Over the years, what started as the Voice of the Customer and its importance to a company’s growth and sustainability evolved into Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) or Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys. The latest evolution in this space is all about Customer Experience (CX) Analytics. After a recent set of frustrating calls with some Insurance companies, I took a deep dive into this space and here’s what I found:
- It’s a fairly nebulous space with some niche players but no clear leader across the entire category
- Broadly speaking, there seem to be 2 camps of players – a) companies with the Telephony/CTI heritage like Genesys, NICE and Avaya that have acquired other niche players to grow laterally in this space and b) pure play companies that have been more focused on evolving Analytics in this area like CallMiner, Clarabridge, Verint, Medallia and Qualtrics (now part of SAP)
- And then there are hybrids – one that I’m familiar with is NTT Technocross, with a rich heritage of Telephony & ICT from its parent company, NTT and a fresh charter from it’s origins as a Software R&D lab, to innovate with Digital technologies like Cloud, AI and IoT. Their Foresight Voice Mining and Analytics solution, a market leader in Japan, has all the bells and whistles and is rapidly evolving into a pure cloud solution
- Speech recognition technologies vary from the short exchanges we use with Alexa or Google to interpreting meaningful sentences or entire conversations that are more likely to occur in contact centers
- Along the way, concepts like Machine Learning, AI and Sentiment Analysis are leveraged to drive the Analytics part of the solution. Companies that know and can address the issue when a customer is angry or dissatisfied during a call, are the ones that will succeed in the future
- But, what’s astonishing is that a large percentage of Contact Centers still rely on supervisors monitoring recorded calls to troubleshoot issues and for QA/coaching. And more importantly, typically around 1% of calls are truly reviewed in this model
- In today’s Digital age, relying on call recordings should be obsolete. Solutions like NTT Technocross’ Foresight provide Live Monitoring of calls and speech-to-text conversion enabling supervisors to jump on issues real-time. The consequential benefits include reduction of CSR churn as well as higher CSAT & NPS from end customers. Some enterprises report a cost savings of over 25% as well since most of the manual post-call work is no longer required
In conclusion, what I find is that there’s a mad rush to embrace Digital technologies like mobile and try to achieve an omni-channel experience but many enterprises are missing out on the most basic of customer interactions and that is the voice channel. There is a wealth of knowledge to be harnessed from all those calls as most humans are much more likely to TALK about issues in detail rather than chat or email them.
So, the million dollar question is – why can’t all companies move faster to deploy these solutions that can vastly improve customer satisfaction as well as internal employee engagement? I know my ex Home Insurance provider would have been able to save my business if they did!