Explore Maintaining a Competitive Edge with Interaction Analysis Winner of the Frost & Sullivan 2007 Product Innovation Award Autonomy etalk White Paper
Maintaining a Competitive Edge with Interaction Analysis Oct 2007 Table of Contents Maintaining a Competitive Edge with Interaction Analysis 1 Sales 2 Customer Service 2 Marketing and Competitive Analysis 4 Operations 4 A Significant Cost-Savings 5 Leveraging Qfiniti Explore To Solve Business Problems 6 Explore ROI Quick View 7 Part of the Qfiniti Enterprise Solution 7 Publisher s Note: Information contained in this document is intended for guideline purposes only. Autonomy etalk product documentation supersedes information contained in this document. The situations described in this document are offered as examples; actual configurations and results will vary from system to system. Proprietary and Confidential to Autonomy etalk.
Maintaining a Competitive Edge with Interaction Analysis Customer service has rapidly become a significant competitive differentiator in today s fast-paced and demanding marketplace. Whether clients are contacting businesses through retail stores, the internet, or via phone, organizations are constantly being held to higher standards as customers compare them to the last positive service experience they have had, regardless of industry or country. Ensuring optimum service requires that all divisions of the organization maintain focus on the customer experience, which can be affected by interactions with company personnel, operations, corporate procedures, or products and services being delivered. To understand the issues that affect customer perceptions, companies need tools that monitor and analyze customer interactions with the business. Autonomy etalk s multi-channel interaction analysis solution, Qfiniti Explore, extends across multiple customer channels phone, email, and chat to help identify and address customer needs, product opinions, agent performance, and operational issues. By utilizing a speech engine to process contact center interactions based on their contextual meaning, Qfiniti Explore enables users to uncover emerging contact center trends, tag customers for sales and marketing promotions, identify agent training opportunities, and deliver insight for performance and operational improvements. This paper discusses the numerous advantages of leveraging multi-channel interaction analysis across departments in the organization, which can ultimately lead to reduced customer churn, improved loyalty, and increased revenue. Data from Speech Analytics Tool Operations review - including KPIs, project status, etc Operations Data Flow Executive Data Flow Agent Centric Business Centric AHT, ACW, ASA, Adherence, Quality monitoring, CSAT, irate customers, happy customers, CRM, Customer preferences Intranet Legal Litigation-suit against organization Sales Status of product/ service, price objects Marketing Customer s reaction to marketing campaigns, buying behaviors, demographics, CSAT, customer loyalty Executive management develops strategy based on operational data, shareholders input, etc Manufacturing Accounting Human Resources Product defects, status of product delivery Billing questions, invoice disputes, payment terms, statement questions Irate employees, performance plans, explanation of benefits Figure 1: Speech Analytics: Sharing Contact Center Information with the Rest of the Business Maintaining a Competitive Edge with Interaction Analysis 1
Sales An organization s revenue is directly linked to the effectiveness of its sales team. That is why it is critical for the contact center to optimize sales opportunities by enabling agents to understand and respond to the needs of the customer. By analyzing a contact center s recorded conversations, Qfiniti Explore can quickly identify customer trends, including their previous behaviors, emotional inclinations, and preferred modes of communication. This helps contact center managers and agents develop communication and sales methods that meet the expectations of the customer. It is also imperative that managers have the ability to leverage recorded interactions to coach and train agents on successful sales techniques. For example, Explore can locate model interactions to demonstrate positive and negative sales interactions, helping agents recognize and pursue cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. By delivering direct and accessible knowledge, Explore enables agents to effectively communicate with customers and achieve critical sales. Investigating Agent Performance A mortgage company utilized Explore to learn if agents were following the proper referral and verification procedures they had been taught. Specifically, contact center managers wanted to know if the agents were referring customers to the website and asking for all of the correct identity verification information from the customer, including their name, address, and account number. By utilizing both direct searches and Explore s script adherence functionality, users could easily identify instances where these procedures were not taking place during the interaction and address the problems with coaching and training programs specifically targeted to sales verifications. The company additionally used Explore to investigate whether the agents on their collections team were using improper tactics to get customers to make a payment. Managers performed Smart View searches for calls that contained phrases the agents were not allowed to use, such as foreclosure and grace period. They also performed searches for calls in which a customer expressed that they were being harassed or threatened. Finding calls in which the agents were using inappropriate language enabled managers to quickly identify at-risk agents, poor scripts, and faulty collections procedures. Qfiniti Explore also simplifies the management of liability and risk in a sales or collections environment. Through script adherence, conceptual search and trend analysis, managers can easily monitor agents interactions, verify sales transactions, resolve customer disputes, and predict a customers behavior. For example, Qfiniti Explore s sentiment analysis capability can detect heightened stress levels in a customer, which can indicate if that individual is likely to default on a payment. This technology is also invaluable in helping businesses identify inconsistent or fraudulent transactions. Customer Service In order to keep customers satisfied, organizations require solutions that enable them to easily recognize and address performance issues in the contact center. Explore can enhance quality assurance by quickly retrieving specific types of calls needed for agent evaluations, coaching, and training programs. Explore automatically retrieves calls based on the defined criteria, reducing the amount of time needed for call searches and calibration. For example, one Autonomy etalk client reduced a weekly calibration session search from two hours to 10 minutes with Explore. Over the course of a year, this one item could save almost 100 hours in quality assurance productivity. Explore also lets users refine search criteria by the day, agent, type of call, and other metadata, resulting in more accurate results that can be utilized. 2 Proprietary and Confidential to Autonomy etalk.
