Big Data Applications in the Contact Center: Opportunities and Challenges

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1 Big Data Applications in the Contact Center: Opportunities and Challenges A Frost & Sullivan Case Study

2 frost.com Big Data in Action: TalkTalk and Nexidia... 3 The Situation... 3 The Solution... 3 Adding Layers of Big Data... 4 Further Results... 4 contents

3 Big Data Applications in the Contact Center: Opportunities and Challenges Frost & Sullivan s Stratecast Growth Partnership Practice, Big Data & Analytics, helps companies of all types navigate this key topic. Drawing from its Big Data research, Frost & Sullivan s Information and Communications Technologies Customer Contact practice notes that over the past decade, the focus of most companies has been on the customer journey and how to improve it. Traditional contact center metrics provide visibility from a macro customer journey level down to individual input on a single channel. However, with the advent of tools like speech analytics, contact center analysts and supervisors gained the ability to efficiently mine interactions for caller intent, and find targeted examples of specific events to better understand what happened between agents and the customer and tie those interactions together to see how the whole issue was resolved. More recently, the application of big data has become a driving force behind how companies consume, interpret and use information. Big data projects cut across all industries and are being used to do myriad things, including enhance forecasting models, contribute to product design, or determine consumer buying patterns. However, it s the merging of the two worlds that really presents new opportunities. While businesses such as Communications Services Providers (CSPs) and large retailers have been using big data to gain more intelligence about the transactional and demographic sides of their customers, to do things such as hone supply chains and predict buying patterns based on previous purchases and Web clicks, more companies are starting to realize the value that comes from combining the information found in their traditional data sources with the behavioral information found in customer interactions. By using an interaction analytics technology that is scalable, flexible and accurate, companies can provide structure to their unstructured audio and text interactions, and combine them with the structured data they are already capturing. The addition of this information allows companies to approach business challenges in new and innovative ways. For example, sales effectiveness can now be studied not only by measures such as close rates, but marketing can refine offers based on what customers say during interactions; upsell attempts can be quantified across all interactions and channels to know when eligible opportunities are missed; and propensity to buy models can be augmented using behavioral indicators and patterns displayed during interactions. Ultimately, big data provides additional and sometimes dramatic insights into customer behavior. Augmenting traditional contact center data with big data can provide meaningful and relevant insights into the customer journey and how to change it. Telecommunications provides an interesting case study for how a big data overlay can help the contact center. TalkTalk is one such company that is taking advantage of big data to improve its operations. BIG DATA IN ACTION: TALKTALK AND NEXIDIA The Situation TalkTalk, the UK provider of fixed-line broadband, voice telephony, TV and mobile services to consumers and business users, decided to initiate a number of projects to reduce its business risk in an ever-tightening regulatory environment. The prospect of agents not being able to fully and accurately represent products or straying off of scripts during customer calls was raising concerns over potential compliance issues. In addition, TalkTalk wanted to be able to take advantage of agent training opportunities in order to boost retention, sales, service, and technical support. As a result, the company decided to bring in additional resources to limit risk and enable best-in-class service levels. The Solution In 2011, TalkTalk partnered with Nexidia to store and analyze calls to gain visibility into potential compliance issues. According to Geoff Smyth, consumer operations director for TalkTalk, the company was initially concerned that having Nexidia store calls would be a duplication of effort, as calls were already being recorded and stored for compliance reasons. However, TalkTalk was pleasantly surprised that although calls were being stored twice, the additional costs were marginal and quickly recovered through the rich analytics being provided by Nexidia s technology. In a short period of time, TalkTalk was able to dramatically reduce compliance issues. Commented Smyth: The cost of that duplication has been nominal, especially when compared to the benefit we ve received. Taking this a step further, TalkTalk has extended the use of Nexidia Interaction Analytics to gain a more holistic view of the customer journey and improve the Customer Experience. By using the Nexidia solution to shift the way it handled quality monitoring (QM), TalkTalk was able to expand beyond compliance and improve customer service, 3

