Three Tips for Measuring Voice in the Sea of Big Data. Tom Goodmanson President and CEO, Calabrio Inc.

Transcription

1 Three Tips for Measuring Voice in the Sea of Big Data Tom Goodmanson President and CEO, Calabrio Inc.

2 Introduction Measuring Voice in the Sea of Big Data Enterprises Turn to the Contact Center to Understand the True Voice of the Customer Big data is a hot topic in business IT today. But while the term is ubiquitous in today s business and IT publications, it has proved difficult for many companies to understand what big data actually means for them. Individual companies are working to understand what big data sources will be valuable to them, and what the nature of that value is. They are struggling to ful ly understand what big data sources they already have, what additional sources they need, and how to realize the value of the data in each source. At the heart of these efforts is the realiza tion that their businesses cannot remain com petitive without soliciting and incorporating feedback from all customer sources. An often overlooked resource for understanding the true voice of the custom er is the contact center. Every day, contact centers have hundreds, if not thousands, of voice conversations with a company s customers. Voice data is the richest, most comprehensive and multi-dimensional data an organization has. Inside your voice data is a wealth of information the kind of information that big data initiatives are all about. Voice interactions can paint a much richer picture of how customers are viewing a company and its products. These conversations can help the organization better understand what is really a problem or an opportunity and what is merely noise in the marketplace. Still, despite the existence of all this data, most departments in the enterprise are desperate to get at it while the contact center struggles with how to share it. Cracking the Complexity of Big Voice Data The data being gathered from cus tomers should be shared across multi ple departments product development, marketing, sales and manufacturing. Yet these interactions have been a highly un tapped resource as a data stream because they don t fit into the traditional data model of 1 s and 0 s. Voice transactions have historically been hard to search, difficult to use and timeconsuming to process among all of the information coming into the organization s contact center. New advances in technology allow companies to effectively analyze voice interactions with customers as part of the overall data coming into the company. There are three essential success factors for businesses to consider: 1. Simplify the process Traditional voice analysis has been cumbersome to configure, requires linguis tic experts to mine the data, and as a result, becomes much too complicated to leverage across multiple departments. A consensus has emerged. Organizations can no longer afford to rely only on the brainpower of data experts who are skilled in setting up queries to process and interpret data. Most organizations have the necessary brainpower inside their own companies. However, if we expect employees across our entire organization to deal effectively with big data, we must give these employ ees tools they can use to explore big data in a very simple, intuitive way. So, the solution is this: To effectively work with the sheer volumes of big data depositories, we must have tools that are user-centric. User-centric tools enable more users to explore enormous volumes of data, in its organic form, to discover information that will be really meaningful for effectively operating the business.

