Over the past weeks we’ve explored the top five myths behind today’s most commonly faced business challenges: Customer Satisfaction, Compliance, Sales Effectiveness, Churn, and Cost Management. I encourage you to take a look back at the previous posts for a more in-depth look at any of the topics. Now we’re wrapping it all up with a collection of the “truths” – best practices designed to give you a fresh perspective on your approach to these challenges.
CSat:
Truth 1: To understand not only how your customers rate your company, but more importantly, what occurred to drive them to that rating, you need to move beyond surveys. Analytics uncovers the drivers behind the scores, making the information actionable.
Truth 2: Having net promoter is one piece of the puzzle for understanding customer sentiment towards your company. But companies who want to use that information to affect change couple it with analytics to be able to correlate and quantify specific customer experiences to scores.
Truth 3: Don’t put customer satisfaction entirely in your agents’ hands – many things outside their control affect the customer including business processes created outside of the contact center. For example product changes, technical issues, or billing errors can greatly impact customer satisfaction and analytics uncovers these.
Truth 4: If you’re not measuring the events taking place across 100% of your captured interactions, you’re leaving information behind. To best understand your customer satisfaction you need to categorize and quantify every interaction to determine root causes, allowing you to correct the issues that drive dissatisfaction.
Truth 5: First call resolution(FCR) is only one facet of customer satisfaction. FCR should be combined with the careful analysis of customer effort, which is a more critical factor in determining satisfaction.
Compliance:
Truth 1: Manual audit teams are only able to monitor a sample of interactions, and spend a lot of time listening to an entire call to find the section where a violation may have taken place. Using interaction analytics can lead to both increased productivity and reduced headcount.
Truth 2: Any violation can leave you vulnerable to disciplinary action, so monitoring a sample of calls isn’t sufficient. You need a system that scales to monitor 100% of your interactions and allows you to use those interactions in analysis to improve performance and reduce costs.
Truth 3: Every company benefits from compliance monitoring, because it goes beyond industry violations. Adherence to corporate and brand standards affect the customer experience and should matter to every business.
Truth 4: Real-time alerting is a tool for compliance and reminds and reinforces appropriate behavior, but the most successful companies pair it with post call analytics to measure agent adherence and augment coaching.
Truth 5: By categorizing and analyzing interactions for compliance, you’ll know exactly what’s in your data, and with the ability to quickly extract and deliver even large quantities of specifically requested audio, interaction analytics helps remove regulatory audit anxiety.
Sales Effectiveness:
Truth 1: To truly improve sales rates, a company needs to know the result of an interaction and what happened during the interaction to cause the result. Using analytics to track behavioral events will uncover this information.
Truth 2: Interaction analytics allows you to quantify the techniques of a top performer, so you can share and measure the application of best practices across your team.
Truth 3: Adding new skill sets to agents should be done through a measured approach, using best practices identified through analytics and targeted coaching that leverages appropriate examples.
Truth 4: Real-time monitoring and alerting works best when coupled with post call analytics to ensure what’s included in the alert, its timing and its adherence are based on strategic goals and proven, effective information.
Truth 5: Good agents drive sales, but only if well-armed. Companies using analytics can refine offers by studying their effectiveness against different customer types, quantifying the impact of alternative campaigns or competitors and understanding the events that shaped the customers’ experience.
Churn:
Truth 1: Only by combining behavioral events found in unstructured data like audio with traditionally captured information do you have a picture that’s complete enough to understand and solve churn.
Truth 2: Unresolved issues, not price, are often a top reason for churn and interaction analytics helps companies determine root cause.
Truth 3: Save queues can reduce churn, but work best you’ve used analytics to send the right interactions to the right agents with the right skills.
Truth 4: Predictive models increase in accuracy when they’re built using all available resources. Augmenting structured data with the behavioral information found in customer interactions adds crucial data points.
Truth 5: All businesses, not just those in oversaturated markets, can benefit from having a solid understanding on the drivers of churn and should take a proactive stance by implementing an analytics strategy.
Cost Management:
Truth 1: Not all drivers of cost originate in the contact center, they often originate upstream due to changes to corporate policies or procedures that impacted the customer. Interaction analytics helps businesses identify and quantify these issues.
Truth 2: Relying on a sample of calls to identify problems can often draw inconclusive results. The examples found may support a theory, but not be indicative of the larger issue. Only when you analyze the events occurring across all of your interactions will you be able to quantify events, trend them and calculate impact.
Truth 3: Reducing handle times saves costs, but one must know which calls types to focus on and what the appropriate goals are in order to protect the customer experience. Using interaction analytics will allow you to get to the root cause of handle times, so cost corrective action can be taken.
Truth 4: Deflecting calls to self-serve channels drives down costs, but you must first use analytics to identify and quantify the types of issues alternative service channels are best equipped to aid in resolving to ensure maximum effectiveness.
Truth 5: Before turning to outsourcers as a cost saving measure, ensure you have a plan in place to measure their performance at the site, team and agent level across the metrics that matter most to you. This will ensure corporate standards are maintained and customer service isn’t sacrificed for cost.
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