Why businesses should embrace call data to thrive in the new consumer age

Recently, Infinity CEO Warren Newbert contributed to How To Run A Successful Business: Interviews With Successful Game Changing Business People, a book full of practical, proven and easy to follow advice on how to start, run and grow your own business. In his chapter, Warren discusses why businesses should embrace call data to thrive in the new consumer age. Here are Warren’s key takeaways!

We’ve entered a new consumer age

As the world continues to adapt to the new post-COVID era, it’s clear that the period of lockdowns and restrictions has had a profound impact on our society. From work, travel, exercise, shopping, socialising and COVID-19 has had an enormous impact on all aspects of our daily lives – and this is no different for customers internationally.

Customer behaviours are always changing and evolving, however, the changes seen recently have altered the business world as we know it. There has been an acceleration in the shift to online shopping, an increased need for omnichannel, and major changes in consumer shopping habits – all changes accelerated by the pandemic and recent macroeconomic developments including the cost-of-living crisis and government U-turns.

Therefore, with customers now leaving brick-and-mortar stores and shifting to purchasing their goods and services from the comfort of their own homes, building customer relationships have never been simultaneous the most difficult and most important key to success in 2022.

Why relationships matter

Strong relationships are at the heart of a great customer experience in 2022 – according to research, 1 in 3 customers will stop using a brand after just one bad experience.

Meeting customer expectations and ensuring positive phone interactions ensures that you can build and safeguard an excellent reputation. This is where logging, interpreting, and acting upon real-time customer insights data can increase the overall profitability of a business in the new consumer age.

Tracking the data from customer calls provides businesses with visibility into how well they’re meeting customer expectations. Deep insight into common questions, challenges, strengths, and other trends will provide you with the insights needed to make sure you’re delivering the experiences customers expect across every touchpoint. It’s not just about frictionless journeys, it’s about frictionless customer experiences.

To effectively tailor customer experiences to anticipate demands and expectations, you need to understand what they’re really thinking. But how do you get into the minds of your customers? Paying attention to what they’re saying on calls is an excellent place to start. That’s hard to do – call monitoring at scale can be time-consuming and aggregating customer data is impossible.

How call data can help businesses thrive in the new normal

Call analytics software allows businesses to get insight from customer conversations and hear the unfiltered truth. What do customers really think of you? Which of your tactics and processes are causing them friction? What can you do to better meet their expectations?

In a remote and digital world with little human contact, customers still want to be able to reach a business by phone, which is fantastic, as each call is packed with transformative truths. When businesses invest in tools that capture that intelligence, automatically and at scale, leaders are taking a huge leap towards improving customer satisfaction and experience.

Not only will this delight your customers and help you form a business winning reputation, but by making improvements throughout the end-to-end customer journey, you’ll be able to optimise processes and improve your sales and marketing performance – giving your profitability a real boost.

The key benefits of using call analytics are:

• Capture data and insights needed to build smooth customer journeys.
• Understand the keywords that are more likely to drive conversions.
• Monitor, record and assign value to call outcomes in real-time.
• Evolve your marketing and sales tactics based on real customer data.
• Identify pain points that can be solved before they even occur.

Bringing intel to the forefront of your strategy

A common challenge for call centres is the ability to extract customer insights from each and every phone call at scale. With Infinity’s speech analytics suite, Conversation Analytics, this is no longer a problem.

Conversation Analytics captures the data needed to build smoother customer journeys, resolve issues faster and reduce manual work involved in handling multiple calls. With Conversation Analytics, you can evolve your tactics based on real data from your customers, instead of relying on intuition. It can tell you things such as:

• 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.

Being able to identify the finer points of conversation using call categorisation gives you clarity that can be difficult to achieve when your monitoring only a small sample of calls.

Key takeaways

So, how can business leaders embrace call data to thrive in the new consumer age? Relationships matter more than ever, and it’s up to you to gain a deeper understanding of your customers is you want to reduce churn and increase loyalty and satisfaction.

Infinity's Conversation Analytics shines a light on the many truths contained within each phone conversation you have with your callers. Use this for smarter attribution, strategic agility, and training phone agents faster. Start a conversation with us today.

This blog post is adapted from an extract which originally appeared in How To Run A Successful Business: Interviews With Successful Game Changing Business People.