There is no doubt that the future of CX excellence is data-driven, and real-time analytics holds the key to unlocking this potential. Research by Harvard Business Review predicts that real-time customer analytics will be crucial for knelt 8 in 10 companies over the next two years, and 58% have already seen a rise in retention and loyalty due to its use. Specifically, real-time analytics has equipped companies with a better understanding of the customer journey in retail, banking, and telecom, among others.
One of the direct ways in which real-time analytics can aid in revenue generation is by powering upselling and cross-selling opportunities. This can happen in two ways.
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Real-time speech analytics can alert contact centre agents to cross-selling/upselling opportunities
Real-time speech analytics processes an ongoing telephonic interaction with an eye out for specific keywords and phrases. It uses natural language understanding to detect when a keyword or phrase is uttered – for example, a product name. You can integrate the real-time analytics module with an automated agent assist workflow so that when the product name is mentioned, the agent immediately sees a pop-up carrying all the information about the product’s latest version.
Real-time analytics can dramatically reduce your reliance on agent memory to drive upselling and cross-selling at your contact centre. It also means that newer agents who aren’t equally familiar with the product line-up or your upselling/cross-selling call script can receive signals on when to redirect an ongoing conversation to a new product or service.
Real-time analytics for upselling/cross-selling in a contact centre could have a significant impact on your revenues. This is because contact centre callers (i.e., inbound) reach out to your agents with the specific intent of problem-solving. This means they would be open to purchasing a new product or service as long as they can derive a genuine value-add in relation to their context, which you will already know from the conversation.
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Streaming analytics on your website drives personalisation for cross-selling/upselling opportunities
E-commerce sites carry an incredible potential for driving cross-selling/upselling using real-time analytics. The website will witness a lot of user activity as prospects navigate through pages, click on different products, create comparison tables, and add products to their cart. User activity data can be analysed in real-time through streaming analytics, informing the personalisation engine which puts together and presents a product package or discount plan perfectly tuned for a sale.
For example, if a customer has been browsing around, adding $60-70 headphones to their cart without making a purchase, the website can use streaming analytics to gauge their requirements based on real-time data as well as historical purchase records. If the customer is accustomed to buying headphones in the sub $110 category, then the real-time analytics engine will surface a product recommendation for a best-selling $110 device with a discount of $5 to convince the customer to make a more expensive but more value-adding purchase.
Broadly, these are the two ways in which companies can use real-time analytics for cross-selling and upselling.
