Digital technology has grown by leaps and bounds and in the recent years, we have seen significant advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools which are now offering enterprise level interaction analytics solutions. Customer experience and understanding is crucial to every business. This is an area where interaction analytics platforms generate unprecedented customer insights and boost operational efficiency as well as quality of contact centers.
Interaction analytics is a process where the platforms consume call audio recordings as raw data, apply NLP and linguistic tools to turn the audio into text and identify the subject or theme of the discussion. These platforms are also capable of capturing text forms of communication such as email, chat and social media conversations. Advanced interaction analytics platforms can automatically analyse 100% of the interactions between customers and customer care. This is leagues ahead of the conventional manual analysis of calls where large organizations struggle to analyse more than a tiny fraction of the overall conversations (typical scenario in a call center).
What makes modern interaction analytics platforms superior is the integration of AI to ensure precision of the insights generated. In the Indian context, the technology can help them generate actionable inputs across languages such as Hindi, English or a regional language like Bengali or mix languages like Hinglish, Benglish etc. There has been ample development of the platforms to give them abilities such as detection of customer sentiment, intent of the call, agent behaviour, SOP compliance and the likes. The analysis is done on parameters such as tone, utterances, rate of speech, dead air etc.
The analysis of a conversation on all such parameters is being made possible by interaction analytics platforms. If you are still a little unsure about why you need to deploy a market leading interaction analytics platform in your contact center operations, here are five key benefits to clear all doubts:
Reduced AHT: One of the biggest challenges for any contact center is to reduce the Average Handle Time (AHT) of a customer interaction. Advanced interaction analytics platforms allow identification of topics which lead to stretching of calls. For instance, updating address changes, inquiries about plans and consumption statements etc. can be the factors prolonging a call. Interaction analytics will generate the insights that can help the company provide agent training or make information easily accessible to agents. It will allow them to resolve the query and avoid time spent on researching or seeking advice or permission of the managers to determine the next step.
Reducing unnecessary calls: It is common for large organizations and financial institutions to have interactive voice recognition (IVR) and self-service mechanisms in place. For instance, when you call your telecom provider, the IVR can guide you to generate a bill or find out your outstanding payments, as well as other payment related information automatically. A bank might have the automated system in place for requesting a new debit card or changing the password. However, many times, the customer service representatives don’t educate the callers about things they can do through self-service mode. Consequently, the call volume increases and the contact center receives calls which are essentially unnecessary. A lot of agent time is spent on answering questions which can be handled by a bot/IVR. Interaction analytics identifies such topics and misses in agent SOP compliance, thereby reducing unnecessary calls volumes.
Less repeat calls: It has been observed in many instances that the customers keep calling back because the agents do not properly understand the concern and provide incorrect or only partial resolution to the query. Thus, a potential First Call Resolution stretches into a 2-3 call repeat conversation which can even lead to a churned customer. Interaction analytics will identify such occurrences and agents who are more likely to let this happen. Accordingly, training or re-training can be planned to improve first call resolutions (FCR).
Superior customer experience: Faster, hassle-free and courteous customer experience is definitely going to be delivered by companies that overcome the above listed shortcomings by implementing interaction analytics tools into their processes. They can even track customer sentiment by topic and analyse what makes customers unhappy in the first place and transform the flow of call to eliminate such pain points.
Compliance monitoring: Companies that deploy interaction analytics are able to analyse 100% of their customer interactions which automatically improves compliance. Any diversions, incorrect information and lack of compliance is flagged and corrective measures are identified. This is of utmost concern in cases of financial institutions where certain disclosures and verification steps are mandatorily required.
Conclusion
The benefits of interaction analytics in modern business operations, especially for customer-facing services like tech-support, consumer care, and sales, interaction analytics can be the game changer for any organization irrespective of the industry. The time is right to leverage the benefits and drive your business forward in the digital first post-pandemic environment.
About the Author:
Biplab Chakraborty is the Co-Founder and COO of Mihup, a leading conversational AI platform founded in 2016. The company uses AI to empower humans with the ability to seamlessly interact with the digital world around them. Mihup’s mission is to make technology inclusive and accessible to all regardless of their language, accent or dialect.
