Even though they talk to customers via telephone, email and chat, the most siloed operation in your customer service operation is your call center. Historically, call centers have been segregated from other parts of the organization concerned with voice-of-the-customer (VoC) issues, which is odd since no other group works directly with more customers every day. Collecting and, more importantly, sharing customer experience (CX) data should be one of the primary responsibilities of the call center.

Why are call centers siloed from the rest of the organization? There are a few obvious reasons:

1. Telephony partners often have a stake in controlling the feedback related to their platforms.
2. More call centers are being outsourced, which makes it harder to integrate call center reports and findings.
3. Call center business processes including workflow and software, differ from other VoC groups making it more difficult to integrate call center data.

Despite these obstacles, call centers are front and center when it comes to assessing CX and customer satisfaction. The data they gather as part of the omnichannel experience can help make or break your brand.

CX Success Relies on Collaboration

According to Gartner more than two-thirds of marketers say their companies compete on CX and more than 81 percent expect to compete mostly on CX by the end of the decade. However, to succeed, CX has to be built around collaborative processes that engender positive customer outcomes. As Gartner Analyst Augie Ray states:

…in a world increasingly built around collaboration, CX outcomes tend to diminish when marketing or any other single department attempts to lead and execute CX alone. CX leaders need to partner and collaborate with other departments to make improvements throughout the entire client life cycle.

No one group listens to the customer more closely than the call center. Call centers tend to be the single, most impactful operation affecting net promoter scores (NPS), which means they have a huge impact on CX.

Aberdeen Group reports that best-in-class VoC users get 10 times the annual revenue of their competitors. Mastering VoC programs also contributes to the success in other ways:

• 55 percent of VoC leaders have higher customer retention rates.
• 23 percent see a reduction in customer service costs year over year.
• 292 percent experience greater employee engagement rates.

Call centers are at the forefront of VoC data gathering, generating more qualitative and quantitative transactional data than any other CX group. Ignoring call center findings and failing to incorporate them in CX analytics is a costly mistake.

Tapping Call Center Data for CX Analytics

Thanks to big data analytics, customer interactions gathered by the call center can be captured and incorporated into CX research. Issues such as siloed data repositories and incompatible workflows can be overcome using the latest data mining techniques, and big data analytics can accept source information in virtually any form. Cloud data repositories and other data sharing strategies also provide ready access to call center research as part of collaborative CX analytics

Once you understand the vital role that call centers can play in VoC data gathering you can break down the barriers and integrate call center CX data into your analytics workflow. It also allows you to make the most of the unique role the call center plays in assessing CX.

Establishing the right protocols for customer experience data gathering has to be part of multichannel CX analytics. You need to establish customer surveys that provide an accurate snapshot of customer attitudes. You also need to be able to process open end questions as well as multiple choice and ranked responses.

More importantly, you need to be able to process real-time data as well as historical data. To increase customer retention rates and reduce customer service costs requires immediate response to customer issues. Having a real-time data analytics engine providing immediate reports based on customer-agent conversations is the kind of big data application that can give your customer service operation a true competitive edge.

It’s time to bring your call centers in from the cold. The more closely you can integrate call center data gathering into your omnichannel strategy, the more comprehensive your understanding of customer experience will be. You also need to take advantage of the call center’s unique role as the direct channel for customer contact, using timely IVRs and real-time analytics to improve customer satisfaction.

If you want to understand the customer experience (CX), you need both quantitative and qualitative CX data. Quantitative research is certainly valuable, especially leveraging rating systems like Net Promoter Score (NPS) where metrics can be tied to revenue growth. However, to get to the “why” of customer behavior you need more, and better qualitative CX data.

As CX expert Bruce Temkin points out, to understand the customer experience you have to ask the customer directly. You can’t take the human experience and translate it into numbers. Once you convert CX into numbers you have lost what the customer is feeling, which means you cannot design an experience that connects with customers. You need to use voice, video, and other means to capture the qualitative customer experience and apply it to CX.

IVR Surveys Deliver More Open Ends

We have seen a growing trend from CX leaders who want to capture and analyze qualitative customer insights, which means more demand for one-on-one data capture and open-end responses in surveys. Recently, for example, we attended a CX conference supported by Forrester where the CXO of Ford Motor Company indicated that acquiring and analyzing open-ended customer data was one of his top priorities. The challenge is finding the best means to conduct those surveys and make qualitative data actionable.

As shown in the graph, our research shows that IVR voice surveys outperform other survey modes including web, mobile, and SMS. IVR voice surveys not only have a higher frequency of open-ended responses, but generate more and better qualitative research data. IVR voice surveys acquired four to six times more open-ended data (based on a character count per open end) than other survey modes. This means that by using voice surveys you are getting more open-ended responses and more in-depth responses to drive insights and ideation.

From Qualitative to Actionable

Of course, gathering consumer responses is only the first step. Processing and mining this CX data in a timely fashion that provides near real-time insights is key to maximizing its value.

The fastest and most cost-effective technique to make voice open ended data actionable is using real-time transcription. Using ASR speech-to-text auto transcription provides written text that can readily be analyzed for sentiment using key words and phrases. Using real-time auto-transcription also can generate alerts for closed-loop response; an ideal solution for customer service call centers.

