How Conversational Intelligence uncovers what your customers want and need
Are you truly listening?
Every day, your company is having countless conversations with customers. Via phone, e-mail, chat, WhatsApp and so on. You may not realise it, but you’re sitting on a wealth of information. On rich data that can help you improve your service, cut your costs and drive customer satisfaction and loyalty. Simply by making better use of the information you’re already collecting, you can start making data-driven decisions and put your company on a path of continuous improvement. It’s easy too, with Conversational Intelligence.
“By mining your data for hidden gold, for valuable insights that may otherwise fall through the cracks, it has the power to reveal opportunities for improving the customer experience and your business results”
Why listening matters
Listening to your customers is key to improving their experience and developing loyalty. Yet in most organisations, the people who are speaking with customers the most, are not the ones who are making decisions about your services or processes. On top of that, there are many different types of conversations happening: phone calls to your customer service department, e-mails to your support inbox, WhatsApp messages, conversations with automated chat bots and more. When you’re processing hundreds or even thousands of conversations a day, it’s easy to get stuck in a reactive workflow of simply responding and moving on to the next thing. You’re hearing what your customers are saying, but are you truly listening? And if you are listening, how do you decide what insights matter most and put them into action?
From data to actionable insights
It’s not an easy question to answer, especially because your company likely cares deeply about providing the best possible customer experience. After all, you’ve given your customers many tools to reach out to you. But more often than not, highly valuable information is collected, but not seen, interpreted or used. Let’s take the example of a major European airline, whose contact centre receives thousands of phone calls every day. The customer service representatives diligently answered each phone call, responding to questions and addressing concerns. At first glance, this may seem like a perfectly good workflow. A deep dive into the data may prove otherwise. An analysis of existing data delivered major insights: a percentage of customers was experiencing payment failures, while others were not receiving their confirmation e-mail in a timely manner. The delayed confirmation e-mail, containing customers’ flight details and ticketing information, was responsible for 15% of all calls to the contact centre. This insight prompted the airline to troubleshoot their automated e-mail system, which uncovered a technical glitch. One that could easily be fixed, resulting in happier (and less anxious!) customers and lower operational costs.
Making AI work for you
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the key to turning data into insights. By mining your data for hidden gold, for valuable insights that may otherwise fall through the cracks, it has the power to reveal opportunities for improving the customer experience and your business results. And you don’t need a team of data science specialists to make AI work for you. With Conversational Intelligence (CI), there’s a user-friendly and automatic way to translate your data into actionable insights.
The what and the when
The CI platform helps companies navigate – and put to use – their omnichannel conversations with customers. The platform aggregates conversational data from any source and uses AI to analyse the data and translate it into actionable insights. The key to CI is that it informs you not only about when customers are contacting you, but also what they are contacting you about. That is a powerful combination.
In our airline example, the when was five minutes to an hour after completing the online booking process. The what was the status of their online booking. This insight led the airline to a glitch in their system that they could easily resolve. But that’s not the only possible course of action. CI delivers the insights, and you decide how to put them to use to improve your services. Whether it’s fixing a glitch, implementing a new solution or simply improving your communication with customers. For example by setting the expectation during the booking process that it may take up to an hour to receive the confirmation e-mail. Even this small change can drastically cut down your call volume, all while improving the customer experience.
The power of CI to support data-driven decision-making
At its core, CI is about gaining insight into your customer conversations to optimise your services. Whether it’s having better conversations with your customers, improving your communication touchpoints or upgrading your internal processes. With CI, you can make data-driven decisions that contribute to your business value. This can take many forms:
• Increased efficiency: real-time insight into customer needs and questions enables you to prioritise what actions to take to improve their experience.
• Cost reduction: by monitoring repeat traffic, such as calls and e-mails to your customer service team and the underlying causes, you can solve the root of the issue. For example by updating the content on the website page that is triggering many waste calls.
• Automation of processes: the data may reveal opportunities for streamlining and even automating your processes. Automation saves businesses resources in the long run, for example by reducing repeat traffic and ticket handling times.
• Marketing support: the analysis of conversational data provides a 360° view of your customers, which supports your marketing team’s efforts, from creating personas to developing tailored marketing strategies.
• Better forecasts and predictions: by definition, forecasting relies on historical data. The CI platform uses data mining to uncover trends and patterns in your historical data to improve your forecasting. With predictive analytics, you can proactively respond to anticipated market developments and optimise your customer journeys.
• Improved quality management: quality management and control are key to making sure you meet and exceed your customers’ expectations. CI supports better quality management by analysing your conversations and providing actionable insights about your customer care team’s performance. In turn, this helps you create better products and services. The CI platform also has a built-in feature that notifies your customer service team when action is required.
Ease of use
The power of AI is well understood, but for many companies the barrier to entry remains high. It requires resources: trained data scientists, an advanced computing infrastructure, IT support and so on. Presenting the data so that it’s easily shared and understood is another challenge altogether. The CI platform removes these barriers. The CI platform is a user-friendly solution with easy-to-understand dashboards. The platform is powered by dozens of high-performing AI models. These out-of-the-box models provide extensive options for analysing and translating your data into actionable insights. To go a step further, you can train the model to enrich your data. You can even develop your own AI model based on your business goals. All within the platform and without any coding.
Taking the next step
Every customer conversation provides valuable information for your business. Collecting, analysing and interpreting this conversational data is key to becoming more data driven. But your organisation is collecting vast amounts of other data points as well, from website analytics to financials, that provide equally valuable information for strategic decision-making. As your organisation evolves and matures, building a comprehensive data strategy becomes increasingly important. A proper data strategy includes a clear objective (e.g. improving your customer satisfaction score) and organises your data in such a way that you can uncover relationships in your data; crucial business insights hidden in your data to help you make better decisions. In addition to the CI platform, Underlined offers tools for building your data strategy and uncovering what drives the best results for your customers and your business. Learn more.
Key takeaways
• Use the power of Conversation Intelligence to truly understand customer conversations.
• Automatically extract valuable insights from written text and speech data.
• Quickly detect anomalies, identify trends and take action.
• Optimise your conversations by removing customer pain points and addressing their needs.
• Design and implement optimal customer journeys with predictive analytics, artificial intelligence and ready-to-use software.