In an increasingly connected world, customers have a variety of ways to get in touch. Contact forms, email, social media and even WhatsApp - you’d be forgiven for thinking that the humble phone call has fallen out of fashion. You’d be wrong.
According to a survey, 75% of customers said human interaction is still important, even as automated solutions improve. Plus, 95% of customers said that brand loyalty is tied to customer service and yet, call hold times increased by 34% during the pandemic.
Clearly, bad customer service experience is bad for business and your call centres have significant influence over this. Which begs the question, how is CRM and call tracking software used in call centres and are you using it well?
In this blog, we’ll explore why Conversation Analytics is a critical piece of call centre software if you want to make customer journeys smoother, increase customer loyalty, resolve issues faster and reduce pressure on your call centre teams.
Call centre software can do many things. Chiefly, it allows you to log and observe calls with your agents in real-time.
Call centre software can do things like automatically route calls, provide performance insights, log and assign value to calls, and integrate directly with your CRM systems to resolve tickets faster.
Call centre software is most commonly used to help unlock more successful call outcomes.
Call centre software is perfectly placed to provide you with insights and data that can enhance your operations. Here are just some of the benefits of implementing call centre software into your business:
Perfect agent scripts – By highlighting keywords that are related to certain call outcomes, you can test sales scripts. For example, rather than saying ‘would you like to upgrade to first class?’ you might find ‘would you like more legroom?’ to be a more persuasive call-to-action. Simple adjustments can help you increase average order value, improve your upselling, and reduce cost per conversion.
Ramp up training – Collecting data on how to influence more successful outcomes is the perfect way to train agents faster. Assess performance, understand where to improve, and even isolate calls that are significantly better at upselling to gather learnings that can be shared across your call centre.
Reduce handling times – With all this customer data at your fingertips, you’ll be able to solve and even pre-empt issues before a customer even picks up the phone. For example, if you notice the same questions keep coming up, why not create an FAQ page that addresses them in once place?
Increase loyalty and customer satisfaction – Every good business is most interested in satisfying their customers and gaining a deeper understanding of what makes them tick is the best way of surprising and delighting them. Perfect your objection handling techniques to win back hesitant customers and transform negative experiences into positive ones.
Feed insights into your wider business – It’s not just your agents who can benefit from rich insights. Feed customer insights, queries and needs into your wider business strategy. This will help you create consistency across every touchpoint.
A great example of using call centre software to have real impact comes from Access Self Storage.
The Covid-19 pandemic meant that many people’s plans changed, and with that so did their storage needs. They needed to handle calls more efficiently to keep costs and waiting times down, as well as gaining a better understanding of the needs and questions people had during a constantly evolving global situation.
They used Conversation Analytics to extract insights that helped them update processes, scripts and training. This practice was crucial in reacting to the changing needs of customers, and for answering the many new questions that the pandemic posed such as:
Are there new products that need to be offered or promoted?
Do existing call scripts ask the right questions?
What new concerns are common, and how can they be addressed?
How else could their products help customers?
Using Infinity’s suite of tools, they saw a 50% reduction in external contact centre costs, a 23% year-on-year boost in calls from offline marketing activity, and an incredible 35% year-on-year increase in converting calls.
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 the context and nuance that can be difficult to track when you’re handling hundreds, if not thousands, of calls each day.
Plus, Conversation Analytics integrates seamlessly with many contact centre technologies and CRM systems, including Vocalcom. This allows you to harness rich data automatically and draw links between marketing data and customer data.
Every conversation matters and it’s up to you to find what matters in every conversation. Start one with us today to unlock the benefits of Conversation Analytics and make every call count.