‘Customer journey management’ is the latest buzz word in the customer service universe. As customer touch points increase, companies find it difficult to monitor and effectively respond to customer interactions through multimodal omnichannels. However, those that can effectively orchestrate the customer’s journey and personalize their interactions reap rich rewards in terms of customer loyalty and increased operational effectiveness. New age contact center technologies and software play a crucial role in capturing customer interactions from various channels. They can even help predict where customers are on their journey. Here are a few to consider incorporating into your business:

1. Omnichannel Desktop: Instead of engaging separate teams to interact with customer queries from different channels, contact centers are now looking at a customer centric approach. Agents are allocated based on customer characteristics, no matter what the channel is. An omnichannel desktop provides a single view of the customer’s journey and allows agents to engage with the customer based on crucial insights their history. This way, agents can optimize the interaction, and increase the chances of cross sales and up sales by customizing offers exclusively for the customer.

2. Personalized Self-Service: Software tools from providers such as Genesys allow contextual and personalized self-service for each customer, cutting across channels and allowing seamless transition to assisted service.

3. Knowledge Management: An effective knowledge management platform is vital to successful omnichannel customer service. This would provide agents and customers alike with proactive contextual knowledge in assisted and self-service situations.

4. Omnichannel Callback: Today’s customer is highly demanding and does not want to be kept waiting. Rather, they would prefer the convenience of requesting a callback – be it from your website, mobile app or answering service. Omnichannel callback allows you to serve customers on their channel of choice, and at their convenience.

5. Analytics & Monitoring: Customer journey analytics and monitoring tools provide insights into the customer’s journey that can predict their behavior patterns and respond effectively. This enhances the customer’s experience, resulting in increased loyalty and a stronger bottom line for the enterprise.

Multi-channel touch points have greatly complicated the end-to-end customer journey. A modern call center infrastructure that aims to be customer centric should consider an all-in-one, open standards software platform from a single vendor. This approach will:

• Reduce multi-vendor complexity
• Allow for increased flexibility and agility
• Provide visibility and operational control across multiple sites with centralized administration

Empowering agents with the tools discussed above will enable contextual customer interactions at every point in the omnichannel journey, thereby benefitting both the enterprise and the customer.

The post The top 5 tools for successful omnichannel customer journey management. appeared first on SAS Call Center.

While first generation analytics focused on structured data analysis, newer solutions help in analyzing unstructured data, such as speech. More than 95% of call center transactions are unstructured and difficult to analyze. But speech analytics applications structure these interactions and aim to identify customer insights hidden within phone conversations. This supports a customer-centric approach, delivering products and services that are most suited for the customer at the right time and through the right channel. Customer-centric sales eventually lead to enhanced customer loyalty and improved business profitability.

Speech analytics works by searching unstructured audio data to identify patterns in meta-data. These patterns may be word choices, word tempo, callers’ emotions, or preference for competitors’ products, and are assessed on a near real-time basis to help agents improve performance metrics. Understanding callers’ emotions allows businesses to segment customers into different profiles based on their response to upsell and cross-sell efforts. This way, the business can sell more effectively, without upsetting the customers or sounding too ‘pushy’.

With more and more businesses recognizing the power of this technology, its use is skyrocketing. In fact, DMG Consulting reports that adoption of speech analytics in call centers grew by 26% from 2013 to 2014. For successful implementation, it is essential to have a planned approach, and a dedicated team of experts who are trained to interpret the software output into actionable steps for the enterprise and the call center. After all, what’s the point of analytics if you don’t act on them?

Speech analytics serves to improve sales and support by providing opportunities for emotion-driven contextual sales efforts. The insights obtained from speech analytics also aide in improving contact center operations in terms of instituting best practices and refining sales scripts. While speech analytics is a promising technological advancement, it is still in its infancy as far as commercial call center usage is concerned. That being said, commercial success stories do exist. Just ask Bluegreen VacationsTM and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters what it did for their profit margins and agent productivity.

Have you implemented speech analytics in your contact center?

The post Leveraging Speech Analytics in the Call Center for Enhanced Business Profitability. appeared first on SAS Call Center.