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Viewpoint: Use customer analytics to outsmart competitors

By Ebrahim Dinat
Johannesburg, 11 Jan 2018
Business should effectively use customer analytics to stay ahead, says Ocular Technologies COO Ebrahim Dinat.
Business should effectively use customer analytics to stay ahead, says Ocular Technologies COO Ebrahim Dinat.

To remain competitive within the contact centre industry, companies need to do more to ensure better-than-exceptional customer engagements, and the best way to measure and quantify these is to deploy customer experience analytics solutions.

According to Gartner Research, "organisations wishing to achieve an effective voice-of-the-customer (VOC) capability must gather and analyse data in a variety of formats from a diverse set of VOC channels. Enterprise architects and managers for CRM, product development, marketing, innovation and customer service will benefit from understanding VOC and how they can apply it."

Chris O'Brien, from Ocular Technologies' software partner company, Aspect, recently said in a blog that "it's pretty common to track the performance of your agents, but if you don't also have analytics to study customer experience, you're only getting half the story".

She goes on to explain that customer experience analytics help businesses discern the efficacy of their IVR systems, get better insights into their preferences and interactions with agents, as well as offer a chance to provide customers with post-interaction surveys for even more thorough study.

Customer experience analytics makes every customer touch point a source for a competitive advantage in a world where the contact centre is actually the "centre" of the customer experience.

This functionality is available to South African contact centre operators today, and is helping several early adopters to realise enhanced customer engagement levels. These solutions, which combine the power of speech analytics, text analytics, quality management and performance management, help you capture and study customer interactions gathered across various channels like speech, e-mail and social media, and empower users to draw insights about your product, processes and staff performance in real time.

What this also does, and effectively so, is provide an early warning system that shines a light on behavioural and attitudinal business trends internally before they become widespread issues on your Web and social media platforms.

Businesses operating in this industry know well that customers come through to their contact centres with pre-conceived ideas - there are numerous situations that might have led them to you but there are only ever really two outcomes - by the time they reach you, they are either happy or not.

Whatever their state of mind when they reach your contact centre, by applying analytics to this interaction, you can better understand who this person is, what they need, and the steps that must be taken to ensure they leave happy.

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