How conversational intelligence can help everyone to have a more positive experience
It could be something small, an issue that has been left to develop over a period of time so, by the time the customer contacts you about it, their view of your organisation is less than flattering. They will likely have chosen to contact you via the usual channels – your phone line or a website form, but increasingly more instant channels such as chat are being used. There is also a rising trend for customers to use social media to vent their frustration with a product or service as the perception is that by publicly airing their issue they will force an organisation to act and to take them seriously.
With all these different channels to communicate customer sentiment, it is difficult for an organisation to monitor brand mentions and customer interaction – especially if you do not have an army of people to take care of it for you. This is why the use of conversational intelligence is important. Getting the right technology in place is vital to gathering such intelligence and unlocking customer insight that you can act on. CX is widely touted as the key to managing a long-term customer relationship, but conversational intelligence plays a huge part in this and its complexity is often overlooked by CX technology vendors.
Drive organisational change at every level
Being able to detect sentiment from within a voice call, as well as from digital channels such as chat, email and social, creates a 360-degree view of customer sentiment. This can be used to drive real change in an organisation, from KPIs at the team level down to those for specific functions. An ideal solution gives users the ability to see all the data that is relevant to their function via a customisable dashboard view. This enables the user to react to any customer issues that may arise and meet their KPIs.
Automate customer sentiment detection
As already highlighted, the ability to manage the ever-expanding channels of communication requires technology to take up the inevitable slack – but gathering information is only one aspect of this. Interpreting the data, tagging it and automating the process that highlights which parts deserve your attention is something that only AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) can offer. These technologies can identify calls that contain phrases relating to dissatisfaction, raised voices and can even recognise when call handlers talk over or interrupt the customer. Being able to automatically detect certain phrases means that you can also gain a better understanding of why customers are calling you and provide key staff with the information needed to mitigate issues or complaints more effectively.
Develop staff performance
It is vital that you learn from successes and failures in team and individual performance. Team managers need to go back through customer interactions and identify cases that can be used to demonstrate good performance. They should also highlight issues relating to call and interaction handling, nipping poor behaviour in the bud before it becomes an issue for the business or the individual concerned. We all appreciate that building and investing in your team improves the bottom line of the organisation, but you also need technology to help you do that, and to make it easier.
Managing customer dissatisfaction no longer needs to be solely about dealing with the most urgent cases. Although you still need to do that, you can now look at the bigger picture, predict patterns and the likely scale of emerging issues, and automate the collection and notification of key topics. Conversational Intelligence not only helps you to boost your CX capabilities, it also changes the way you engage with your customers, builds more positive relationships and improves your staff performance in the longer term.
