Are you listening? Hearing and Learning from Customer Interactions in Contact Centers

Better leaders hear through the “buzz” of a contact center to capture and act on their customer interactions. Here’s how to listen—then act to improve your costs and customer experience, too.

My kids listen to a podcast called “Brains On!" that focuses on science and teaching the benefits of asking questions. Every episode, in a section called the “Mystery Sound Extravaganza,” the podcast team plays a brief sound snippet and asks kids to guess what it is. Part of what makes that sound game so unique is that, once you’ve heard the clips, you’ll never forget that sound again (think whale songs or a smoke alarm when the batteries have run out).

This game got me thinking: if I say “call center,” what sound comes to mind for you? Endless hold music? Telephones ringing? Or, if you’ve spent any time leading a call center, is it the “buzzing”?

Listening through the “buzz” of contact centers

Spend just five minutes in any contact center and you’ll never forget that buzzing sound. It’s a constant hum of voices and computers—the combination of tens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of simultaneous interactions between company employees, consumers, customers, suppliers, and support teams.

Within that contact center, within the buzzing and humming, is the real-time focus group on your products and services. Within that site, amongst all those interactions, is the referendum and customer feedback on your supply chain and operations. It’s happening right now, just as it did yesterday, and will tomorrow.

But, despite what we may assume, not one of these interactions is the same as the next. Every customer is unique, each scenario slightly nuanced, the information available today exceeds that of yesterday, the time of day and behavior patterns will affect workflow volumes and complexities, and products and processes are constantly evolving.

Your self-service portals, automated processes, and agents are engaged right now in a whole host of unique contacts – and there’s an important question to ask beyond what the inside of a call center sounds like: are you truly listening and learning from these interactions?

Turn on, tune in, or drop out

Digging in, whether you currently have the tools or not, can be daunting. Leaders of the contact center and customer experience areas are often overwhelmed; they focus on the escalated concerns of consumers and customers, along with the day-to-day requirements and challenges of managing large groups of headcount (both internal and outsourced). Being trapped in this reactive cycle can lead to ongoing cost management pressures, increasing demands from customers, and the growing risk of attrition (agents, customers, and suppliers alike). 

Fortunately, the tools to break this cycle are available and the ability to rapidly implement and realize value is real. Let’s explore options to get the most from your contact centers.

Get the most from your phone system

Phone systems are often the most underutilized of all the reporting tools in the contact centers, used only for simplistic reporting such as calls offered, handle time, and occupancy. However, many leading providers have upgraded their dashboards and insight tools to create a better lens into the customer activities.

“Begin simply: explore the tools available from your phone provider and how best to use that data. You’ll begin to paint a clearer picture of your needs.”

Begin simply: explore what’s available from your provider and how to best use that data. You’ll begin to paint a clearer picture of your traffic patterns and drivers. When properly aligned to your organization’s goals and priorities, this data—appropriately filtered and analyzed—can improve staffing, responsiveness, and identify contact drivers to boost customer experience.

Unleash the benefits of Salesforce

In recent years, Salesforce has done incredible work to make supporting customers easy and efficient.  They’ve provided great dashboard and insight tools to all levels of management, from supervisors to company executives. Depending on the type of customer contact centers you’re leading—whether that’s boutique direct-to-consumer or a fully scaled B2B center of excellence—there’s a Salesforce solution to support you.

If you haven’t already identified that Salesforce solution, it’s time. Salesforce provides access to self-service portals and knowledge management that will improve experience, but more importantly it can provide tremendous insights into areas of opportunity for your agents and customers.

Also consider integrating Service Cloud, which has grown in capability strength and ease of use. Service Cloud allows agents to support customers seamlessly across the entire contact channel spectrum (live chat, mobile, self-service, social media, etc.). Service Cloud’s omni-channel feature allows for consistent contact flow management, insight gathering, and call dispositioning—meaning that not only are you better able to serve your customers in the channel they prefer, but you can maximize both the customer experience and your own insights along the way.

Reconsider speech, voice, and text analytics

The average agent will have between 12,000 and 20,000 customer contacts each year. That’s a lot of impressions. When scaled across the number of individuals you have within your sites, the annual affected customer experiences can quickly get into the millions or tens of millions. Everyone knows that it’s impossible to have a person listen to and review all your contacts and, in the past, the technology to automate this process was either clunky, or over-priced, or both. That’s no longer the case. Enter the newest generation of speech, voice, and text analytics tools.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has brought the potential of the cloud to bear with new waves of voice analytics technology offer breakthroughs in translating voice-to-text and keyword searches. Natural language processing has further improved key phrase identification, meaning you gain visibility into sales opportunities and future focus areas for coaching. There’s also the unlocked savings potential for identification of business process gaps, reduced loss time for coaching/performance improvement, and improving the cycle time for change management.

“The new generation of speech, voice, and text tools aren’t just recording calls anymore. They unlock great customer experiences and providing deep insights in a cost-effective and efficient manner across all your channels.”

These tools aren’t just recording calls and translating them into text anymore. In the past, introducing voice analytics could mean skyrocketing recording costs and increased admin time reading translations. The new tools focus on unlocking great customer experiences and providing deep insights in a cost-effective and efficient manner across all your channels.

If you can reduce time searching for the exceptions and customer challenges, you can better apply your team’s efforts towards analyzing trends and driving resolution. Even better, your team will have more time and more meaningful insights to improve relationships between coaches and agents.

Avoid stranded or partial data

Calls get transferred, other departments become part of the workflow, channels change from phone to email. Sound familiar? There are many imperfect, everyday scenarios that ultimately may leave you with incomplete visibility into your customer experience across your contact channels. The tools and dashboard options you select will depend on your location strategy, processes, workflows, and contact types. Examples like how your CRM layer fits into your broader enterprise system, how your multiple site or virtual agents collaborate and what tools they use, and how deeply you’re connected to your clients’ systems all dictate what other considerations may need to be made.

So how do you choose when there’s a whole universe of process and technology tools to get a complete picture of your customer experience? Execute a purposeful workshop to understand the current state and associated potential for “blind spots” to make sure there aren’t gaps where there should be insights. Your team should collaborate and calibrate the entire contact flow and customer experience to prioritize areas of focus as you move ahead. 

First hear it, then listen, then act

Whether it’s through improving how you utilize the tools you currently have, implementing one (or more) of the tools above, or simply ensure you’re picking up on all actionable insights there are to be picked up on – the benefits to getting closer to your customer and their experiences with your organization are plentiful. The interactions and feedback from your customers flow into your organization every moment. It’s time to tune in to capture those insights.

When you're tuned into the interactions in your contact centers,you really hear the voice of your customer and can determine a path to action. If you’re not, well, then it might as well be the “Mystery Sound Extravaganza”—and you can keep on guessing. 

If you’re ready to dig in, we are here to help:  [email protected]