For decades, contact centers relied on surveys like NPS, customer satisfaction, and other quantitative measures to reveal key CX (customer experience) outcomes. The downside is that these methods are everywhere, and the constant bombardment of surveys can dilute their power. In this digital-first age, customers are leaving amazing traces of information everywhere: Tweets, messages, chats, and more are living trails of customer sentiment waiting to be analyzed. But are we using the right solutions at the right time?
Why text analytics matters now
Text analytics, a well-known tool in the industry, also represents the next frontier of customer experience insights by uncovering new brand perceptions, sentiment, and challenges through a plethora of digital channels. Text analytics helps brands sort through large amounts of “typed or texted” conversations (unstructured data) to gain a deeper understanding of what makes the digitally inclined customer tick and where proactive solutions can be introduced.
The digital nature of most interactions offers opportunities to gather amazing insights with text analytics. With over 40% percent of U.S. consumers shopping through digital channels according to The Global Shopping Index, organizations have a chance to not only listen, but show and act that they know their customers.
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Contact center leaders who fully embrace and leverage the rich feedback that comes with text analytics can improve customer and employee experiences across multiple channels. What was once used primarily for compliance or QA on associates can be enhanced to identify and fix common pain points as they occur, discover areas to automate (and where the human touch is needed), and uncover otherwise invisible feedback that was hidden behind traditional survey results.
Here are key tips and takeaways around a tool that is set for a new-era of CX.
Empower your brand experience
A holistic customer experience includes great employee experiences. Deploying the most recent innovations in this space allows customer service departments to:
Explore trending discussion topics, detects common digital-first behaviors, and/or gets a pulse on current brand perceptions.
- Identify critical levers for improved customer experiences.
- Assess customers’ perceptions of their interaction with the contact center and identify sentiment trends for each agent as well as the whole team.
- Uncover overarching areas for improvement, agents in need of training, agents that deserve rewards, and more.
- Discover what emerging issues are agents reaching out to their team leads for help. Leverage text analytics insights from internal chat tools, to find and uncover issues.
- Identify proactive solutions and share these insights with their client partners to improve processes and solve small problem before they become large.
Text analytics enables employees to proficiently manage time by diving into the topics that really matter for customers. At the same time, leadership is presented with new coaching opportunities based on the analysis of employee and customer unstructured data.
Ask and you will receive (amazing insight)
A brand journey should never end with a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ response. CX is never black and white—customers may be satisfied with a product but they won’t be able to mention displeasure with wait times. Likewise, a customer who had a negative experience won’t be able to mention the one positive experience they had with an associate. The secret to identifying these challenges and pain points in the customer and employee journey is using text analytics to fully analyze open-ended responses.
Active listening is critical for any relationship—personal or professional. In a research context, giving people an opportunity to tell you why they would recommend products, services, or take certain actions can be extremely valuable both for current understanding and future forecasts.
Until recently, asking open-ended questions was too difficult to analyze. TTEC research has found that verbatims that reference key themes were 2X-3X more powerful in predicting outcomes than NPS. And they provide deeper levels of insight. Advances in text analytics enable organizations to review and analyze freeform answers with scale and speed on an individual basis.
Identify areas for improvement
Gathering verbatims, organizations can use text analytics to create a clearer idea of sentiment surrounding everyday interactions through a combination metrics such as NPS, Issue Resolution, and FCR. Aggregating these metrics into a text analytics dashboard allows CX leaders to identify problems in the customer journey such as returns, associate communication, and wait times that have a negative or positive sentiment score.
Once these areas for improvement are spotted organizations can act swiftly to implement additional tools that can alleviate stress such as machine learning, AI, and other forms of intelligent automation that either augment the agent experience or introduce more effective self-service.
If customers know that the organization will act based on the feedback, they are more likely to provide accurate responses and continuous feedback on great and challenging experiences.
Text analytics in action
A major retailer’s contact center spent considerable time manually scrubbing through customer comments and grouping them into areas of improvement. It wanted to more quickly gain insight into how to improve associate performance related to wait times, cancelations, and more based on what customers shared via surveys.
We used text analytics to expedite and eliminate the process of combing through customer comments to free up valuable time for the client while also gaining impactful insights. By analyzing metrics such as NPS, FCR, and issue resolution on our text analytics dashboard we helped replicate associates’ best practices in call handling.
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Insight from text analytics led to changes that improved customer metrics overtime
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We identified key drivers of excellent customer service (as reflected in text analytics verbatims) as being professional, helpful, providing essential information and clear instructions, and correct resolution of the issue raised by the customer during the first call. We also discovered that shorter wait times and strong product knowledge help improve NPS and customer sentiment.
Revamp your analytics initiative today
There is a mountain of digital data out there, but before a summit you need to train for and understand the journey. Any CX organization looking to better use their text analytics tools needs to start with 4 simple steps:
Step 1: Find the obvious problems
Identify areas that need immediate attention and can make the biggest difference in your call center’s success.
Step 2: Organize the wealth of information available
Examine all the information provided by your text analytics software, including keywords and volume insight. This is a good indicator that the issue/trend is important. Trends in customer feedback can be identified for things going well as well as opportunities for improvement. These comments combined with other KPIs give deep insights.
Step 3: Allow your customers to write what they want
Authentic customer feedback, in their own words, is much more valuable than written responses that are restricted to a list of options. By allowing customers to express themselves freely, you get better insight. Open ended answers contain amazing levels of insight.
Step 4: Provide coaching based on precise topics and issues
Managers should be able to drill down into the specifics of every customer interaction in just a few clicks. From there, they can offer highly personalized coaching and training to increase customer satisfaction at every level.
Take your text analytics to the next level
It’s time to think of text analytics insights as not only a useful tool, but a bridge that connects different departments and empowers the entire contact center. With a defined purpose and knowledge of digital channels organizations can unlock meaningful insights that will guide customer experiences in the present and future.
