Your contact centre and the volumes of customer data it holds is a fundamental differentiator in your customer experience (CX) strategy.

The rapid digitisation of business and service processes brought about by the pandemic means that oceans of information are at your disposal.

Invaluable customer information flows in and out of your contact centre every hour, such as:
  • who they are
  • where they live
  • what they purchased
  • their reasons for making contact
  • has their enquiry been resolved, and
  • what are their pain points?
Using this provides deep insights into your customer journey, from point of product origin through to warranty fulfilment.

As one example, speech-to-text capabilities and sentiment analysis allow BPO providers to deliver quality assurance levels never seen before. Instead of randomised checks, now every recorded conversation is fed through speech-to-text AI, indexed and checked for compliance and resolution. Keywords can be flagged to reveal trends.

Previously, call QA was done on a limited basis where a QA manager listened to randomly selected conversations, drawing up metrics and reporting manually. Now, thousands of calls go through an automated, intelligent system that crunches in-depth and accurate reports in minutes, providing reliable, large databases of information for actioning and improvement. The same can be done with webchats and e-mail data.

Similarly, such capabilities allow comprehensive tracking and recording of every interaction that a customer has with your call centre, so that no matter what agent assists them, they have a comprehensive view of where that customer is in their journey with your business. Such large tracks of data are best suited for identifying trends, which is simply not possible with limited data samples.

In a material example, a data analyst would quickly question recurring trends in the data requiring intervention. 

What would it mean for your customer experience if you could send out a pre-emptive, courtesy message to advise clients of issues before they happen and before they lose their sense of humour? What would it mean to your business if you could manage customer expectations for better outcomes, pre-empting problems before they arise, by analysing the gold that resides in your contact centre — the voice of your customer?

When you take this level of data and analytics and AI and layer it over your customer information and value chain in your business, your contact centre becomes a highly strategic business partner and an enabler in a world where CX is fast becoming the only differentiator.

However, how this data is collected, analysed and put to use is key. Data collection for the sake of ticking boxes fulfils no purpose other than to provide some form of compliance track record. Like a precious gem, data first needs to be mined and extracted. The peripheral stuff that adds no value needs to be removed; it needs to be cut and polished and only then is a value derived when its purpose is fulfilled and acted upon.

The businesses that excel in building exceptional customer journeys are the ones who invest in the tools, technology and platforms to extract the value that sits in their customer data. 

By recording, analysing and listening to what your customers are telling you in their everyday interactions with your agents, chatbots and other digital channels, you're able to extract actionable steps to resolve issues before they happen. You can also resolve the causes of repeat complaints that cost you loyalty and customer satisfaction. Fundamentally, understanding this data will help you design the right customer service delivery platforms to meet your customer needs now and going forward.

For example, the pandemic experience has shown that while self-service platforms have been invaluable in providing scale and resolving simple service queries quickly to reduce volumes, they have not been an effective replacement for human engagement. This is especially on complex enquiries.

By analysing such data, along with resolutions rates and sentiment analysis, we know that offering multichannel, AI-driven client service platforms as a back-up to the essential human engagement, and not as a replacement, is crucial. Your data will inform the level, scale and resources that need to back every customer service channel, and even what external factors may impact your customer service strategy.

Businesses have an opportunity like never before to build adaptive, responsive and resilient customer service models. These models safeguard and enhance CX as the fundamental differentiator that it is.

For more information, visit www.icontactbpo.com. You can also follow iContact BPO on Facebook.