How Conversational Analytics Can Help Your Business

Providing customers with an exceptional experience on a consistent basis can help businesses gain a competitive advantage in an increasingly cutthroat landscape. Did you know that:

• 96% of customers say customer service is important in their choice of loyalty to a brand¹
• 84% of companies that improve their customer experience report increases in revenue²

As a result, businesses are utilising software to obtain insights into customer sentiment, behaviour, and emotion that can help them to enhance the experience they offer. That’s where a conversational analytics tool can help.

By deploying this conversational analytics software, contact centres can extract crucial insights from conversational data that are difficult to access with traditional business intelligence (BI) solutions.

In this blog, we’re going to explore what conversational analytics is, how it works, and delve into the numerous benefits it can provide. Let’s get started.

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What is Conversational Analytics?

Conversational analytics, sometimes known as conversational intelligence, is the process of extracting data from the conversations that occur between contact centre agents and customers on a daily basis.

This includes:

• Voice data from phone calls
• Text data from emails, chatbots, and social media conversations

It’s also important to remember that this term is used interchangeably with a number of others, including conversation intelligence, speech analytics, voice analytics, and interaction analytics. However, it’s the process, and how it provides accuracy and the ability for contact centres to extract insights, that really matters.   

How Conversational Analytics works

Conversational analytics leverages cutting-edge technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) to turn raw data from human conversations into actionable insights. 

Thanks to NLP, which combines linguistics and computer science to understand human language, conversational analytics can be applied to all forms of communication — from phone calls to email, instant messaging, social media interactions, and other text-based conversations. 

The machine learning element essentially allows conversational analytics tools to be trained in certain tasks that explore data and identify patterns — flagging a particular word or phrase, for example. Over time, the system learns and expands its knowledge, allowing it to take on more complex tasks while increasing its accuracy.

Conversational analytics is a particularly powerful tool in that it not only analyses what was said but also the meaning and sentiment behind the language, making it a powerful way to gauge what customers really need, want, and think. 

The benefits of Conversational Analytics

Now we know what conversational analytics is and how it works, let’s move on to the most important part — how conversational analytics can help your contact centre to drive improved performance and customer satisfaction. 

Here are some of the key benefits that this remarkable technology offers.

Understand the context behind customer conversations

How do you deliver outstanding customer service if you don’t know what your customers really want or think? Conversational analytics allows you to understand your customers on a deeper level than ever before by analysing the context and sentiment behind the language.

By helping contact centres understand what customers want, conversational analytics drives measurable improvements in performance by enabling you to: 

• Pinpoint where operational improvements are needed
• Fine-tune the way you deliver support, allowing you to eliminate up to 30% of unnecessary inquiries
• Enable agents to resolve more customer queries at the first time of asking, increasing first call resolution (FCR) and cost-per-call rates

Reduce customer churn

Remember the stat we mentioned at the start of this article? For the vast majority of people (96%), customer service plays a key role in whether they remain loyal to a brand or not. In other words, poor customer service leads to customer churn. 

Customers today expect high-quality service across multiple channels. They expect their issue to be resolved quickly, with little fuss or bother, ideally during the first interaction. If you can’t offer your customers this, chances are they’ll look elsewhere for a business that can. 

The cost of customer churn cannot be underestimated. In fact, it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one, while increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase profits by 95%.³

Conversational analytics gives you a clear advantage in your mission to please customers. By analysing the customer experience across all channels, you gain access to actionable insights that help you improve call handling and the overall customer experience. Ultimately, this allows you to reduce customer churn, increase brand loyalty, and boost your bottom line. 

Ensure compliance during customer interactions

Contact centre staff have a complicated job. Not only do they have to use a range of people skills in order to listen to and help customers in a calm and empathetic way, they also have to navigate complicated processes — all while staying on the right side of regulatory and business compliance. 

Conversational analytics can help here too. By setting up compliance triggers, managers get alerted in real-time when compliance is at risk or has been breached — and take immediate action to remedy the situation. This allows contact centres to better protect customers, agents, and the entire organisation.

Better support contact centre agents

Besides helping contact centre agents to provide a better standard of service, conversational analytics is also a powerful tool for supporting agent performance and wellbeing. 

The same technology that is used so effectively to understand the sentiment behind a customer’s words can be used to monitor and understand how agents are feeling in real-time.

If agents are struggling with stress, low morale, or a lack of key skills, managers can step in to provide additional support. Managers can pinpoint areas where additional training may be needed, allowing them to identify and close skills gaps on an individual basis.

The better-equipped agents are to handle the pressures of contact centre work, the better they will perform — and the happier they will be. This naturally results in a better standard of service, a more content customer, and reduced staff turnover.

Work with Awaken to provide an exceptional customer experience

At Awaken, we’re pioneers in the world of contact centre technology. Our ground-breaking platform — conceived by people with decades of real-world experience in customer support — is packed with powerful features designed to simplify and improve the way you support your customers and agents. 

Central to this is our powerful conversational analytics tool, which offers two distinct processes:

• Speech analytics: Turning spoken conversation into a readable text format, which can then be analysed to identify keywords and phrases that are crucial to successful outcomes
• Voice analytics: Harnesses the power of AI and ML to analyse all forms of customer interactions — from phone conversations to email, instant messaging, and social media — and applying customer sentiment analytics that uncovers the true meaning and emotion behind specific words and phrases

These processes combine to create powerful insights that help you gain a deep understanding of your customers, agents, and overall performance — allowing you to make positive changes that drive better outcomes. 

If you’d like to learn more about how Awaken’s conversational analytics could transform the way you deliver customer services, get in touch today and book a demo.

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¹ 2017 State of Global Customer Service Report

² New Research from Dimension Data Reveals Uncomfortable CX Truths

³ Customer Retention Marketing vs. Customer Acquisition Marketing