How to Create the Best Customer Experience through Analytics

Utilizing data research to design the optimal customer journey can be a disorganized and arcane task between different departments. Contact centers are struggling to pick the right CRM systems, capture metadata, and interpret situational analyses required to drive home the magic moments of CX. Because customer management isn’t just about measuring leads and transactions, it’s about measuring interactions and converting them into reoccurring transactions.

Collecting More Than Just Customer Data

“Honestly, it’s about making sure that you’re capturing all of your data. That’s why I’m a big firm believer in speech analytics. Utilizing that is an untapped resource,” said Christopher Kuehl of Sitel at CCW Vegas.  “Now I can listen to key target KPI indicators” added Brian LaRoche of CallMiner. When you combine strong management practices with agent data metrics, your company has more than mere surface-level data or traditional survey-styled customer feedback. You can now increase individual agent performance through CRM features and correct unexpected or reoccurring pain points. 

Omnichannel Communication

In a customer-centric era dominated by identifying those incredibly insightful money making data points, data strategists often fail to make use of different contact points or channels, resulting in segregated information across the omnichannel experience. “Data silos is one of the biggest channels to overcome,” said Keuhl. However, CallMiner in particular is a great way to navigate data silos, interpret email, chat, voice, all on one platform to make the customer and agent journey seamless. Finding objective benchmarks and areas of improvement (such as generating higher operational efficiency, reducing average handle time, or lowering agent turnover rates) needs to be a priority that is easily communicated across channels if organizations want to remain customer centric. “The true value of analytics is the ability to dive deeply into interactions. It is to extract the types of insights that cannot be properly articulated in a traditional feedback survey. Instead of pursuing that opportunity, organizations are merely looking at surface-level data. They are using analytics tools to analyze more customers than they can with surveys rather than to analyze customers differently than they can,” said Brian Cantor in a recent CCW market study, Trends In Customer Experience Design & Strategy.

Being Realistic

“One mistake made this year by contact centers was jumping too quickly on the bot bandwagon and doing so without ensuring the bot was not siloed and instead connected to their other channels.. Many companies did not consider CSAT and the best use cases for bots.” Said Ted Hunting of Bright Pattern.  Over purchasing of different technology platforms (thinking of the shiny new toy vs. the experience the customer is actually receiving) is an increasingly common trend with companies that claim to be customer centric. Another words, organizations are focusing on more platforms than they can handle, resulting in data silos across departments. (ex: making customers repeat information across channels).  Voice analytics, for example, can search virtually every word or tone in a call and optimize performance metrics for agents (proving useful for many), vs a chat bot that may be rarely utilized by a niche target market.

Of CCW’s market study’s respondents, 59% of respondent organizations generate over $1 billion in revenue, and 57% employ over 1000 individuals. 60 percent of these respondents said AI (like chat bots for example) should complement agents, not replace them.  Turning to every hot piece of customer service technology as the sole all or nothing approach might not be a wise decision in upcoming months.  Other top priorities include improving the knowledge base across omnichannel teams in order to journey map the orchestration and coaching agents on the “human” factors that AI automation can provide. The goal for customer service tech isn’t to collect data on solely customers, or replace agents, it’s to empower them by giving them the data and insights they need to be successful with those customers.