Enhancing customer support & sales in contact centers with real-time conversation intelligence

By Bhaskar Mishra, Head of Product, Mihup

The emergence of digital retail has led to the expansion of market coverage. In this e-commerce era, contact centers serve as the points of assurance and conversion of customer queries into meaningful transactions for businesses. However, most of them have been struggling to adequately improve their customer experience in sync with the changing times. The realization of the need to transform their customer experience is now driving businesses towards the deployment of conversation intelligence platforms. These are advanced technology-driven systems that can monitor each interaction, generating data-driven insights, and real-time assistance to contact center agents to help them deliver a superior customer experience with greater compliance, speed, and ease.

Here are some of the ways through which the speech analytics system powered by real-time conversation intelligence is helping contact centers constantly improve their performance and output

Generation of insights from 100% interactions
Manual Quality Analysis processes are not only expensive and time-consuming but also monotonous and prone to errors. Further, in any given contact center, hardly 5% of calls are analysed randomly, and the rest remain as invaluable yet unused data. This is where conversation intelligence platforms help bring visibility into key insights and metrics of every call interaction.

Improving agent efficiency at individual level
In traditional contact center training, as well as on-job performance reviews, emphasis is on running scripts, and listening to randomly selected calls from each agent. However, this turns out to be extremely challenging and inaccurate when large contact centers with hundreds of agents are concerned. There could be human error, bias towards some high-performing agents and so on. Moreover, random selection of calls might lead to the scenario where a ’good call’ of an agent is evaluated, and bad calls go unheard. Thus, even when the agent is actually lacking on compliance or customer experience, he or she might get away with it.

Conversation intelligence is capable of unbiased screening of every conversation, ensuring consistent tracking of the conversations on the same parameters. Since it is an AI-powered system, it doesn’t get fatigued or distracted even while listening to thousands of calls. Thus, it helps overcome the challenge of accurately and quickly resolving queries which is not possible in the conventional manual processes. The ability of the AI enables the contact center managers to individually assess each agent’s strengths and weaknesses, and create personalized training to help lift their performances.

Faster response and handling of calls
Very few customers today are willing to wait in a line, but most have to endure it due to the paucity of agents and a rise in the number of calls. Even after the call is answered, accurate and quick resolution of queries is often a challenge. With time being precious, such approaches hurt customer experience strongly.

With conversation intelligence, businesses are able to undertake routine call evaluation that provides insights into customer purchase history, and brand perception. That allows them to train agents based on the customer nature and behaviour and resolving issues on the first contact itself.

Personalized conversations
Customers love personalization! Any brand where they get instant identification and preferential treatment in the form of personalized responses and offers will delight them more.

For instance, a customer calls his web hosting provider to enquire about renewals of a hosting plan, and the AI agent assist platform is able to pull up the customer’s account information to discover that a domain name is set to expire soon. Thus, the system would share cues with the agent, and they might not only share the relevant info quickly but also offer a discount on a domain name that would expire soon. The customer would feel valued and tempted to make the additional purchase. This leads to a cross-selling opportunity for the brand, and a superior experience for the customer.

These are just some of the ways in which the conversation intelligence platform would aid contact center agents in ramping up their capabilities and customer experience. Further, the system also makes work more enjoyable for agents by automating routine processes creating call summaries and making notes for crucial points of any conversation. It also helps the agents in real-time through nudges for boosting sales, compliance and delivering precise and fast responses to the customers.

Essentially, conversation intelligence is proving to be the end-to-end problem solver for modern businesses. As a manager, would you still prefer losing out on valuable business, clients, and agents by persisting with outdated practices?