I recently had the pleasure of an hour-long conversation with Mark Lockyer, CallMiner’s international sales director on the progress being made with real-time analytics. It’s a theme I’ve increasingly noticed in contact centre technologies. From real-time triage and routing to real-time scheduling and of course conversational self-service.
The ability to understand customer intent and generate next best actions is becoming transformative for service management. So, I wanted to understand how this was being utilised in terms of helping agents regarding their motivation and quality of outcomes. I was not disappointed in terms of what I heard.
Here are some of the highlights from that conversation.
To get straight to the heart of our discussion, real-time agent guidance is designed to affect the outcome of a customer call as it happens. Whereas post call analytics and automated scoring is orientated to improving future agent performance. Combined they provide the means to achieve sustainable excellence in experience management. For both customers and colleagues.
Real-time is enabled by following the flow of conversation and posting on screen advice in response. This ranges from prescriptive compliance to nudges on when to introduce a new topic into the conversation. Or something as simple and motivational as a thumbs up.
Generally speaking, the sooner someone receives feedback on their performance the better. The same applies to putting this feedback into practice. That’s why real-time guidance can be such a powerful way of validating or modifying behaviours.
The value of doing this only increases in a hybrid work model where the supervisory challenge of team support has caused a root and branch review of how to onboard new team members and thereafter keep everyone engaged.
Real-time scoring of the customer experience is also a timely addition for a couple of reasons. First as behavioural psychologist Daniel Kahneman puts it there is a crucial difference between our experiencing self and what we then retain as memories of an event. As such, the closer in time we can sample a customer’s experience the better in term of accuracy and completeness.
Secondly, lockdown and the pandemic has sharpened customer expectations for seeking out organisations able to recognise and respond to vulnerability and tune into their emotive needs as strongly as their functional ones.
Loyalty is not what it was. The pandemic jolt to previous patterns of daily routine has woken us up. The wholesale switch towards digitisation is proving disruptive. Start ups appear with exciting new experiences. Legacy brands can just as easily stumble trying to make things simple enough to work as a new digital workflow. Seeing those warning signs in real-time and preventing a customer from churning therefore matters for any organisation attempting to repair their growth momentum post COVID.
In summary, real-time analytics ticks many boxes. Losing customer and colleagues is an expensive failure that can often be avoided. So, redirecting conversations towards better outcomes makes sense. Especially when this can be scaled so that overall average performance of all colleagues is lifted, and more customers get the outcomes they expect more often. Those memories are worth investing in for their value they offer in terms of advocacy, trust and propensity to spend more for longer. And being able to evidence this redefines the value a contact centre can offer.
Keeping colleagues has become more challenging. Mental health and wellbeing remain an issue. Transmitting culture remotely is harder. The Institute of Customer Service reports a rise in aggressive customer behaviour and we know that live conversations are only becoming more challenging as automation and self service soak up the easier outcomes.
So being regularly helped with detailed feedback is a real boost. As is being recognised for doing something well. It recharges our batteries and stimulates the desire to keep getting better. Investing in resilience is crucial in tough times. People who are learning and succeeding tend to be happy and content with what they are doing and where they are.
Real-time analytics blended with coaching and personalised learning pathways is how we are going to bring on the next generation of live assistance as the bar for experience management continues to rise. As I started out saying, real-time agent guidance ticks many boxes when you make the most of it.
I have only managed to explore a few of the themes from the conversation with Mark. We covered a lot of ground and in particular Mark provided a level of detail that really brought the topic to life. So please take a listen to the whole discussion which you can find here.
As ever, thank you for reading.
