A Guide to Contact Centre Interaction Analytics

Author: Chris Robinson | Date: 02/12/2020

In today’s ultra-competitive business environment, companies must do whatever they can to keep their customers happy. Providing an outstanding experience across all touchpoints is one of the best ways to do this, with customer service playing a particularly critical role in customer satisfaction.

As these statistics show, the quality of customer service you offer plays a critical role in whether customers decide to stick around or move on:

93% of customers are likely to make a repeat purchase with companies that offer excellent customer service¹
61% of customers say they would switch to a new brand after just one bad experience²

While there are many strategies you can implement to achieve a high level of customer service, leveraging modern technology — such as interaction analytics — is perhaps the most powerful.

In this article, we’ll explain what interaction analytics is and how it can help you deliver an improved customer experience, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Suggested reading: If you’re interested in reading more about how technology can enhance the performance of your contact centre, take a look at our free eBook — Your Contact Centre Could Operate Better… A Lot Better

What is Interaction Analytics?

Interaction Analytics (IA) is the process of turning raw data from customer interactions into meaningful information that can be structured, sorted, and analysed. This process ultimately results in actionable insights that enable you to improve the way you deliver customer service.

With interaction analytics, businesses get a complete picture of their customer experience, covering every interaction across multiple channels and touchpoints, including:

Phone calls
Email
Instant messaging
Social media interactions

Interaction analytics can tell you what your customers really think and want. It shows you exactly what’s driving them to your business and to purchase your products or services. It can also help you pinpoint contact centre problems that are impacting your business now as well as identifying future threats.

All the raw data you need to realise these outcomes already exists in abundance across multiple platforms and systems. Interaction analytics allows you to tap into that data and turn it into valuable insights that you can use to improve customer experience ratings and transform the customer journey.

How does Interaction Analytics work?

Interaction analytics harnesses the power of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) to extract actionable insights from raw data. Let’s take a look at how it typically works in practice.

First, the analytics software gathers conversations and their related metadata — including the agent’s name, the customer’s name, and the date and time that the conversion took place. What happens next depends on whether an interaction is speech-based or text-based.

For speech-based conversations: Interactions are automatically transcribed to text format and then run through a text and sentiment analysis, which analyses both the agent’s and the customer’s voices for signs of agitation or stress, or periods of silence
For text-based conversations: The unstructured data is run straight through text and sentiment analysis, then the transcripts are sorted by category using Natural Language Processing (this process is also known as text analytics)

Interaction analytics solutions are then able to derive actionable insights from this analysis, which are typically presented in a graphical way via a reporting dashboard, making the insights easier to understand and act upon.

The key benefits of Interaction Analytics

Interaction analytics offers a range of powerful benefits, giving businesses that leverage it a competitive advantage over those that don’t. In this section, we’ll look at some key examples.

Quality assurance

Traditionally, quality management in contact centres consisted of manually listening in to agent-customer interactions. While all conversations were typically recorded, managers could only pick and choose a fraction of the total calls to monitor, giving them an incomplete picture of the overall performance standards across the contact centre.

With customer interaction analytics software, however, contact centre managers can now take advantage of automated quality assurance, allowing them to analyse 100% of customer interactions across all channels. For the first time, managers gain a 360-degree view of agent performance, making it easier to spot issues and ensure a high level of service.

Interaction analytics software can also check customer conversations in real-time to ensure that agents are adhering to scripts and that all interactions are in line with organisational and regulatory compliance. This greatly reduces the risk of human error.

Identify agent training needs

The ability to monitor and analyse every single agent-customer interaction enables contact centre managers to identify where agents may be lacking in the required skills or experience to do the job effectively. This allows managers to pinpoint precise areas where agents need assistance or support, enabling them to provide training that is tailored to individual needs and skills gaps.

Managers can also flag instances of outstanding or poor customer service and use them as examples of what to do/what not to do when training new and existing agents.

As a result, contact centre managers can ensure that agents have the knowledge and skills they need to resolve customer queries quickly and effectively, while making the entire training process more cost-effective and efficient. Say goodbye to ineffective, generic training programmes — and hello to targeted coaching that meets individual needs.

Resolve calls on first contact

Interaction analytics provides contact centres with valuable insights not only into customer sentiment, but also agent wellbeing and performance. Armed with these insights, contact centres can:

Tailor conversations to meet customer expectations
Equip their agents with the skills they need to resolve issues as quickly as possible

By understanding what customers want, businesses can fine-tune their messaging and processes. This helps to eliminate unnecessary inquiries and enables your agents to solve customer problems during the first contact.

The ability to solve issues quickly and effectively will have a huge impact on customer satisfaction. It also allows your agents to handle higher call volumes, which reduces waiting times and makes your contact centre more efficient and cost-effective.

Improve customer experience

All the benefits we have discussed so far result in one thing — a superior customer experience, which ultimately means higher customer satisfaction. And we all know that happy customers tend to be loyal customers.

Put simply, interaction analytics removes the guesswork from contact centre management and replaces it with powerful, data-driven insights that get to the heart of customer sentiment and performance-related issues.

As a result, contact centre managers can identify bottlenecks and areas of improvement, understand and meet customer needs, ensure agent compliance, and provide the best customer experience possible.

Interaction Analytics from Awaken Intelligence

At Awaken, we’ve been pioneering contact centre technology for years. Our powerful platform is packed with features designed to help contact centres deliver the best service possible — including interaction analytics.

Awaken’s interaction analytics runs customer interactions of all kinds, as well as their associated metadata, through our AI algorithms, which analyse both the language and the sentiment behind it. We then extract actionable insights from the data, covering important areas, such as:

Automated agent quality
Complaint identification
Operational efficiencies
Compliance
Vulnerable customers / treating customers fairly (TCF)

We then present this information via a simple and intuitive dashboard, allowing you to turn insights into action and quickly improve your customer experience. On top of this, our platform’s machine learning capabilities allow you to continually monitor and learn from customer interactions and fine-tune your approach for the best possible results.

If you would like to see how Awaken interaction analytics could transform the way you deliver customer service, get in touch with us today and book a demo.