Open-ended voice response can give you a more accurate barometer to assess customer sentiment. Voice driven IVRs have been shown to give deliver substantially higher response rates, which indicates deeper consumer engagement. And technology such as real-time speech-to-text transcription can make that qualitative data actionable, flagging problems for immediate attention and providing meta data that creates emotion and sentiment scores for each response.

If you need more qualitative consumer CX data and really want to listen to your customers, consider using open-ended voice IVRs. They are your best tool to gather more accurate emotional response CX data, and you can readily convert voice to text for a more accurate picture of sentiment analysis.

If you want a copy of our latest research showing the performance of different types of qualitative research tools, just drop us a line and we’ll be happy to share the results.

Customer Experience (CX) management continues to be a top strategic initiative in board rooms around the world. In KPMG’s 2017 analysis of Customer Experience Excellence they found that out of 257 brands, the top 25 brands (based on CX rankings) achieved double the revenue growth of the top 25 Fortune 500 companies. That’s why more brand leaders rely on IVR voice surveys.

Measuring CX is more predictive of customer satisfaction than any other form of customer interaction giving you a 30 percent more predictive insight of overall satisfaction. Maximizing customer satisfaction by promoting positive customer journeys also has the potential to increase customer satisfaction by 20 percent, providing a revenue lift of 15 percent and lowering the cost of customer services by as much as 20 percent.

Note that it’s the entire customer journey that defines CX, not just the call center, so to optimize that journey you need to deliver a positive and consistent brand experience. That brand experience begins very early in the sales process and spans multiple channels and points of contact. Your brand lives and dies by CX so by the time the customer reaches the call center brand impressions are already established. That’s why call center interaction is ideal for gathering qualitative CX data to help refine the customer journey. The challenge has always been capturing call center interaction and quickly converting it into a form that makes insight actionable. That’s where IVR voice surveys with real-time transcription prove invaluable.

In our last blog, we talked about automated transcription, leveraging Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) models. Recording customer calls “for training purposes” or to gauge customers’ brand perspective has little value unless those recordings can be converted to text format that can be readily incorporated into analytics and business processes. As we have noted in the past, manual transcription is time consuming, costly to produce, and cumbersome to read. By the time a call transcript is generated, the opportunity to shape CX and reinforce the brand experience is gone.  Automated Transcription using ASR models provides a near real time ability to transcribe voice data (including IVR voice survey open ends and call center voice recordings) with high accuracy and very low cost.

Real-time transcription and analytics, on the other hand, can drive real-time response.  There are any number of advantages to using AVR for real-time call center transcriptions:

• It provides a real-time record of the call center exchange, including customer sentiment.
• It delivers immediate insight into issues that require an immediate response, such as a product failure or service issue.
• It delivers immediate call center feedback to correct problems and for use in case management and training.

Today, ASR has become highly sophisticated. Our own studies show that ASR delivers more than 90 percent transcription accuracy, and that there is virtually no difference in text analytics coding accuracy (i.e. identifying similar codes from open ends in voice surveys). Couple highly accurate ASR with new analytics technology and you have a powerful tool that can shape the brand experience in near real-time.

Qualitative data will continue to be essential for measuring CX and improving call center operations. What we are starting to see if ASR technology delivering qualitative data for analysis in real-time, which significantly shortens reaction time. The end result is better customer support, an improved brand experience, and ultimately an increase in revenue.

Market pundits have predicted the decline of call centers as a critical component of consumer care.  In reality, call centers continue to be the single most important component of consumer care in the digital age. Research shows 69 percent of consumers are more satisfied using the phone to acquire support across most industries, something you could test with your own call center IVR surveys.  Further, at a cost of $1.00 per minute, Call Centers represent the single most expensive customer care system cost by a large margin.

Because of the volume of consumer contacts and their relative impact on consumer satisfaction, call centers have always been considered a critical touch point in the customer journey for all customer experience CX research.  Further, multi-modal surveys have been used for post call center surveying, but IVR surveys have been the dominant and preferred survey method. New trends in customer research will further expand the use of call center IVR surveys for post call customer care.

Call center operations are beginning to integrate speech to text technology as a scalable method to review and analyze the performance of agents, and coaching agents to enhance success metrics. Speech to text captures the customer exchange and transcribes it to make it easier to analyze and dissect call outcomes to assess agent performance. This technology will enable call center management to better understand the causes of successful and failed customer care calls.

What the technology of transcribing actual consumer call recordings will not provide is a clear understanding of the impact customer care and service call successes and failures have on the customer’s relationship to the brand. This can only be achieved by an effective and broad-based post contact survey methodology.

IVR surveys continue to offer the preferred survey methodology because it offers nearly instantaneous post call or service contact, extremely high participation rates, a mobile friendly platform, and the ability to gather quantitative and qualitative feedback, including insight into brand affinity. The qualitative data acquired by IVR surveys has dramatically improved and is more cost effective with the integration of similar speech to text technology. Now you can transcribe survey open ends and integrate such data for text analysis and ideation research in near real-time a fraction of the cost of manual transcription.

As call center innovation grows so does the ability for customer experience research to measure the attitude of consumers and score their experience to measure the impact on consumer brand affinity.

 We can help you get more from speech to text IVR surveys – learn more.