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Understanding customer emotions is the key to delivering exceptional CX

By Tracy Burrows, ITWeb contributor.
Johannesburg, 05 May 2021

With brands now competing in what Forrester calls “The Age of the Customer”, customer experience has become the battleground in which organisations win or lose.A critical ingredient for delivering a five-star CX in the contact centre is understanding and leveraging emotion across customer interactions. Emotion is a key driver for developing strong and lasting customer relationships.

The challenge virtually all organisations face today is that traditional methods of assessing contact centre agent performance, such as manual quality assurance, only review a small percentage of conversation recordings or transcripts. Further, most depend on a very small volume of post-interaction surveys to assess customer satisfaction and fail to give a holistic view of customer experience or agent capabilities and performance. Assessing less than 100% of customer interactions makes it exponentially more difficult to ensure an exceptional customer experience.

This is according to Frank Sherlock, VP of International at CallMiner, who was speaking ahead of a webinar to be held in South Africa on speech analytics and measuring emotion.

“In our recent survey in partnership with ITWeb, we found that the vast majority of local organisations with contact centres record voice calls, and capture text-based interactions like chat and email,” says Sherlock. “However, it is impossible for human supervisors to monitor to all of those conversations, so they tend to only review to a handful of recordings or transcripts, often only three to five random interactions per agent per month. This makes it impossible to get an accurate view of the agent’s performance over time. And because manual scoring requires subjective judgement, it is not completely reliable and makes it hard to gather fair and actionable data on agent performance.”

Further, post-interaction surveys, which are likely to only be completed by very satisfied or unsatisfiedcustomers, don’t give an objective view of all customers’ experience or overall sentiment around the brand, he notes.

In contrast, AI-powered speech and conversation analytics comprehensively automates the analysis and scoring of 1,000s of hours of recorded calls and text conversations per day, capturing voice of both the customer and agent across every part of the of the single or multi-channel interactions. This powerful enabling technology positively impacts the two most critical areas for customer facing organisations:

Firstly, for contact centre operations, adding automated quality assurance capabilities empowers team leaders and supervisors to focus on agent coaching and areas of improvement. This powerful technology indexes, categorises and scores 100% of those customer interactions including analysing acoustic measures such as tempo and agitation to highlight conversations that need attention.

“Secondly, beyond the contact centre speech and conversation analytics delivers a wealth of actionable information on a customer’s emotions, attitudes, and opinions, as well as customer service and agent performance.” Sherlock says. “Our survey in South Africa found that many contact centres do see the value in measuring and scoring emotion, but respondents reported some challenges in terms of tools and skills sets to do so,” he says.

Frank Sherlock, VP of International at CallMiner.
Frank Sherlock, VP of International at CallMiner.

By harnessing advanced technologies, strategies, and best practices for analysing and scoring customer emotions as tangible metrics for actionable insights, contact centres can improve agent performance, deepen the understanding of voice of the customer and deliver a better customer experience – ultimately improving competitiveness and the bottom line.

CallMiner experts will outline the challenges, trends and opportunities for speech and emotion analytics during a webinar, in partnership with ITWeb, on 13 May. Attendees will get insight into the findings of the recent ITWeb Speech and Emotion Analytics survey, learn how and why to deploy advanced speech analytics to measure emotion, and get an understanding of how these technologies improve contact centre performance. For more information and to register for this event, go to CallMiner - Better CX with speech & emotion analytics Webinar (itweb.co.za)

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