Forrester study highlights the value of customer intelligence

Customer service representatives (CSRs) address organizations’ toughest customer issues. Chatbots and interactive voice response (IVR) can handle simpler tasks and issues, but customers often seek human intervention when the problem is more complex. Yet, your contact center may struggle to deliver excellent experiences under these complex and high pressure situations.

Customer intelligence tools can help your business improve the outcome of these interactions and experiences, and empower representatives to be more confident and efficient in handling these high pressure situations.

To fully grasp the benefits of customer intelligence within the contact center, you first need to understand what customer intelligence is.

What Is Customer Intelligence?

Customer intelligence is the process of collecting large amounts of customer data and analyzing it to develop the most effective ways to interact with customers. The intelligence that’s uncovered often reveals a deeper understanding of the voice of the customer to help build more meaningful relationships. Basically, customer intelligence is insights gleaned from vast amounts of customer conversations, across a range of channels, that are used to improve customer experience (CX), build customer loyalty and increase retention. 

At CallMiner, customer intelligence is at the heart of everything we offer. Our platform leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to analyze every customer interaction across all channels at scale. This analysis provides actionable insights to improve the customer journey, contact center performance and even business decisions across the enterprise.

We recently commissioned a study conducted by Forrester Consulting to examine the latest trends in customer intelligence.

The study, “The New Contact Center Empowers Its People with Customer Intelligence,” explores how contact center leaders are increasingly leveraging customer intelligence tools to help prioritize the experiences of customer service representatives to improve CX. In fact, the study shows that nearly two-thirds (65%) of respondents have increased their focus on improving the CSR experience by adopting AI and automation technologies to empower representatives to better serve customer needs.

Why Power Customer Intelligence with AI?

Companies that rely on traditional customer analysis tools can understand only a small portion of their customer base. Customer surveys are one common analysis tool, yet studies show that response rates to these surveys range between 5 to 30%, and they are often completed by the most satisfied or dissatisfied customers. Manually reviewing customer conversations is another common analysis method. However, quality assurance teams that manually review customer conversations have limited resources with the capacity for listening to only 1 to 3% of their customer interactions.   

With an estimated nine million calls to U.S. contact centers daily, you’re missing as much as 99% of what your customers are saying.

AI-powered customer intelligence enables businesses to capture and analyze 100% of interactions. The most comprehensive platforms can ingest and analyze large quantities of data quickly. This increased understanding of customer interactions means that businesses can develop a broader picture of their customers based on all the data, rather than a limited view.

In fact, customer intelligence platforms that leverage AI, such as conversation analytics, have the computing capacity to analyze every customer interaction automatically and in real-time. Applying AI to sift through this wealth of customer interaction data offers a clearer understanding on how customers feel toward your organization, uncovering insights that were once invisible.

Empowering CSRs with Customer Intelligence

Customer intelligence can empower your CSRs to address every business challenge, regardless of how emotionally charged a conversation may be. With customer intelligence, CSRs gain: 

Next-best-action advice: Customer intelligence tools can help CSRs understand customer emotion quickly through alerts that offer next-best-action advice. In-the-moment, real-time alerts derived from conversational behaviors can be popped onto agent screens with next-step suggestions. These alerts offer automated guidance to elevate agents to a new level of engagement and success.

Optimize agent training: Providing agents with the right product and service information to address customer needs is critical to CX improvement. Customer intelligence can identify common issues, such as the agents who need additional training and the specific issues they need training on. For example, measuring silence during interactions can be a remarkable indicator of process and training breakdowns not easily identified through other means. Proactively resolving these issues frequently improves customer and employee satisfaction.

Performance benchmarking: Customer intelligence is an invaluable tool for benchmarking how each agent represents your brand. By tracking conversational behaviors, such as displaying empathy or delight, can illuminate how representatives engage with customers. With this intelligence, customer service centers can determine which behaviors lead to emotional resonance with customers. These insights can be operationalized as powerful agent coaching opportunities.

Drive Business Improvements with Customer Intelligence

Too many companies examine only a small portion of their customer interactions. With AI-powered customer intelligence, like what you gain when you leverage the CallMiner Eureka platform, your business can analyze and learn from every customer interaction. Armed with these insights, organizations can take action and improve the connections between customer service representatives and customers.

But the benefits don’t just benefit the contact center and CSRs. With a deeper understanding of customer needs and wants, businesses can make better decisions enterprise-wide. These improvements have the potential to drive significant ROI and bottom-line increases in the contact center and beyond.

To learn more about how customer intelligence drives the best customer experiences, download the Forrester Consulting study, commissioned by CallMiner, “The New Contact Center Empowers Its People with Customer Intelligence.”