Information is the lifeblood of any modern organisation – revealing trends, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and informing decision making. Capturing information in its raw form – data – is no longer the issue – rather, the sheer abundance of data is more often the problem for companies who have to sift through mountains of it in order to unearth the insights hidden within.
When it comes to customer information, unlocking the full potential of data enables companies to provide new levels of customer experience and, ultimately, reduce client churn. But too often, essential data is siloed away out of easy reach, requiring tedious manual extraction. Worse still, much of the most useful data is hidden away in unstructured formats.
To find out how companies can overcome this hurdle, CX Today welcomes Martin Taylor, Deputy CEO and Co-Founder of contact centre technology firm Content Guru, provider of the storm® contact centre solution.
Overcoming Customer Data Hurdles
A number of factors prevent companies from making the most of customer data – perhaps chief among them being a lack of understanding about what exactly they have in their hands. “There is a lack of understanding about the improvements that can be made through using analytics technology to comb through data and find trends and touchpoints in customer interactions,” explains Taylor. “Business leaders might not realise the potential diamonds they have knocking around in their pockets, if only they could work out how to extract and cut them.” Part of business leaders’ squeamishness comes from the fear of jeopardising security and compliance. “Data is the new oil, and business leaders are petrified of an oil spill, which could, of course, be catastrophic. If leaders do not trust that the technology at their disposal has the ability to provide insights into their data with the requisite safely, then they will more likely to steer clear of the whole idea.”
It’s these legitimate concerns that have fuelled the development of Content Guru’s storm platform. “Inefficient, ineffective and insecure data analytics technology will stop companies from making the most of their stores,” says Taylor. “Being lumbered with outdated, behind-the-times solutions will have you dragging behind the rest in a state of fearful and willful ignorance. To ensure you can actually leverage insights effectively, you need a cutting-edge cloud solution to mine your data. A true cloud solution, like the storm platform, should provide a multitude of different ways to extract customer data, and indeed to collect and refresh the data pool, like a freshwater spring on a mountainside, if that isn’t taking analogies too far.”
Content Guru’s offering accordingly features functionality such as Smart Folders in storm RECORDERTM, allowing customer calls to be automatically grouped by keyword or sentiment, which enables trends or items of concern to be identified quickly, or storm ANALYTICSTM, which allows instant analysis of large volumes of interactions. Leveraging Natural Language Processing, the storm solution can analyse customer intent, speech and text in order to build a broader understanding of the customer journey. Also among the offerings is storm Machine AgentTM, capable of analysing interactions across all channels of communication, written, spoken and visual, with recordings automatically classified and grouped according to content, sentiment, and service agent performance. Taken together, the goal is to assess customer-agent interactions in real-time, empowering agents to maximise customer engagement at the moment and, crucially, reduce consumer churn whilst driving cross and upsell.
Understanding the Voice Channel
With voice remaining the overwhelming favourite for complex customer queries, the above-mentioned Natural Language Processing (NLP) offers a powerful and vital option to automate key elements of customer service whilst collecting rich data in an easily-harvestable form. “NLP parses meaning from speech (or text), and detects intent, before automatically routing a customer to the best-placed human agent to deal with their enquiry,” says Taylor. “NLP can even interpret emotion, from the tone of voice and keywords. Content Guru’s NLP and sentiment analysis capabilities are already being used by areas of the emergency services to detect where a call agent has just dealt with a particularly harrowing interaction. Supervisors can use that information to ensure employees receive suitable support following such interactions.”
Of course, it’s little use developing these insights if they can’t then be seamlessly disseminated throughout the organisation. Solutions such as Content Guru’s storm CKS® Knowledge Management, mean actionable information can be served to the right people, via the right channel, at the right time, as Taylor explains. “Through a single, feature-rich portal, organisations can centrally configure and control the information accessible to both internal and external users, across all channels and locations. Logic-driven decision trees swiftly guide your agents and/or customers to the informative articles they need, in a format appropriate to the channel.”
Such an approach is crucial to ensuring that data leads to real-world improvements. “Too often, companies uncover valuable insights through data mining, but do not actually put their findings to use,” says Taylor. “Often this is because the analysis of the information has taken so long, that the relevance of the insights gained has diminished. Automation can help to speed up this process, with Content Guru’s NLP capabilities working continuously to streamline contact routing and storm CKS® Knowledge ManagementTM automating screen-pops of relevant articles for service agents, based on the customer information retrieved by the NLP technology.”
It is this combination of efficiency, security and timeliness that turns a lake of unstructured data into fresh, actionable information, ready for the consumer when the organisation most needs it.
