Leveraging analytics to understand customer trends
“ClearTouch’s “always-on” cloud-based delivery model provides customers with immediate access to the newest version of the ClearTouch platform as well as the ability to easily scale up or down adjusting to evolving business needs.”
Uthaman Bakthikrishnan, Executive Vice President of ClearTouch
What are key trends that will power customer experience through contact centers in 2022 and beyond?
The modern-day contact center already uses a host of technologies to manage customer interactions, track productivity, and much more. These capabilities are often disjointed, and they don’t offer end-to-end visibility over the customer journey. In the age of digital transformation, customers expect enhanced engagement services from companies. Due to this, organizations are increasingly leaning towards outsourced services for customer engagement through contact centers.
Here are some trends that will drive customer service operations in the coming years-
- Migration to the Cloud: Software that is hosted on the cloud can be accessed from any location, making it a great choice for remote workers, but it can also offer higher levels of security and more powerful features. Contact centres are expected to keep moving technologies to the cloud whenever possible.
- Use of analytics across customer journey: To fully understand a customer and implement better CX strategies it is vital for businesses to leverage analytics. Advanced analytics is the key differentiator that can make significant improvements in customer satisfaction. For instance, contact centers can make use of analytics at different stages of the customer journey. Interaction analytics can be used to enhance interactions between an agent and a customer through insights like response and hold times, abandoned calls, resolution time, and call transfer rate. Furthermore, tools like voice and predictive analytics can also be leveraged to track positive and negative feedback while also helping agents with forecasting and scheduling.
- AI-enabled self-service channels and automated workflow: With contact center adoption on the rise coupled with labour shortage challenges, companies are increasingly gravitating towards AI-enabled solutions to provide high-quality CX with sophisticated, scalable self-service options that go beyond the redundancy of chatbots. Contact centers will benefit from AI with robust data and history about customers, empowering agents to enhance customer service operations and also automate repetitive and manual processes.
- Omnichannel conversations: The rise of digital channels has bolstered contact centres as an industry, as businesses have more ways to connect with customers. They need to be in tune with the latest customer trends and provide them with the best customer experience possible. Engaging with your customers no matter where they are and engaging at each touchpoint of the sales cycle has become a central platform to success in the new digital world. Omnichannel communications can not only enhance product or service value but also drive customer loyalty, improve brand perception and help organizations gain a competitive edge.
How can analytics be leveraged to derive meaningful customer insights by enterprises?
Today’s empowered customers interact with a particular brand through various touch points across many channels like website, mobile apps, offline stores or contact centre. Each interaction is a vital part of the overall customer experience. Thus, making it extremely critical for contact centers to understand the ‘voice of the customer.’ To do so, various tools have to be employed to harness the power of call center analytics and various metrics and KPIs that are motivations, interests, and needs associated with customers. Analytics can help identify sales conversion drivers, build, monitor, and measure customer engagement index, and ensure regulatory and statutory compliance. Enterprises can better strategize their analytics by employing a few simple techniques:
- To better serve customers and gain a competitive advantage, set specificresearch and analysis that will not only provide you with insights but also help you with actionable insights.
- If enterprises don’thave access to internal data that provides insights into customer experience, then they look at drawing insights from larger market research performed by organizations in the same space. It will help determine customer trends and problems your customers face.
- In order to learn how to tackle complex CX problems, focus on simple projects that cangenerate valuable insights and recommendations. Adopt the same techniques to further tackle more complex issues.
How customer experience can be enhanced in contact centers through solutions like Voice Analytics and AI-enabled chatbots?
When the pandemic struck, the call volumes at a customer bank’s call center went up drastically. They were moving their agents to work from home, and the call volumes were increasing. So, their time to resolve customer queries went up, which made their customers unhappy.
The enterprises decided to automate their processes to handle their customer queries better. There wasn’t any consensus on what could be automated.
Voice Analytics is primarily an effective voice recognition tool that analyses and records a spoken conversation. Companies across industries like insurance, technology, financial services, and healthcare are leveraging this technology to generate insights into actionable customer services. ClearTouch’s Voice Analytics provides critical support to agents by using audio from recorded calls and converting them into structured data for searching and analyzing. This solution supports advanced search and filtering, enterprise-grade speech recognition and transcription, contextual call playback data, tagging and commenting, transcript visualization, and full Payment Card Industry (PCI) redaction.
What are some of the biggest challenges faced by contact center agents in customer service operations?
