#CX #CustomerExperience #ContactCenter #CallCenter Customer feedback surveys and focus groups have long been the standard in learning more about customer sentiment, but the truth is that they only give a partial view of how your customers feel about your company. Customer surveys collect feedback data quickly, often within hours of the related customer interaction, but their Q&A-type format can lack nuance and context that gives deeper meaning to the data. Focus groups offer crowd-sourced insights gleaned through a conversational approach, but only from the small sampling of the population present. Nowadays, Voice of Customer (VoC) data is gaining serious traction as a primary source of meaning and context from customer data, making sentiment analysis a new priority for brands committed to delivering next-level customer service.
Incorporating sentiment analysis gives a contact center a real-time picture of its overall sentiment score and customer service performance. Contact center teams can access a developing record of customers’ opinions, including aspects of their emotional state before, during and after interactions. The obvious advantage of knowing a customer’s emotional state during a call is to enable the agent with insights that strengthen their rapport with the customer, which in turn fosters a positive customer experience and stronger trust in the brand. Sentiment analysis works hand-in-hand with the contact center’s CRM software so that agents have immediate access to insights when they need them while archiving a detailed record of how the agent handled the call. These AI-powered insights help guide agents through initial contact with the customer and throughout the call to streamline the problem-solving process and allow the agent to ask relevant questions that keep the caller engaged for longer, giving the program more opportunity to capture more data about the customer. When the goal is to create the best customer experience possible, imagine what nuanced data about a customer’s needs, wants and desires can help your team do!
Customer sentiment is especially powerful in three specific areas of a contact center’s day-to-day operations: augmenting CX personalization; ensuring real-time measure of current performance; and supporting the brand’s strategic planning with accurate data. Here is how each one of these operational factors is improved by adding sentiment analysis into the mix, and how it can improve your contact center CX now and going forward.
Delivering authentic CX personalization
When it comes to creating a connection with a contact center customer, detailed customer data gives the agent a full-screen view of that customer’s journey with the brand, be it their first interaction or their tenth. Sentiment analysis adds colour to this picture by scanning and identifying for intent and emotion. AI technologies analyze data from natural language processing, speech recognition, and voice quality and characteristics, and prompt agents with insights and recommendations to guide them into rapport, helping them deliver a more personalized experience to customers with the kind of authentic empathy that builds brand trust and loyalty.
Tracking and training for better performance
Sentiment analysis and data-driven insights aren’t only vital to a contact center’s day-to-day operations; they are essential in its evolution. Analyzing contact center interactions between agents and customers, both in person (on calls) and through chat sessions (online) can bring customer pain points into sharper focus, and highlight trends or patterns in the customer journey that need to be addressed to make interactions more efficient and effective. When a contact center can see trends in customer queries, it is more equipped to act on them in a way that reflects the brand’s values and goals; through improved agent training, thoughtfully designed self-service options, and investment in a more seamless customer experience.
Supporting strategic planning
Tracking and training for better performance allow a contact center team to improve aspects of its day-to-day operations in real-time, but these same data-driven insights can (and should) become the foundation of your brand’s CX strategy. Sentiment analysis supplements the feedback your team receives from surveys and client interactions, giving you a deeper understanding of their frustrations and motivations so that your team can deliver the solutions your customers want. This data can even help build the stable, engaged and satisfied workplace that is the key to creating great customer service: by identifying agents who consistently provide positively reviewed interactions, management can more easily recognize, reward and learn from their high-performing agents, and create better organizational performance through effective evaluations and training.
At the risk of sounding a bit… emotional, it's time to embrace sentiment analysis as your contact center’s partner in creating consistently exceptional customer experience. When leveraged in combination with the standard metrics that contact centers rely on, AI-powered VoC tools like sentiment analysis are crucial to evolving contact center CX to grow your brand. Sentiment analysis informs how your company’s customer experience impacts your customers’ human experience, offering a complete and heartfelt picture of how your brand fits into their hearts, minds, and expectations.
bespokeCX gives contact center teams the framework, tools and perspective to deepen customer relationships and deliver exceptional customer experience. AI-driven insights including cutting-edge sentiment analysis maximize operational alignment and strengthen customer connection, helping agents provide confident, authentic customer service that can improve your brand’s reputation and revenue. Visit www.bespokecx.com to learn more.