3 Measuring Voice in the Sea of Big Data According to Denis Pombriant, man aging principal at Beagle Research, User-centric analytic solutions that streamline filtering, mining and explo ration activities are differentiating the big data marketplace, and organizations will continue to turn to these solutions as they build the foundation for big data initiatives. Tools that enable business es to easily find, organize and extract knowledge from traditionally unstruc tured data such as voice transactions are crucial in managing big data. User-centric tools need to be so easy to use that virtually anyone at any level in an organization can understand how to use them to get the information they need to be as effective as possible at their specific job. The tools should provide a functionality that is so easy to use that it removes the need to understand the science behind the tool, and turns the exercise of analyzing the big data into a simple exercise of basic logic. 2. Make the data personzlized to each department or group using it Different departments need to con sume the incoming data in different ways. For example, a marketing manager should be able to easily pull the infor mation that she needs to conduct a new campaign (or see the impact of her most recent one), the sales manager should have instant access to how marketing s latest campaign affected sales of specific items, and the operations manager should be able to view the effect on inventory, manufacturing speed, and so on. It s the same data, being used by different depart ments in different ways to measure and react to the impact on the business. As a result, business can turn to the analysis of voice transactions to solve business prob lems that were eluded by traditional data analysis. Here are some examples: The CMO voice of the customer. If you re a CMO, you understand the importance of data. But in the age of in formation, where there are 100,000 tweets every minute and 1.5 billion smartphones across the globe, the problem isn t that you don t have enough data, but that you might drown in the sea of data that is piling up in your organization. And what s worse, you know that the answers to your questions are buried in that data. How do you stay on top of who your customers are, why they buy and how they buy? How do you stay current on their views about your company s products, your brand and your competition to keep from being caught off guard? Marketing departments will find that that some of the richest insights come from listening to their customer data. Marketing departments have an incredible resource available to hear what customers are say ing to agents in the contact center voic ing opinions, making requests and airing complaints. Through automated listening, marketers can get inside the minds of the customers. Here s an example. An online retailer was experiencing a high volume of can cellations for orders placed through their contact center, which posed a significant threat to recurring revenue. By adding the element of voice analysis to order-taking conversations, this business is now ana lyzing thousands of daily calls and extract ing what agents and customers are saying to indicate possible defections, including common objections, competitive mentions, cancellation threats and more. They are us ing this insight to drive targeted marketing campaigns focused on customer retention. CEO/CFO revenue and margin protection. Sales organizations are held account able to overall sales and margin metrics, but C-Level executives need to under stand how occurences across the organiza tion impact revenue and margin. Analyt ics applied to customer voice transactions has the power to quickly reveal issues so organizations can take action before put ting critical corporate goals in jeopardy. Here s an example. Finding the right balance between customer incentives and margin protection can be tricky. A leading beverage company empowered its agents to present coupons and other special incentives as a remedy for customer issues, but lacked a system of checks and balances so agents had the guidance and direction about when such offers were truly required. By applying voice analysis to customer service transac tions, the business is correlating coupon and incentive offers to the root cause of complaints. This allows the business to provide clear direction to agents so they can remain empowered while still protecting margin.

4 Measuring Voice in the Sea of Big Data Legal compliance and risk mitigation. Failure to follow approved scripts for customer disclosures can be costly for many regulated businesses. By not following mandates, retailers, healthcare organizations, financial institutions and universities are at risk for legal action and financial penalties, not to mention loss of reputation. As an example, an online university was attempting to monitor compliance through random manual review, yet had the capability to listen to less than 1% of the 70,000 daily incoming calls. Speech analytics applied to customer service interactions automatically captures and analyzes 100% of all calls, revealing those which require further training and mitigating risk. 3. Take action Companies can now use analytics to phonetically listen for unique search terms within a voice transaction that can reveal patterns and insights into what customers are saying. The technology no longer needs to be complex, daunting and inflexible, but instead enables a company to be as extensive or real-time as the business needs, as well as, being more proactive in their responses to customer insight. Speech analytics technology automat ically analyzes each spoken transaction, categorizing it based on things you need to pay attention to. This approach simplifies the correlation of vast amounts of data into intelligent dashboards that give you real insight into issues and opportunities that you can take advantage of. Analytics lets you convert data to information to knowledge to wisdom, which drives informed action. Not only can a company gain valuable insight into what is happening, but it can also sync critical information across the organization and give all business owners the wisdom they need to make their individual functions, and the company as a whole, successful. Working Smarter It s clear that speech analytics solu tions help businesses incorporate insights from conversations as part of their big data initiatives. By literally listening to the true voice of the customer, key stake holders in the organization will find a gold mine of answers to some of the most fundamental questions with which businesses are struggling. The challenge is finding a simple solu tion for processing that complex data. Speech analytics provide businesses with simple, user-centric, powerful tools to manage and analyze their customer conver sations to achieve greater insight into sales and marketing effectiveness, compliance, quality and accuracy.

5 400 1st Avenue North, Suite 300 Minneapolis MN Copyright 2014,Calabrio, Inc. All rights reserved. Calabrio and the Calabrio logo are the registered trademark of Calabrio Inc. All other products are the property of their respective companies. LC