Subscribe
  • Home
  • /
  • TechForum
  • /
  • Managing customer expectations with interaction analytics

Managing customer expectations with interaction analytics

Only customer satisfaction scores are a real indicator of the outcome of interactions, says Cecilia Jofr'e, Executive of Intuate Group.


Johannesburg, 19 Aug 2015

The foundation of today's customer experience management (CEM) is based on a sharper focus on the customer and expanding the channels of consistent, positive interactions; but companies must also ensure that they measure how successfully each interaction is handled, as many do not take this extra step.

To date, most companies have still not changed the key performance indicators (KPIs) they use to determine how well they are managing customer interactions, says Cecilia Jofr'e, Executive of Intuate Group. Many still rely on overall customer satisfaction scores, queue times, average handling times, the number of times a customer is put on hold, and the time taken to complete after-call work.

Yet of these, only customer satisfaction scores are a real indicator of the outcome of interactions. It is therefore critical that organisations adopt other measures that address effectiveness and outcomes.

Established companies add first-call resolution rates to their list of KPIs. However, Intuate Group would advise that first-call resolution be used with caution. For example, an agent might consider resending a statement as resolving a request for a missing invoice, but if the first failed because the customer's address had become corrupted, this will not resolve the issue because the new statement will also go astray - and the customer will likely have to call in again.

The most mature companies have begun to implement outcome or effectiveness measures that show the impacts and business outcomes of interactions. Three of the most popular found in today's contact centres are net promoter scores (whether customers will recommend the company to others), customer lifetime value (the amount customers spend over their entire relationship compared to how much it costs the company to support them) and Web conversion rates (the percentage of customers who complete a purchase through Web self-service versus those that only begin a transaction). As businesses move to multichannel services, the more advanced ones are implementing KPIs on a channel-by-channel basis so they can evaluate the impact each is having on the business.

Sophisticated Interaction Analytics solutions are capable of leveraging large volumes of recorded conversations to gain actionable business intelligence; such as spotting trends, identifying underlying reasons for customer calls, assessing quality assurance programs, measuring script adherence, determining training needs, and much more.

By implementing a real-time monitoring and decisioning solution, a contact centre will be able to respond immediately to emerging issues and opportunities - as they are happening. In turn, this will give robust performance management capabilities with key analytic functionality to uncover what is affecting KPIs, so that organisations can develop solutions, provide proactive responses, and track effectiveness at an agent level.

Share the right knowledge with the right people

A contact centre captures the multi-channel interactions occurring between agents and customers. But, trying to make sense of this raw "big data" can be a rather daunting task. Getting it into the hands of those who need it most can be even harder to do. Interaction Analytics allows a contact centre to capture, synthesise and disperse the business intelligence locked inside the customer interactions. Simply put, it will get the right information to the supervisors and analysts who can use it to effect change.

Learn and improve from every interaction

Whether an organisation needs to increase resolution rates, manage handle times, find compliance breakdowns, or address other challenges within its contact centre, the power to solve these problems is within customer interactions.

Questions to ask should, at the very least, include:

* How are agents interacting with customers, and are the customers satisfied?
* How is the contact centre performing against key initiatives?
* Is the contact centre adhering to proper protocol on every customer interaction?
* What best practices can be elevated?

With the right Interaction Analytics solution, finding answers to these questions is easy because the structured searches can find any words or phrases, without being restricted by a dictionary. Structured searches can then be saved and used to run reports and establish trends.

Saved searches could also be used to generate quality initiatives that become the areas in which agents' performance is scored -thus ensuring that their performance aligns with goals.

Defining and tracking metrics as they relate to agent performance goes beyond behavioural issues to find business processes and procedures that might stand in the way of achieving goals. It is essential that organisations have the right tools at their disposal to make critical changes that can help decrease costs, increase revenue, and improve customer experiences.

Provide more responsive service with real-time screening

With access to real-time information and decisioning tools, agents can respond immediately to emerging issues as they are happening. Real time speech analytics (RTSA) can help identify situations or opportunities as interactions are taking place, and can automatically send the agent the right information for the next step, or it can notify a manager that an agent needs assistance with a difficult caller or that an agent has skipped a key part of a script or workflow.

Without a comprehensive Interaction Analytics solution, organisations will find themselves stuck in a vicious cycle of "garbage in, garbage out" when it comes to the handling of big data. Noble Systems, for which Intuate Group is a preferred partner, offers Noble Interaction Analytics, a leading-edge solution that addresses the most common business needs without complicated analysis or custom reporting. Noble Interaction Analytics delivers:

* User-defined analysis to look at what you need, when you need it.
* Simplified customer interaction analytics for rapid implementation and fast business results.
* Real-time screening with agent and manager alerts to identify and respond to situations as they occur.
* Initiative-driven quality scorecards with built-in coaching forms.
* Powerful tools focused on quality management.
* Compliance and positivity scoring for each interaction.
* Performance tied to strategic corporate initiatives to implement business process improvement beginning at the agent level.
* Easy implementation.
* Affordable licensing based on the numbers of agents and users.
* Multi infrastructure deployment.

By using Noble Interaction Analytics as a part of an integrated contact strategy, organisations will be able to manage teams more effectively, to pinpoint areas for improvement and to better coach their agents. For more information on Noble Interaction Analytics please contact Intuate Group.

Share

Intuate Group

Intuate Group is a privately owned, broad based IT company that focuses on providing professional, integrated technology and people resources solutions. Its services encompass the provision of state-of-the-art contact centre solutions, the supply and implementation of best-of-breed IT solutions, as well as IT strategy and consulting. The company is also a partner of choice for business intelligence, project management, the management and support of IT infrastructure - specifically storage and server consolidation - and the provision of resources.

For more information, please visit www.intuategroup.com.

Editorial contacts

Mark Edwards
Intuate Group
(011) 302 1200
marke@intuategroup.com