Example ROI for Quality Management Manual Search for Call to Evaluate Total number of agents per supervisor 20 Total number of calls to evaluate per agent per month 5 Total number of calls being evaluated for all agents 100 Total minutes needed to find and listen to a coachable call 1 30 Total minutes under review each month 3,000 Cost per hour per supervisor (Fully Burdened Rate, i.e. hourly wage + benefits) 2 $ 37.5 Total Cost per year per Supervisor $22,500 1 Manual search assumes that supervisor has used metadata alone to find call samples, and requires listening to several calls to find appropriate calls for quality evaluation. This is an estimated average across industries and assumes specific criteria are needed for an appropriate call to evaluate. 2 Based on data from the Global Benchmarking Council - The Evolving Role of the Contact Center Manager Automated Search with Explore for Call to Evaluate Total number of agents per supervisor 20 Total number of calls to evaluate per agent per month 5 Total number of calls under supervision for all agents 100 Total minutes needed to find and listen to a coachable call 3 10 Total minutes under review each month 1,000 Cost per hour per supervisor (Fully Burdened Rate) $37.5 Total Cost per year per Supervisor $7,500 Total Savings per Supervisor $15,000 Total Savings per Year for 200 Agent Center $150,000 3 Explore uses a combination of metadata and conceptual search to find appropriate call samples for quality evaluation, eliminating the need to listen to several calls for a single evaluation. While most organizations have processes in place for evaluating agent performance at regular intervals, few have the ability to identify and address problems as they occur. Using Explore, contact center managers can be alerted to performance issues as they arise. This is primarily achieved through Explore s script adherence feature, which compares the agent conversation with a model script that is ingested into the system. Explore can retrieve recorded calls that do not contain enough of the script, or immediately notify a supervisor when an agent does not follow script. Explore s trending features additionally identify unknown trends that are not picked up by script adherence matches. One Autonomy etalk client reduced a weekly calibration session search from two hours to 10 minutes with Explore. Over the course of a year, this one item could save almost 100 hours in quality assurance productivity. Explore also delivers root cause analysis functionality to uncover the source of low or inconsistent evaluation scores, frequent script deviation, or poor customer feedback. This can be done by mining calls linked to agents evaluations, survey responses, or script adherence matches. By understanding the underlying causes of certain agent behaviors, managers can tailor coaching and training programs to the specific needs of their agents. The timely resolution of performance problems results in more confident agents, reduced call times, and improved customer satisfaction. Maintaining a Competitive Edge with Interaction Analysis 3
Marketing and Competitive Analysis By understanding customer behaviors, market trends, and competitive information, businesses can effectively evaluate marketing campaigns, create promotions, and utilize new channels of communication. Leveraging Explore, the business can measure the success or failure of a current promotion and shed light on hidden benefits or unknown problems. Features like sentiment analysis and clustering can also reveal which types of communications, marketing promotions, and sales incentives are the most successful with particular customers. By uncovering buying trends, past responses, and emotional inclinations, Explore helps the organization understand and predict future customer behavior. Businesses can use this customer insight to enhance future marketing programs as well as to improve sales initiatives, product development, and operational performance. Explore additionally delivers current competitive, product, and market trends directly to the contact center, enabling the business to maintain a competitive edge in a quickly changing market. Understanding Customer Behavior and Competitive Trends An outsourcing company leveraged Explore to understand why wireless communications customers were refusing to upgrade to a new wireless plan. By performing a search in Explore, contact center managers discovered that customers calling into the contact center were mentioning the rate plans of three competitors. Further investigation showed that customers perceived one competitor as substandard, and claimed another competitor offered a better plan for the same price. Another search in Explore revealed further customer concerns about the rate plans that were offered. By analyzing calls in which customers did not agree to sign up for a new plan, Explore uncovered concerns that the customers would not be able to carry over unused minutes to the new plan. This prompted the organization to evaluate the rate plans and the way they were being promoted both within and outside of the contact center. Operations Contact centers are often so tightly focused on coaching and training that they overlook why customers are calling in the first place. Qfiniti Explore s real-time analytics enable contact center managers to see beyond agent performance issues and gain knowledge of what truly impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty. By leveraging Qfiniti Explore, organizations can gain a