Autonomy etalk White Paper
Explore
™™
Maintaining a Competitive Edge
with Interaction Analysis
Oct 2007
Table of Contents
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 stan-dards as customers compare them to the last positive service experience they have had, regardless of industry or country. Ensuring opti-mum service requires that all divisions of the organization maintain focus on the customer experience, which can be affected by interac-tions with company personnel, operainterac-tions, 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.
Agent Centric
Business Centric
Intranet
Operations
Data Flow ExecutiveData Flow Data from Speech
Analytics Tool
Operations review - including KPIs, project status, etc
Executive management develops strategy based on operational data, shareholders input, etc AHT, ACW, ASA,
Adherence, Quality monitoring, CSAT, irate customers, happy customers,
CRM, Customer preferences Legal Sales Marketing
Manufacturing Accounting Human Resources Litigation-suit
against organization Status of product/service, price objects Customer’s reaction to marketing campaigns, buying behaviors, demographics, CSAT, customer loyalty
Product defects, status
of product delivery Billing questions, invoice disputes, payment terms, statement questions
Irate employees, performance plans, explanation of benefits
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 opti-mize 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.
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 assur-ance 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.
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.
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 130
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 310
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 ingest-ed into the system. Explore can retrieve recordingest-ed calls that do not contain enough of the script, or immingest-ediately 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.
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 adher-ence 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.
Marketing and Competitive Analysis
By understanding customer behaviors, market trends, and competitive information, businesses can effectively evaluate marketing cam-paigns, 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 cus-tomers. 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.
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.
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.
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 con-cepts. This enables users to immediately find and play back only the calls they need. This ability consequently reduces the number of individu-als 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 115 2 Total number of calls requiring review to obtain sample calls 1500 200 Total time to load/listen to each call (minutes) 5 21 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
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.
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 search-ing and trend-spottsearch-ing capabilities. By alertsearch-ing managers to coachsearch-ing and trainsearch-ing 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 transac-tions, 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
analy-sis 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.”
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
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 Trend IdentificationSentiment Analysis customers and agents to help detect and reduce Reveals inconsistent behavior from both fraud, identity theft, and inconsistent activities. Dispute Resolution Financial Services,
Healthcare, Insurance Conceptual Search query, providing more precise and accurate results Retrieves calls conceptually related to the initial 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 and up selling based on missed opportunities and Managers can target agent training to cross selling 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
