Agents and Technology Must Work Together

Andy Smith explains why empowered agents and sentiment analytics solutions need to join forces to collect actionable insights.

Today, companies know they have to act on individual customer feedback to gain customer loyalty and, equally importantly, to drive improvements within the organisation.

Many are investing in Voice of the Customer (VoC) programmes. However, it has been suggested that those organisations who have invested in a sentiment analytics solution can still struggle to capture the true voice of customer.

Many sentiment analytics solutions used in contact centres are too crude to capture individual feedback, and the algorithm has not yet been invented that can accurately decode complex human interactions and adapt to the evolving language of consumers.

While sentiment analytics solutions offer you pie charts and word clouds which indeed are useful to show large trends and the bigger picture, in order to drive actionable feedback you need to understand the nuances of contact with individual customers – something that only a human can do.

You need to empower agents to respond to individual feedback

Collecting actionable insights is best done by a combination of sentiment analytics, contact centre processes and the front-line agents themselves.

You need to be able to empower agents to respond to individual feedback. Don’t forget it’s the agents who interact with your customers every day – they are at the heart of the contact centre, so you need to focus on driving higher levels of ownership and awareness among your front-line staff.

A customer survey module can enable you to collect valuable customer insight by leveraging the knowledge of your front-line staff in building a customer-focused organisation. Having contact centre agents and managers accessing real-time customer feedback can also drive higher levels of ownership and awareness among your front-line staff.

By linking results to business processes and generating intuitive reports, you can crowd-source ideas for improvement and establish cross-functional teams to reduce customer service issues.

Sentiment analysis tools will never be perfectly accurate

The truth is that sentiment analysis tools will never be perfectly accurate as they are affected by many nuanced variables. Humans are much better designed for this task.

Hence you should do your best to support your employees in using the technology – they are “the machine” that ultimately has the insights, everything else is a toolset to expedite the process.

With thanks to Andy Smith at EvaluAgent