The future of CX is data-driven, and real-time analytics holds the key to unlocking this potential.
As Jeff Jacobs of McKinsey & Company says in a Harvard Business Review report: “The expectations of consumers today is that everything exists in the world of the now and that their interactions will be personalized… Real-time analytics is absolutely core to enabling companies to deliver those kinds of experiences.”
However, real-time analytics has many more use cases that go beyond personalization. The technology also helps make quick, unbiased decisions, isolate early-stage trends and guide employees to deliver better service experiences.
Alongside enhancing customer service, real-time analytics can also bolster sales strategies. It does so in two ways:
- Tracking contact center conversations
- Monitoring how customers navigate the website
By harnessing these insights, companies can proactively increase revenues. Here is how.
1. Tracking Contact Center Conversations
Real-time speech analytics monitors ongoing contact center interactions, using natural language understanding (NLU) to identify when customers utter specific keywords and phrases. The system then informs agents of a possible up-/cross-sell opportunity.
For example, perhaps the customer refers to the name of an older product. Once they do so, real-time analytics can trigger a pop-up on the agent desktop, containing details of a better alternative. The agent can then use their initiative to determine whether it is a good time to up-/cross-sell.
Taking this further, some real-time analytics vendors measure sentiment. In deploying this capability, agents can upsell at the optimal moment, when the customer is in good spirits.
Such an approach reduces a contact center’s reliance on agent memory to drive upselling and cross-selling initiatives. It also supports recruits who are not so familiar with the company’s product range.
In doing so, real-time analytics increases agent confidence while strategically building customer value by upselling products that are relevant to customer conversations.
Taking this approach, contact centers can create seamless upselling experiences, which bypass awkward scenarios where agents spring sales pitches on unsuspecting customers.
2. Monitoring How Customers Navigate the Website
Websites witness repeated user activity as prospects navigate pages, click on various products, and add products to their cart. However, such exploits often fail to translate into meaningful engagement.
Real-time analytics helps to skew the odds in the business’s favour. Feeding insights into an analytics-driven personalization engine, companies can present relevant offers and discounts to customers, increasing the chances of a sale.
For instance, if a customer has added $60-70 headphones to their cart without making a purchase, the website can trigger a proactive live chat to resolve concerns and encourage them to complete the sale.
Such a proactive message is sometimes sent via an advanced chatbot, which gets to grips with customer navigation behaviors, buying habits, and their purchase history to tailor incentives that foster actions.
As another example, consider a customer who has left $200 earrings in their basket. However, they have never spent more than $175, and are taking a long time to check out. Offering a $25 discount is perhaps all it takes to convince the customer to make an expensive but value-adding purchase.
Further use cases of real-time website analytics, which may improve sales, includes engaging with customers who repeatedly visit the same webpage and offering personalized discounts to those who have previously abandoned their orders at the last minute.
Uncover a whole host of leading data and analytics service providers, which offer real-time capabilities, by reading our rundown of the: Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data and Analytics Service Providers 2022.
