Customer Experience Improvement

Many of us have seen the data, 58% of customers say that customer service is a very important factor that affects their choice of a brand, source Microsoft’s State of Global Customer Service Report.

Call recording has been in place for decades, yet why have contact centers remained the same for decades? “Please listen carefully as our menus have changed.” No they have not, the menu has been the same for the past two decades! Why hasn’t call recording led to a virtuous circle of improvement?

Here are some of the claims made by call recording vendors:

• Call center managers can review the calls to get a better understanding of how agents handle customer conversations.

• Learn whether support representatives are following the protocols.

• Figure out specific customer support aspects that can be improved.

• With call recordings, call center managers can save time as they do not have to listen to each call in real time.

• Identify the gaps in terms of training and best practices whether they are followed or not.

• Learn first-hand customer feedback or issues and train your team to handle them better.

• Listening to call recordings one on one with employees will empower managers to identify the skills that need to improve and work upon.

• Based on the recorded audios, call center managers can prepare presentations to teach about the proper way of making and taking calls.

It’s rather manual and lacks quantified data and analysis, this reflects the historical limits of ASR. The call center manager will call a meeting based on their analysis, or bring in a consulting firm that analyzed the data, and based on ‘industry best practices’ make improvement recommendations. The training to implement the improvements is given, and when the call center manager evaluates the results, not much has changed. It’s been going on for decades. Often the sample size is too small given the highly manual approach, and sometimes changes to the process have unintended consequences blurring customer feedback.

vCon enables tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of calls to be analyzed by a broad ecosystem of innovative companies. Changes in the process can be analyzed by A/B analysis on possible ways to diffuse customer frustration about an overage charge. The vCons for the calls can be analyzed to make sure the A/B script is being followed, sentiment analysis, and customer feedback during / post call can be combined to produce quantified results.

Often great customer service is exemplified by employees going above and beyond what is economic for the business. While some companies like Zappos simply ensure a human approach to the customer. This may not work for all brands and situations. But being able to test and quantify the results over thousands or tens of thousands of conversations gives the business, and most importantly the agents, confidence in the process change. This is an example of a complex human factor problem that will require new approaches to conversation intelligence, enabled through the ecosystem made possible through vCon.