News & Views | Infinity

Real time customer analytics: Here's how to use data to enhance experiences

Written by Matt McGillicuddy | Mar 1, 2023 12:30:00 PM

These days, there’s so much more to customer loyalty than delivering the goods on time and on budget. Customers expect you to provide five-star experiences across the customer journey, from the initial research stage on your website or social media channels to the first call to your contact centre.

The ability to analyse conversations at scale to extract historic trends is an important part of developing your customer experience strategy. But what separates the wheat from the chaff is the ability to respond and adapt in there and then. For this, you need real-time customer analytics.

According to Forbes, 70% of enterprise businesses have increased their spending on real-time customer analytics solutions over the past year. Furthermore, 58% have seen a significant increase in retention and loyalty as part of their efforts. If real-time consumer insights aren’t yet on your roadmap, it’s time to get on board.

In this blog, we’re going to explore the different types of real-time customer analytics. Then, we’ll explain how to use customer insights and data to enhance the overall customer experience.

What is real-time customer analytics?

First things first, what exactly are real-time customer analytics? Real-time customer analytics is when you collect, analyse, and interpret customer information as and when you receive it. This usually involves using call monitoring to get live customer data that you can leverage to drive more successful outcomes.

With real-time call monitoring, or call tracking, you can listen to customer calls with your agents as soon as they happen. This provides you with call analytics and dashboards that highlight keywords, speech patterns and even sentiment. Real-time call monitoring means you can be more responsive to customer needs by identifying them in the moment. This in turn leads to higher-quality calls, happier customers who receive a personalised experience, and the right information at the right time.

What are the different types of customer analytics?

When it comes to understanding your customers, the opportunities for analytics are endless. Here are the six commonly recognised types of customer analytics:

  • Segmentation analytics
  • Customer acquisition analytics
  • Customer engagement analytics
  • Customer satisfaction analytics
  • Customer churn analytics
  • Customer Lifetime Value Analytics

Each type of customer analytics offers different insights into who your customers are and what they expect from your business. Call centre analytics enable you to track and optimise things like acquisition, satisfaction, churn, and lifetime value. 

What are the benefits of real-time customer insights?

Most importantly real-time customer analytics enable you to enhance your call centre operations. By delivering customer-centric insights, you slash can spend without negatively impacting the overall experience. The key benefits are:

  • Use recordings and transcriptions from real calls to optimise your training: Collecting data on how to influence more successful outcomes is the perfect way to train agents faster. With Agent ID and agent scorecards, you can cherry-pick the best calls made by your best agents to use for training. Accelerate upskilling, while increasing conversion rates and ensuring that your customers are truly satisfied.
  • Minimise wait times and reduce pressure with customer intel:

Use customer intel to handle enquiries faster to minimise average wait times. As a result, you’ll reduce the overall pressure on your call centre agents. Furthermore, you can use detailed intel on topics of conversation to enhance call deflection techniques and improve the overall customer experience.

  • Improve your upselling and cross-selling strategies:

If you can identify keywords that drive call outcomes you’re most interested in, you can test scripts and adjust the wording to increase conversion rates. Use this to create upselling and cross-selling strategies that are proven to drive real results.

  • Engineer more satisfying customer conversations:

Satisfying your customers and understanding what makes them tick is the best way to surprise and delight them. Call intelligence software automatically monitors conversations to flag keywords or trends before you’re even aware of them. You can then tie these trends to positive or negative call outcomes, so you know what to do more, or less of.

How can you use customer analytics real time?

When it comes to driving more revenue and improving your contact centre operations, being able to spot those make-or-break moments in a call is key. Your agents need to be able to identify and respond to shifts in mood, sentiment, and tone in real time. But without the right tools in place to monitor and support, it’s a big ask.

Calls show you what your customers really think, and they show you opportunities to capitalise on. Moreover, they flag issues you aren’t yet aware of, they can pull out frequently asked questions, and generally provide you with a massive goldmine of intel that improves the customer experience. We like to call them talking points.

Tools like Conversation Analytics help you successfully react to customer feedback and address their needs in real time.

Which tool is used for real-time data analysis?

Speech analytics help supercharge call centre performance by providing you with real-time data on where calls are coming from. Result? You better understand where and why customers pick up the phone.

However, a major challenge for call centres is the ability to extract customer insights at scale. With Infinity’s speech analytics suite, Conversation Analytics, your call centres can surface hidden insights, highlight topics and keywords, and analyse sentiment in every call.

Identify common trends or obstacles in your customer journey, highlight FAQs that delay conversion, and pinpoint precisely what turns unhappy callers into loyal customers by recognising talking points. It tells you:

  • Why people are getting in touch, by monitoring and logging the topics of conversation, including any associated keywords and phrases.
  • The outcome of each call, so you can surface trends from calls that delivered positive or successful outcomes.
  • How customer sentiment is changing throughout the call, so you can pinpoint exactly what makes the phone call experience positive or negative and improve from there.

 How do businesses use real-time consumer insights to improve the experience?

Collecting and using real-time consumer insights will make for happier customers and will help reduce your acquisition costs. Pendragon, a leading automotive dealership, wanted to drive significant change across their business by truly understanding what their customers wanted.

Every day, they received thousands of calls across its network of brands and dealerships. At this scale, every improvement in these conversations is significant. However, not knowing what happens on those calls makes it difficult to make improvements. All in all, they felt they were missing opportunities and were keen to find a solution.

Using Conversation Analytics, they were able to pinpoint every call where key terms came up in conversation. There were also additional clarifiers like where in the call they were spoken, or their proximity to other terms. As a result, they were able to drive a 63% reduction in cost per acquisition, increase sales and service calls by 12%, and reduce common friction points across their major branches by 66%.

Ready to find what matters in every conversation you have with your customers?