deeper understanding of customers attitudes, behaviors, and intentions, allowing users to target customer service, marketing and sales, and product and service initiatives toward more specific customer needs. Explore enables this by uncovering emerging or common issues that directly affect a customer s satisfaction level. This functionality provides contact center managers with more targeted training material and alerts the business to unknown issues, such as a product or service failure. As a result, agents are better equipped to handle customer questions while the business can expedite the resolution of critical issues. Qfiniti Explore additionally helps protect the organization from risk and liability by automatically locating and retrieving information for regulatory compliance, fraud detection, customer disputes, and legal discovery. Explore s conceptual search capabilities return faster and more accurate results when a query is initiated, enabling organizations to more quickly prove compliance, verify sales, or turn over electronic information for litigation. In addition, Explore can alert users to real-time occurrences of non-compliance, such as an agent deviating from script, while trend and sentiment analysis can quickly uncover inconsistent or fraudulent activities. Explore s unsurpassed accuracy and speed allows organizations to address internal problems, from product issues to fraud, as quickly as possible. 4 Proprietary and Confidential to Autonomy etalk.
Uncovering Root Cause Analysis and Operational Issues A hospitality provider used Explore to understand why their agents were receiving low customer satisfaction scores, even though they had excellent evaluation scores. By utilizing Qfiniti Explore, the organization not only learned the reason their agents were receiving poor customer feedback, but also discovered an unknown operational issue that needed to be addressed. By analyzing the calls for those agents that received low satisfaction scores, Explore revealed that all the calls had the same common topic of website reservations. Playing back the calls additionally showed that customers were experiencing problems with the website while trying to make an online reservation. As a result of their frustration with the website, customers were unfairly giving the agents low scores on their customer service. These problems were further affecting contact center productivity metrics since the self-service channel was not performing its function effectively. A Significant Cost-Savings At the most fundamental level, Explore delivers a significant cost savings to businesses by alleviating the need to manually play back all of the calls recorded in the contact center. Explore automates this process by transcribing, indexing, and organizing calls based on the discussed concepts. This enables users to immediately find and play back only the calls they need. This ability consequently reduces the number of individuals needed to listen to and categorize calls, allowing the business to utilize resources in more significant roles in the contact center. This savings is particularly evident when a sample of a particular type of call is required, such as with process improvement initiatives or program reviews by management. To achieve statistically valid samples, as would be required for six sigma projects for example, a percentage of the overall total numbers of calls may be required to review in order to find specific examples. The cost to obtain these samples increases with the scope or size of the organization. The example below shows a conservative example of the cost to obtain one sample and the savings realized from using Qfiniti Explore to automatically find these samples. Finding Sample Calls for Projects/Programs Manual Explore Number of sample calls required 100 100 Number of calls to review to obtain appropriate sample call 1 15 2 Total number of calls requiring review to obtain sample calls 1500 200 Total time to load/listen to each call (minutes) 5 2 1 Total number of minutes to find sample 7500 200 Average compensation/hour supervisor (Fully Burdened Rate) $37.5 $37.5 Supervisor cost to develop sample $4,688 $125 Saving per project: $4,563 Number projects per year requiring samples: 20 Total productivity savings per year: $91,250 1 Depending on the type of samples needed and the percent of the overall call population, an individual may have to manually listen to much more than 15 calls before finding the appropriate recording. The Explore example conservatively assumes that 1out of every 2 samples returned will be appropriate. 2 With Explore, users link directly to the desired search audio, eliminating the need to playback the entire call Maintaining a Competitive Edge with Interaction Analysis 5
