Leveraging qualitative research technology to transform customer experience.
The customer journey is marked by touchpoints that dictate the overall customer experience. If you plan on navigating this journey in its entirety, you’ll notice that the interactions between customer and company converge in the dynamic, often frenetic, contact centre setting.
Contact centres are seen as the cold face of the customer experience, this isn’t surprising because these contact hubs are the best place to start understanding customer needs. As a result, businesses are adapting their software platforms to keep up with technological advances in speech recognition, speech analytics and machine learning. The dialogue between you and your customer is a long-term investment that yields countless opportunities, and so consistency is key here. Another aspect worth noting is the intersection between your marketing efforts and your customer service departments.
“Once your marketing and customer service teams do start working together, your organisation will almost automatically begin seeing improvements across the board” – Josh Brown, Content and Community Manager at Fieldboom
And which organisation wouldn’t want that?
Calibration and the culture of continuous improvement
Data collection, analysis, training, and improvement–otherwise known as Quality Assurance–are seen as central to operational efforts in contact centres. Part of the QA managers’ role is gaining meaningful insights that are deduced from call monitoring. This is a method of live listening or listing to recorded calls, inspecting their quality, and then effectively looking for ways to improve. In this way, a QA manager can easily pick up trends affecting customers and take action accordingly.
If you’ve ever been on the customer-end of the line and heard, “This call may be recorded or monitored, for quality and training purposes”, well, this is precisely where your calls go to be assessed.
With Quality Assurance, you can gauge and measure the following:
Customer satisfaction
Brand awareness and brand loyalty
Purchasing wants, needs and trends
Viability of new products
Data to measure campaign effectiveness
Anticipate campaign success levels
In reality, many call centres listen in on calls to evaluate and train the customer-facing support agents instead of using it to improve the customer experience. It’s also idealistic to claim that the insights listed above can be gleaned manually. As useful as it may be to listen to all calls, it’s just not feasible. While the stakes are pretty high, most QA teams tasked with assessing contacts are only able to evaluate 5% of the calls, and that is the best-case scenario. Another pain point experienced by QA teams are the splintered software platforms required to perform call evaluations, often slowing down the process.
What to look for when considering Integrated QA software platforms
The right software will be beneficial to QA teams and in turn customer experience and market research teams, but there are several factors to consider before taking the plunge;
● Ease of Use
The right platform has been designed with the end-user in mind. This means that little to no training is required to be able to use this software and teams can hit the ground running.
● Scalability
A tool as dynamic as your environment is key. So one that proves to be effective will no doubt stick around regardless of changes to the staff and organisational goals.
● Cost-effectiveness
Putting a price tag on efficiency isn’t easy, but it’s a necessary consideration to make in terms of the overall return on investment.
● Features
Technological strides are being made in the field of machine learning, so automating the tedious parts of the QA task-list is an example feature that will save time without you losing out on accuracy. Look out for software that incorporates speech analysis, transcription, alerts, script branching, call grading, and QA workflow optimisation.
● Safety
Of course, privacy is a big one. Contact centres handle a lot of sensitive information, safety is paramount, and so the software you select should prioritise data security.
A key driver behind exceptional customer experiences
The utilisation of technology is set to refine the customer service experience, thus creating pathways for positive change which will resonate throughout the enterprise. Leveraging the right tools will help you to significantly improve customer experience in your contact centre.
Voyc – Conversation Intelligence and Compliance Monitoring AI-powered software – helps companies monitor 100% of their customer interactions and ensure that every interaction is handled with consistency and care. Reach out to us to see how Voyc can help you boost your customer experience and improve customer outcomes.