By Jnanankur Ghosh, Head of Marketing, Mihup
There are two typical scenarios that continue to pose challenges for contact center managers all over the world:
1. Poor customer ratings and compliance issues due to generic product pitching and inefficient database management
2. Unstructured processes and time constraints often lead to multiple follow-up calls and low-quality of leads
As a contact center leader, if you are facing either or both of these challenges, it is time to bring in conversation intelligence and improve sales in your organization. Emerging conversation intelligence platforms are affordable, scalable, as well as constantly improving in performance. Having said that, we must explore the challenges faced by contact centers and how these can be overcome through the right conversation intelligence platform.
Challenges faced by contact centers
Difficulties in customer engagement –Due to a lack of personalized pitching, there is a much higher percentage of call hang-ups or the need for excessive follow-up calls.
Too many products and plans to deal with – The customers on live calls don’t have the patience to wait for several minutes or converse with an agent who struggles with providing the right information. Agents find themselves helpless as there are way too many products and services to describe off-hand.
Lack of information – Agents don’t have contextual information, and are often found wanting when it comes to handling complex questions or objections.
Inadequate QA evaluation – Even the best QA teams struggle to analyse more than 5% of calls manually. Thus, each day, the random sampling makes them miss out on understanding what 95% of the conversations are about.
Non-actionable customer feedback – Whether the conversation gets your agents a 5 rating or 2, you won’t know beyond the statistics. There is no understanding of what made the customer happy or unhappy. Consequently, the feedback is just a general piece of data that can’t be precisely acted upon.
To turn things around, there are some core areas where agents need to be supported.
Guidance – Training managers are constantly under pressure from the operations to expedite the onboarding of agents. However, this can often lead to agents being hastily trained, and not being well-versed with the product knowledge or compliances. They need to be provided with real-time guidance to navigate through calls especially when it is a complex conversation.
Coaching – There are going to be finer individual shortcomings that the batch training didn’t cover, but the agents need personalized coaching to address those issues.
Actionable insights – They need meaningful and actionable insights regarding processes, people and outcomes instead of just being told whether they are receiving negative feedback or positive.
Conversation intelligence to the rescue
When unaddressed, these challenges snowball into inefficiencies, loss of morale among agents leading to further performance degradation. Consequently, managers would end up firing agents and hiring new personnel, only to go through the same cycle again.
However, with the integration of advanced conversation intelligence platforms, the root cause of these inefficiencies can be fixed. At a time when talent is in short supply, using such smart technologies to retain people and improve their sales performances is clearly the better idea. There are two ways in which a conversation intelligence system can help.
Real-time agent assistance
An AI and NLP-powered platform would not only listen to and analyse conversations, but also automatically offer several efficiency boosters for the agents such as:
· Personalized and contextual cues for agents on the call
· Live transcriptions and note apps to bookmark key moments of the conversation
· Automatic conversion of the conversation into a concise call summary
· Integration with the company’s content management system to pull out relevant information in real-time and provide cues to the agents
· Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for routine tasks
Real-time Speech Analytics
Automatic analysis – Integrated AI will analyse each conversation and mark each quality parameter accordingly.
Conversational features – Advanced conversation intelligence platforms can identify cross talk, dead air and delayed starts in every call interaction.
Easy dashboards and reporting – The right conversation intelligence platform would offer easy reporting in an understandable and actionable format to simplify and enhance the follow-up processes.
Discover areas of improvement – The leaders can easily get detailed information of the areas of improvement and recommended steps for the agents. This means greater improvements in shorter turn-around-time (TAT).
Conclusion
With the emergence of integrated services and web 3.0, you can’t just prevail over competition by being good. What your contact center agents need most is a speech analytics system powered by a conversation intelligence platform.
What your contact center agents need is the very best of technical support and conversation intelligence to proactively address concerns, improve customer satisfaction, get better at speed of response, and acquire the knowledge to convert more sales.
Rocket Science? No, just conversation Intelligence