn’t need to be performed retroactively, but can be conducted while contacts are live to trigger a reminder message or supervisor intervention. That is another way analytics can reduce unrealized revenue by using real-time contact monitoring to ensure best practices are followed and to guide agents with next best action recommendations, particularly in complex sales scenarios.
Many of the tangible revenue improvement, cost reduction, and productivity gains customer engagement analytics users have reported resulted from more consistency in operations and better adherence to best practices. There are undeniable benefits to improving consistency and quality, however the benefits are often hard to measure. For example, companies carefully craft policies and procedures to ensure compliance with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and other regulations. Every time agents deviate from proscribed language and procedures they raise the risk of non-compliance. Each violation can result in a $500 fine, or a $1,500 fine if the violation was considered willful. At those rates, any consistent errors or omissions made by agents creates significant risk exposure, even at operations with a relatively low contact volume.
There is no cap on TCPA damages. For many organizations, the cost avoidance for noncompliance fines would have more than offset the investment in a speech and text analytics solution.
It is intuitive that consistency and quality contribute to compliance. However, that understanding does not show companies specifically how they can improve, nor the role that analytics can play. To do so, it is useful to look at some of the specific capabilities and metrics customer engagement analytics can provide.
Analytics not only help companies improve quality, but enables them to measure and report quality in meaningful ways. The ability to monitor, grade, and record every contact makes a tremendous amount of data available for quality analysis and reporting. The documentation is extremely useful for defending against complaints and preparing for audits. Some contact center management companies and other service providers use the advanced data collection and reporting capabilities that analytics provide as a strategic differentiator to help win clients.
There are many ways to use insights from analytics to improve the customer experience. Examples include using contact analytics insights to modify IVR options to provide customers a shorter and smoother path, managing flow more efficiently across multiple channels, introducing new service options, creating social media campaigns or other customer outreach to proactively provide frequently requested information, and even developing new products and services.
Of course, the fundamental and well-proven benefits of shortening calls, reducing escalations and improving first-call resolution also contribute directly to higher customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers are more likely to become repeat customers.
Various studies have attempted to calculate a value for customer satisfaction, which varies considerably by industry and organization. The exact dollar value of customer satisfaction is often murky, but one thing is clear: customer churn is expensive. Reducing churn is another way customer contact analytics creates value.
A top-10 US cable provider used its analytics data to build a model that predicts which customers are most likely to churn. The predictive analytics help guide customer retention and customer acquisition strategies. Another company calculated it could improve its retention rate by 2 percent, which would produce $246,000 in incremental revenue annually, as shown in the table below.
Improving Retention / Upsell RatesAdvanced customer engagement analytics can go beyond reporting what was said and done to provide additional insight that reveals sentiment. These solutions combine acoustic characteristics such as stress in the voice or rate of speech with the context of the conversation to measure sentiment within a call, a group of calls, or group of agents.
Customer engagement analytics produce return on investment by providing the insight to improve agent productivity and performance, avoid costs from compliance violations, and increase revenues by enabling more effective and consistent customer interactions. By analyzing numerous data points from 100 percent of contacts, analytics produces insight that is more detailed and comprehensive than what is possible from random sampling and other traditional contact center management methods.
Customer engagement analytics produces value in many different ways, including:
- Raising quality and consistency in customer contacts
- Improving agent and supervisor efficiency
- Reducing risk of compliance violations
- Increasing revenue through higher close rates, greater customer retention, and more effective sales management
- Improving customer service and satisfaction throughout the customer journey
Each organization values these benefits differently, so when considering the potential ROI an analytics solution can provide, it is important to account for all the quantifiable and soft benefits that are important to the organization.
Aspect can help companies see how customer engagement analytics can improve their operations and profitability. Aspect offers free test drives of its Aspect Engagement Analytics platform that analyze contact data to show companies potential areas for improvement.For more information, please contact Aspect at (888) 547-2481, or visit www.aspect.com.
Chrissy can be reached at Christina.Cowell@Aspect.com.
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