Contact centers are seen as tough work environments and often face challenges like attrition, agent absenteeism, and agent turnover, all of which affect the customer service quality, team morale, and effectiveness. Here are a few major challenges that contact agents face frequently:
- Low customer satisfaction: One of the biggest challenges contact center agents face is satisfying customers. However, with increasing customer expectations enabled due to digitization and adoption of social media, coupled with cut-throat business competition, it has become even more challenging for agents to engage with customers. Hence, it is vital for contact centers to implement innovative and engaging techniques like Voice Analytics, IVR, Omnichannel strategies to provide an enhanced experience.
- Lack of training: The important aspect of providing superior levels of CX does not stop with having access to high-end technology solutions. What is more important is training contact center agents on how best to use technology that will equip them to solve customer queries. Contact centers should set up regular training sessions with agents and appraise existing techniques to significantly improve operations and services.
- High attrition rate: A significant attrition problem plagues the call centre sector. Fewer employees are available to ensure efficient work execution when a trained agent quits the company. This causes the business to expand its workforce in order to offset the attrition, which drives up the cost of acquiring, training, and developing new employees.
- Lack of tool integration: Instead of utilizing a single, more modern platform, many contact centres use several, out-of-date software systems and tools to assist with their daily operations. As a result, agents are opening and closing as many as ten separate programmes to answer a single question, and they are wasting a lot of time on administrative duties. The amount of toggling makes it difficult to provide a positive consumer experience. Organizations want a cloud-based customer care platform that enables fast and simple client interactions while enabling agents to manage numerous systems from a single point of contact.
Why is cloud security becoming crucial for enterprises?
As organizations get ready to expand their footprint in the business world, they are now using the cloud as a source of expansion. They have prioritized a cloud-first approach to enable their businesses to transform with agility at scale. As technology evolves, the risks of cyberattacks are also increasing. It is therefore important for companies to ensure that their data is secure and protected from any kind of threat. Cloud security enables businesses to-
- Accelerate security capabilities and controls to be deployed in minutes or hours, rather than months
- Integrate security into current products, business procedures, and operational groups
- Apply automation and self-detecting processes that significantly reduce manual labour
- Establish pre-emptive controls to help detect malicious security attacks and deploy steps to prevent such attacks from happening in the first place
While companies increasingly look to cloud computing as a means to expand, modernize and stay competitive, it has its own risks.
How ClearTouch is empowering Indian businesses to transform on-premise call centers to cloud-based operations?
ClearTouch offers a complete contact center suite with Business Intelligence and Workforce management for enterprises, contact centers, BPOs and financial services companies in India. Our contact center platform features a holistic set of easy-to-use, automated agent tools and advanced apps for omnichannel communications, workforce engagement, compliance & data management, integration & automation, intelligence, reporting & analytics etc. Moreover, we offer a deep understanding of the needs of call centers with a unique approach to pricing – no contracts, monthly minimums, or maintenance fees – that supports rapid scaling and instant flexibility to changing business needs. ClearTouch’s advanced cloud-based platform enables contact centers to improve agent performance and enhance customer experience while increasing efficiency and reducing compliance risk. ClearTouch’s “always-on” cloud-based delivery model provides customers with immediate access to the newest version of the ClearTouch platform as well as the ability to easily scale up or down adjusting to evolving business needs. ClearTouch is trusted by companies and enterprises of all sizes in India’s healthcare, insurance, financial services, banking and business process outsourcing industries. We serve 1500+ customers across India and other international locations.
What are some of the biggest challenges that ClearTouch has faced this year?
Due to lack of digitization and customer service operations, enterprises find it challenging to streamline their operations. With our integrated contact center, we have been able to provide customers with Omnichannel experience, List Management Services, Voice Analytics, Call Recording, Intelligence and Reporting. Some challenges that we have addressed for our customers are:
- For our customer in the BFSI space, we migrated a traditional bank’s contact center agents to work from home within 24 hours using our cloud contact center platform.
- As ‘speed’ is at the center of customer experience, we have helped address over 95% of customer support issues immediately for a BPO, by helping reduce 100’s of hours in report generation for a BPO
- To exercise per-minute pricing, we did customizations for our customers at zero cost, which otherwise would have been expensive
- To further equip contact center agents with call volumes, we helped reduce the call hold time for agents in the RCM industry from 40 minutes to near zero
- We helped remove the challenge of entering alphanumeric characters that were error-prone, in the RCM industry
- We implemented list management services and enhanced the ability to extract data from multiple sources and manage data automatically