Leveraging Qfiniti Explore To Solve Business Problems Qfiniti Explore delivers several features that can help contact centers and businesses effectively take advantage of its conceptual searching and trend-spotting capabilities. By alerting managers to coaching and training opportunities, as well as root cause analysis, these features enable the contact center to improve customer service, reduce call times, and improve overall satisfaction. In addition, Explore can provide critical information on customer, product, service, operational, market, or competitive issues that can drastically improve a business sales and marketing programs and product and service offerings. Conceptual Search Explore automatically retrieves calls conceptually and contextually related to the initial query. This returns more accurate results than basic word-spotting techniques. This type of search enables the contact center or business to solve a specific business problem, such as locating all the calls in which a customer canceled service. Script Adherence By comparing a model script against an agent conversation, Explore can identify calls that do not contain an acceptable amount of the script. This functionality allows managers to ensure regulatory compliance, verify sales transactions, and monitor cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. Alerting Alerting capabilities notify users as new content becomes available, expediting the delivery of crucial information. Alerting delivers instant notification for coaching, sales opportunities, marketing, or investigation, enabling contact center managers to take action in a timely manner. This can help reduce the amount of missed sales or marketing opportunities. Trend Identification Qfiniti Explore automatically groups calls that contain similar concepts, even if the calls do not contain the same keywords, to reveal previously unknown trends or issues. This feature also alerts end-users to emerging customer, operational, and performance-related trends. Sentiment Analysis Search results can be refined based on heightened emotion during a call. Sentiment analysis can help identify angry callers, heightened stress levels, or other emotional factors that may affect customer satisfaction. Sentiment analysis can help agents identify and respond to emotional customers, alert managers to fraudulent activities, and provide root cause analysis for poor survey responses. Hot and Breaking The Hot and Breaking feature of Explore allows a user to visualize new and breaking subjects in the center without prior definition. By delivering real-time information on marketing, competitive, or product trends, this solution enables businesses to quickly tailor their offerings to the needs of the market. Autonomy etalk s development has included a focus on moving the analysis of call center data beyond the center itself. What begins with call center operations (QM) quickly becomes a tool for managing performance and feeding back ideas for improvement (performance management) and then, in the latest iteration, becomes a critical vehicle for analyzing multiple customer contact channels for deeper insight. Frost & Sullivan 6 Proprietary and Confidential to Autonomy etalk.
Explore ROI Quick View Speech Analytics Need Primary Industries Explore Feature(s) Benefit(s) Compliance and ediscovery Financial Services, Healthcare, Insurance Enterprise Search Automatic Call Retrieval Multi-Channel Analysis Automatic and transparent retrieval of calls from a local, remote, or archived repository of voice and text based interactions ensures every interaction is processed in a timely manner. Fraud Detection Financial Services, Insurance Sentiment Analysis Trend Identification Reveals inconsistent behavior from both customers and agents to help detect and reduce fraud, identity theft, and inconsistent activities. Dispute Resolution Financial Services, Healthcare, Insurance Conceptual Search Retrieves calls conceptually related to the initial query, providing more precise and accurate results for quick resolution. Marketing and Competitive Analysis Telecom, Retail, Hospitality Hot and Breaking Alerts Real-time delivery of relevant information ensures the business stays up to date on their customers, competitors, and the market. Sales Optimization Retail, Hospitality, Telecom Trend Identification Sentiment Analysis Managers can target agent training to cross selling and up selling based on missed opportunities and customer trends Customer Service Telecom, Retail, Insurance, Healthcare Agent Script Adherence Conceptual Search Trend Identification Agents can be monitored at any time to ensure they adhere to scripts to provide complete and courteous service. Trend-spotting notifies supervisors immediately of inconsistent or inappropriate behavior and identifies unknown coaching opportunities. Collections and Sales Verifications Utilities, Financial Services, Insurance Conceptual Search Script Adherence Sentiment Analysis Managers can ensure agents follow the correct procedures for verifying sales and collecting payment as well as identify customers who are at risk defaulting. Operational Performance Telecom, Financial Services, Retail Trend Identification Sentiment Analysis Alerts The business is alerted to customer, operational, or performance issues as they arise, enabling quick resolution of critical issues before they escalate. Part of the Qfiniti Enterprise Solution Qfiniti Enterprise delivers a unified, centrally managed platform for multi-channel interaction analysis, real-time agent support, and contact center performance management. By automatically delivering relevant and accessible customer intelligence to the organization, this solution enables businesses to understand the meaning of customer interactions and deliver outstanding customer service across the globe. Qfiniti Observe - Call and desktop recording for quality/compliance Qfiniti Explore - Automated customer communication analysis Qfiniti Assist - Automatic information assistance Qfiniti Survey - Integrated customer satisfaction survey Qfiniti Advise - Scoring and measurement for evaluation Qfiniti Expert - On-line agent coaching and training Maintaining a Competitive Edge with Interaction Analysis 7
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