It’s weird when you think about it. Billions of phone calls occur every year, month – even every second – yet the data from those calls are not fully utilised. Not even close. Important customer data such as key topics, trends, sentiment – emotion and literally the kitchen sink – can be rescued from this deep conversational ocean just by tacking on conversational analytics.
Now think about the Voice of the Customer (VoC) – it’s the latest buzzword and it is becoming an integral part of the holistic customer experience. Even though the intersection of physical and digital worlds is moving exponentially, data shows that customers still prefer to use the telephone to contact a business as part of their communication journey. In fact, is their preferred means of communication. Therefore, it was only a matter of time before businesses started putting their hard-hats on and getting serious about integrating conversation analytics into VoC.
Customer Profiling
The CMO sits quietly in the corner, head spinning, filled with many unanswered questions. If you don’t know who your customers are, how can you attract new and profitable ones? How can you ensure you’re marketing the right offer with the right message? If I don’t understand each demographic that’s part of my business, how can I improve my offerings in the smartest way possible?
It’s not as woeful as you may think. These questions are actually answered by your customers, but the trick is to listen. In the past, listening to your customers has not been an easy feat – not when you’ve got manual sampling processes. But now, conversation analytics comes along with its automation and its fancy population analysis and multi-channel capabilities, and the answers to the above are at hand.
One of the main problems is that marketers are still relying on traditional demographics to be more relevant to their customers.
Individuals don’t necessarily fit the predefined demographic categories that business can ever so haphazardly plop customers into. As individuals we are vastly more complex than any stereotype that can be associated with us. Therefore, those stereotypes, identities, lifestyles and purchase patterns are not necessarily aligned in neat little rows. Customers may be part of the consumer world, but they’re still humans.
That’s why mining the voice channel for customer insights can lend a much deeper understanding of your customers because it digs deeper and looks at each customer individually: a one-size fits all approach doesn’t really work anymore.
Customer Engagement
It’s one of many million dollar questions: How do I keep my customers engaged? The word on the street is that it’s time to remove those silos and adopt a holistic omni-channel approach when wanting to deliver seamless customer experiences and improve customer engagement.
“B2B and B2C companies strive to deliver a seamless and consistent customer experience across all channels and touch points to customers, whether it is an in-person interaction at a store, a mobile device interaction, a phone call, a tweet, or an email. To achieve meaningful customer engagement, businesses must first integrate traditionally siloed customer engagement functions—marketing, sales, and service—into a single platform,” says Forbes.
It’s because customers utilise many different touch points for their interactions with businesses. For instance, I may start with a tweet to live-support, maybe follow that up with a phone call, and then from then on, stick to using the web portal or app, if available. Given the myriad of channels customers use, it would be remiss to mine data from only one channel – it would be even more remiss to leave one out, especially if it’s the most commonly utilised channel.
Customer Retention & Loyalty
Conversation analytics has the ability to connect dots between sales, marketing and other divisions, which ultimately provides marketing departments with intel from calls that turn leads into sales. With this, companies can start marketing to customers in more effective and personalized ways.
Take for example customer loyalty programs. With the customer data that’s available on a multi-channel level, businesses can reward customers by paying attention to their specific purchase preferences. A business now has the opportunity to have a wider view of their customers.
Say for example a customer has been browsing online, they then telephone your business to inquire about certain things. The data from their internet session is logged, and the agent has that intel to use during the interaction. Conversation analytics can then work its magic through emotion and sentiment scoring, real-time alerts, and the customer can have one of the best customer experiences of their lives.
The customer data collected from telephone conversations can allow businesses to create more personalized customer services, and far deeper customer profiles. In fact, businesses are sitting on a goldmine of customer data that can be used in retention strategies and create customer loyalty programs that drive new profits.
