Customer contact centres are often the most important business units within any organisation. Directly connecting customers to a brand, contact centres are the main opportunity for organisations to enhance their reputation and ensure their customers are satisfied with their services. Are customer contact centres enhancing businesses as they should be or is there room for improvement? Most people would say there is considerable scope for progress.
Churn is a term used for the amount customers or subscribers who terminate services or contracts with a business over a period of time. Studies have found that in certain industries, such as insurance, annual churn rates can be as high as 20% and even in business in general the rate is estimated at between 2% and 5%. In a lot of high churn industries; insurance, telecommunications, finance, and utilities, direct customer interactions are limited to billing and support which amplifies the importance of the customer contact centre handling these communications. As a result, a massive focus, across all industry verticals, is being placed upon making the customer contact centre as effective as possible.
Improving customer experience, CX, is now even more crucial in the age of social media with diverse platforms available for customers to either promote or degrade an organisation to the rest of general public. That’s where BrandsEye and Red Box come in.
Red Box, the voice communication capture specialists, provide a host of solutions to record and store voice, as well as SMS, video and instant messaging communications within an organisation. Being able to review and analyse a business’s communication channels provides huge benefits when it comes to enhancing and improving services within the contact centre. They have now partnered with BrandsEye to take that ability to a whole new level.
Opinion mining might sound like something out of a dystopian thriller, but it can have a hugely positive impact on an organisations ability to provide great customer experiences. BrandsEye are one of the world’s leading data mining firms and specialise in monitoring opinions using integrated sentiment analysis and topic recognition. They can mine conversational text, using AI and human crowds, providing quantifiable metrics on a brands reputation through channels such as social media. The partnership with Red Box now provides an additional medium with Red Box’s transcribed voice data.
Kate Hammett, Global Head of Partnerships at Red Box explained why the partnership can enhance contact centres globally.
“The most exciting aspect of the partnership, from our perspective, is Brandseye look at the external social noise, what the public are saying in terms of interaction with a brand. Then with our tools, we understand what the internal noise and atmosphere is like, which can really help organisations understand how they are performing from an holistic point of view.”
“That’s where the power of our partnership with BrandsEye comes in because all the social noise and the voice conversations are fed into the same engine to determine the sentiment and the intent, it’s a really strong proposition.”
The partnership’s aim is to enable Red Box and BrandsEye customers to build a more accurate and holistic picture of their customer contact centre’s performance. They can then use this information to compare against competitors and identify and remove pain points within their customer’s journeys. The Managing Director of BrandsEye, Cameron MacQuarrie, understands the potential scope for the new partnership.
“With Red Box we can start to provide a holistic view across an organisation, of what people really think when they talk to others about your brand, and your services, and then how your contact centre can be responding to that.”
Data sets like those provided by Red Box, and BrandsEye’s mining, can be utilised by the contact centre in a number of ways. Historically customer contact has always been a very reactive process, possibly why churn rates are so high in certain sectors, by the time the customer is contacting you it may very often be too late to salvage the relationship. Cameron also explained that transforming customer contact centres to make them more proactive is something a partnership like this could enable.
“What we are trying to enable businesses to do within the contact centre is, rather than just being reactive in terms of picking up the phone to people at the point of distress, to really help them be ahead of the curve. To use the contact centre team not be a reactive based organisation but to be proactive and reach out to people when they really need the help.”
Providing a holistic view of brand awareness is undoubtedly a vital tool in enabling the transformation of the customer contact centre. Becoming more proactive could be the differentiating factor within increasingly competitive markets. With the new Red Box BrandsEye partnership that possibility is now a reality.
