5 Reasons to Use Interaction Analytics

Jon Ezrine looks at the different ways interaction analytics can help improve your contact centre.

1. Find out which offers your customers find most appealing

For companies who rely on inbound calls to drive revenue, making the most of each selling opportunity is critical to the bottom line. Captured interactions can paint a vivid picture of what happens during calls, so companies can adjust their tactics.

With analytics, you can uncover customer reactions to specific product offers and find out which offers are most appealing. You can hear common objections to offers, and learn how to overcome them.

You can even find out what makes your highest-selling agents successful, and then get the rest of the team to do the same things. Interaction analytics can give you direct feedback from your customers to help you design and deliver offers more effectively.

2. Pre-empt customer churn

How can you predict which customers are at risk of cancellation? Have disappointing experiences prompted them to shop for service elsewhere? Are your competitors effective at wooing them away?

One of our communications clients discovered the answers to these key questions with interaction analytics, and took steps to save the accounts. This client’s research into call histories showed that many customers had been signalling that there were unresolved issues and dissatisfaction during calls that happened well before their cancellation date.

Key topics and events kept surfacing in conversations with these former customers that connected with patterns of subsequent churn. By recognising those same patterns among existing customers, the company could attempt to correct any unresolved issues and save the at-risk accounts before it was too late.

3. Customer feedback can help steer initiatives back on course

The best-laid plans don’t always go as expected, but customer feedback can help steer initiatives back on course.

Another one of our clients experienced a spike in customer service calls on the heels of a new product launch. A quick investigation into the increased call volume showed that customers were having problems installing the new software on certain computer configurations.

This insight helped developers discover a previously undiscovered glitch and determine how widespread the problem was likely to be. Armed with this information, the product management team was able to rapidly communicate a temporary workaround solution to affected customers, and engineer a permanent fix for future product shipments, helping contain a costly and embarrassing situation.

4. Better understand the customer journey

Learning why your customers prefer your products – or those of your competitors – can be marketing gold. This is especially true in the financial services industry, where the battle for “wallet share” can be won or lost based on customer experience.

Our financial clients are using interaction analytics to give themselves a competitive edge by better understanding the customer journey.

One of our clients discovered that many of their customers thought it was simply too hard to do business with them. This client measured “customer effort” and found that this metric was directly linked to the market’s perception of the bank’s brand.

Unhappy customers aren’t likely to open new accounts or expand their relationship with a bank; they’re more likely to move their accounts elsewhere.

Our analytics revealed where the client’s customers were frustrated by its inability to provide a seamless experience across all their different contact channels. With this new knowledge, they took steps to improve their “interaction landscape”. Now it’s easier to do business with them, and the bank has an opportunity to grow their relationship with customers.

5. Dispel the mysteries that surround customer behaviour

Business as usual may be costing you more than you realise.

Operational inefficiencies can be driven by a case of “you don’t know what you don’t know”. Interaction analytics can help dispel the mysteries that surround customer behaviour, and help your organisation take a more proactive approach to managing internal processes for maximum efficiency.

A client of ours was blindsided by an unexpected spike in the number of cancellation calls to their reservation centre during a time when call volumes were expected to stay flat.

With many more incoming calls than anticipated, the call centre was short staffed, and service quality suffered. Our team was able to help the organisation discover the reasons behind the sharp increase in cancellation calls and take steps to address the operational issues that prompted the call spike.

Interaction analytics can impact your bottom line far beyond the contact centre. Failing to use it to drive strategic value across your enterprise is like wearing the new Apple Watch just to tell the time.

With thanks to Jon Ezrine at Nexidia