4 frost.com retention, and loyalty. Nexidia allowed for the deployment of scorecards to supervisor desktops that enabled one-on-one behavioral coaching to take place. With an upgrade to the newest version of Nexidia Interaction Analytics, TalkTalk will now be able to conduct multi-channel analysis across all customer interactions (chat, , social, media, surveys, and voice). As a result, TalkTalk will be able to better service its customers and roll out new services more efficiently. In the first stage of using interaction analytics, TalkTalk was analyzing a small number of calls. Today, Nexidia analyzes more than 14,000 hours of audio per day across TalkTalk s entire worldwide operations. Adding Layers of Big Data TalkTalk knew that it wanted the information contained in recorded calls to be part of the company s big data landscape. However, other sources of data were structured and therefore easier to analyze; the audio interactions were an unstructured data source and didn t fit as simply with the other components. So TalkTalk furthered the company s Voice of the Customer (VoC) initiative to better determine how to go about integrating that real VoC data along with other big data elements to improve the view of the customer journey, with the goal of getting to a single source of the truth about each customer. First, TalkTalk centralized and aggregated key data elements into an IBM data warehouse. The company took internal customer data, such as where customers live, as well as buying behavior, and complemented it with other freely available external data (such as demographic information on spending patterns) to create a broader view outside of the confines of the TalkTalk business. The next step was to use the Nexidia solution to organize the unstructured contact center data so that it could be incorporated into that same single source of the truth. By combining operational, CRM, and interaction analytics data, along with other big data elements, TalkTalk believes it has achieved a complete 360-degree view of the customer. Prior to the use of Nexidia interaction analytics, this data wasn t effectively captured. Further Results Prior to the deployment of Nexidia, TalkTalk supervisors were limited by the number of calls they could listen to in order to pursue agent improvement. Nexidia has enabled TalkTalk agents to reach best-in-class status by allowing supervisors to quickly identify the areas in which an agent is struggling and deliver targeted coaching based on relevant calls. Nexidia also enables TalkTalk to see and react to competitive offers and then train agents on how to respond as soon as the issue arises during an interaction. For instance, a competitor might promote an offer that lures customers into wanting to switch providers. However, drilling into the offer often uncovers hidden fees or lock-in agreements that customers might not be aware of. Therefore, when a customer comes into the sales channel saying he or she is considering moving to a competitive product, TalkTalk agents, through better training, are able to quickly make a cost-effective offer to retain that customer. In addition, analyzing the resulting calls enables the company to take agents who are struggling with such calls and have them listen in on and learn from bestin-class agents who understand how to convey the TalkTalk advantages versus competitive disadvantages. Now we are able to train our best agents on how to educate customers who talk about changing providers as to what the true costs really are, Smyth adds. At the same time, we re able to bring lower-performing agents up to a level of competency we re very happy with, simply by allowing them to listen to the calls and then by providing the coaching they need. Meanwhile, TalkTalk uses Nexidia to identify additional opportunities as well as problem areas to drill down and identify what Smyth refers to as hot spots. For instance, Nexidia is helping to facilitate TalkTalk s journey to improve preferred self-service channels, maximizing the number of transactions with automated self-service. Interaction analytics enables the company to better understand what customers are saying about the various channels and make changes based on quantitative results that will enable customers to be more comfortable with automated speech, or direct them from that channel into mobile applications as an alternative. In short, Nexidia Interaction Analytics has enabled TalkTalk to better understand its customers. It is now able to draw correlations based on the information contained in the unstructured audio data as well as the structured data (such as customers geographic area, spending patterns or demographics). This big data approach allows TalkTalk to validate assumptions on what customers are really experiencing and, in turn, allows the company to improve product and service delivery and consistency. Having the analytic power to combine all this data is opening new doors for TalkTalk. 4

5 Auckland Bahrain Bangkok Beijing Bengaluru Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Colombo Delhi/NCR Detroit Dubai Frankfurt Iskander Malaysia/Johor Bahru Istanbul Jakarta Kolkata Kuala Lumpur London Manhattan Miami Milan Mumbai Moscow Oxford Paris Pune Rockville Centre San Antonio São Paulo Sarasota Seoul Shanghai Shenzhen Silicon Valley Singapore Sophia Antipolis Sydney Taipei Tel Aviv Tokyo Toronto Warsaw Washington, DC Silicon Valley 331 E. Evelyn Ave., Suite 100 Mountain View, CA Tel Fax San Antonio 7550 West Interstate 10, Suite 400 San Antonio, TX Tel Fax London 4 Grosvenor Gardens London SW1W 0DH Tel +44 (0) Fax +44 (0) GoFrost [email protected] Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today s market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the Global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Is your organization prepared for the next profound wave of industry convergence, disruptive technologies, increasing competitive intensity, Mega Trends, breakthrough best practices, changing customer dynamics and emerging economies? For information regarding permission, write: Frost & Sullivan 331 E. Evelyn Ave., Suite 100 Mountain View, CA 94041