VOICE of the Customer
Posted by Dave Capuano on Mon, Nov 21, 2011
Email, tweet, email, chat, email.... time to makea phone call. Sound familiar? Many customers – when trying to buy a solution, solve a problem, or obtain more information – end up calling into your business. Those calls are typically recorded for quality and training purposes… and may be one of your company’s largest non-monetized assets when it comes to your Voice of the Customer program.
Did you know that a small contact center can create over 10,000 hours of recorded conversation every week, and large call centers may capture hundreds of thousands of hours of customer calls every day? I didn’t fully grasp that fact until I got a dose of market education, compliments of the folks at Verint. Since our acquisition by Verint this summer, I have been spending time learning about the various technologies that comprise the Verint portfolio, and have recently gained deep exposure to their Speech Analytics solution. The solution provides a ton of value to the contact center, and can provide valuable insight into customer interactions, cost drivers, and changes in customer satisfaction and is a critical component of any comprehensive VOC program. If your organization has a call center, you owe it to your program to find out if they have deployed speech analytics. For those unfamiliar with the technology, be
low are some key features:
- Automated emerging trend detection: Exposes emerging trends by automatically identifying increases or decreases in certain terms and phrases mentioned in customer conversation, indicating potential changes in customer behavior – without the user ever having to know which terms to look for. For example identifying that the phrase “new fees” has increased by 60% in the last week.
- Call categorization & alerting: Automatically categorizes calls correlated to key performance indicators such as customer complaints, repeat calls, emotional calls, and then detects and alerts users. If certain call types reach a set threshold. For example, alerting the “customer at risk” calls has exceeded 5% of total call volume.
- Automated Root cause (TellMeWhy): Surfaces the Top 10 root cause drives of any subset of calls, for example identifying that account opening processes are driving many repeat calls and very long calls.
- Emotion detection: Identifies both customer and agent emotions expressed within a voice conversation, based on both acoustic and linguistic elements.
- Context visualization : The ability to visually map the relevant context of any word, phrase or call category. For example, automatically identifying that in the last week most customers that mention the website also mentioned they have issues with their login password.
- Comprehensive BI Reporting: Ability to leverage Verint’s out of the box reporting platform or export speech analytics categorization results to any external data warehouse.
During my recent speech analytics education, I have been exposed to some very cool functionality – functionality that aligns perfectly with Vovici’s technologies. I won’t cover all of them here, but if you’re curious you can learn more here.
One important topic I do want to highlight is what Verint calls “Customer Behavior Indicators.” This is where their speech technology evaluates if a certain word, phrase, or category is being used more or less often in a statistically significant manner. For example, if the phrase “new fees” has a sudden increase in utterance due to a new policy being implemented without proper customer communication (hmmm...do we know anyone who has done this?), the technology automatically detects this – without any guidance from the user – and clearly displays it with other top trending words and phrases in an easy-to-read chart. If the contact center notices this trend and it is linked to those responsible for the Voice of the Customer program, they can hopefully get ahead of a bad business decision and make amends, before the issue goes viral on social networks.
I know many of you are working on mapping your customer lifecycle of interactions, and are actively defining your listening posts. At the same time, don’t forget to look around your organization and reach into the contact center. You will be amazed how much customer feedback already exists in your organization, and you might also be surprised to find out that your company has already invested (or has plans to invest) in technology that can support your initiatives.