5 Benefits of Collecting Metrics to Identify Common Contact Reasons

No matter what industry you serve, chances are your customers have high expectations. As a contact center, it is your primary responsibility to understand and manage customer expectations. That includes determining if customers feel their needs are being met on every call. Collecting this valuable speech and text data or over all interaction data is just the first step in managing customer expectations though. Once you’ve collected the data, you need to do something with it if you want to improve the customer experience and deliver exceptional customer service consistently. Actionable analytics is key.

Today, customers have a wide variety of ways they can interact with your contact center including phone calls, email, live chat, mobile apps, and social media. Multi-communication channels make it more difficult to understand customer expectations than it was for businesses thirty years ago when the phone was the only channel. What makes it even more difficult is that today’s customers have a much smaller attention span. While they may begin their journey researching your services online, a few days later, they may finally make the phone call or send an e-mail to finalize their journey.

To get a well-rounded view of customers, contact centers need to collect and analyze data from every channel. Collecting cross-channel metrics makes it possible for contact centers to:

1. Uncover User Experience Issues

Whether you communicate with customers via your website, e-mail, or telephone, you typically want their experience to be seamless. Even when a business creates a channel with the customer in mind, customers may still struggle. For instance, if a customer is asking questions via LIVE chat on your website but doesn’t get the answers they are looking for, they may decide to call. But chances are they will probably look elsewhere for what they want.

The only way you can identify a user experience issue is if you collect speech and text data across all channels. And then analyze it for trends such as lost customers or bounce rates on certain pages.

2. Create a better marketing strategy

When you start to collect data about your customers, you gain a better understanding of who they are. This information is especially valuable to your marketing department who can use it to tweak existing marketing strategies and create new ones.

Collect information about what types of interactions customers make online, over the phone, or via email. Marketing teams can use this to determine where they should focus their budget to maximize the return on investment (ROI).

3. Create new processes

By collecting interaction data across multiple channels, you can uncover why customers contact you and through which channel. Some common roadblocks that cause frustrations include not being able to find the information they need to make a purchase decision, not having enough information on how to use your product or service, or not being directed to the best-equipped customer service agent for their specific request. If left alone, each of these can result in lost sales and customers.

Review the data to identify specific trends on individual channels or common reasons for contacts across all channels. Update your internal processes where needed to improve the overall customer experience, increase retention, and improve your bottom line.

4. Determine which types of customers use channels

More than likely, you have different types of customers depending on the products or services you offer. By collecting information about customers, you can identify which customers use each communication method.  To create a better experience for customers, you first need to understand the types of customers you serve and which is your ideal customer profile. Each customer type will have a unique set of expectations. Once you collect specific information, your contact center agents are better equipped to deliver a personalized customer experience, resulting in loyal customers.

5. Identify other customer trends.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know you have a faulty product before it becomes widely known, impacting your reputation? Or that you have agents that need more guidance on how to properly manage customer conversations? These are both additional trends that are easier to spot when you collect data across all communication channels instead of focusing on one. Once you have this information, you can quickly make changes or provide necessary training to assure the problem doesn’t persist.

Speech analytics software is a tool used by many contact centers to easily collect data across multiple channels. It captures conversations and transcribes them into a searchable database where managers can review and identify trends such as those listed above. In addition, speech analytics software can also notify you when certain keywords or phrases are mentioned that need attention, listen for signs of an angry customer, and score conversations in real-time.